Mind Control News Articles Excerpts of Key Mind Control News Articles in Major Media Below are many

highly revealing excerpts of important mind control articles from the mainstream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major media we bsites. If any link should fail to function, click here. These mind control news articles are listed by order of importance. For the same articles by date poste d to this list, click here. For the list by date of news article click here. By choosing to educate ourselves on these important issues and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing 1999-02-01, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm "Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overt hrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen . Carl W. Steiner. At least the voice sounds amazingly like him. But it is not S teiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Ala mos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Psychological operations ... PSYOPS, as t he military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments , militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives. Cove rt operators kicked around the idea of creating a computer-faked videotape of Sa ddam Hussein crying or showing other such manly weaknesses, or in some sexually compromising situation. The nascent plan was for the tapes to be flooded into Ir aq and the Arab world. The tape war never proceeded...but the "strategic" PSYOPS scheming didn't die. What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah fl oating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army to rise up against Saddam? According to a military physicist given the task of looking into the hologram id ea, the feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air. A super secret program was establishe d in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document as a system to "proj ect information power from space ... for special operations deception missions." Note: If the above link fails, click here. If you want to understand some of the many hidden capabilities of the U.S. military, this article is a must read. For more on the use of these "nonlethal" weapons, click here.

C.I.A. Data Show 14-Year Project On Controlling Human Behavior 1977-07-21, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A1FFC3E59157493C3AB178CD85... The Central Intelligence Agency conducted a 14-year program to find ways to "con trol human behavior" through the use of chemical, biological and radiological ma terial, according to agency documents made public today by John Marks. The docum ents ... suggested broader experimentation on unwitting humans by the intelligen ce agency or its paid researchers than had been publicly known before. Mr. Marks distributed 20 documents that described the following incidents, among others: In 1956, the C.I.A. contracted with a private physician to test "bulbocapnine," a drug that can cause stupor or induce a catatonic state, on monkeys and "convic ts incarcerated at" an unnamed state penitentiary. A letter from an unnamed C.I. A. official in 1949 discussed ways of killing people without leaving a trace. "I

believe that there are two chemical substances which would be most useful in th at they would leave no characteristic pathological findings," the letter said. I n 1952, two Russian agents who were "suspected of being doubled" were interrogat ed using "narcohypnotic" methods. The two men were given sodium pentothal and a stimulant. One interrogation produced a "remarkable" regression, the papers said , during which "the subject actually relived certain past activities of his life . The subject totally accepted Mr. [name deleted] as an old and trusted and belo ved personal friend whom the subject had known in years past in Georgia, U.S.S.R ." The C.I.A. conducted secret medical experiments from 1949 through 1963 under the code names Bluebird, Artichoke, MK Ultra and MK Delta. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For lots more reliable, verifiable in formation suggesting a major cover-up of government mind control programs, click here.

Mind-Control Studies Had Origins in Trial of Mindszenty 1977-08-02, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20E11F83A5B167493C0A91783D85... It may be difficult for Americans to comprehend the frame of mind of the men who ... started the Central Intelligence Agency's effort to manipulate human behavi or. The C.I.A. leaders were certain the Communists had embarked on a campaign to control men's minds and they were determined to find a defense, setting out in earnest the next year 1950 with Project Bluebird, which evolved into Project Articho ke, then became MK-ULTRA - MK-DELTA. With each code name change, they broadened their sweep, until there remained virtually no avenue of human behavior control they were not exploring. There was an "urgent need," the C.I.A. and other intell igence agencies argued, to develop "effective and practical techniques" to "rend er an individual subservient to an imposed will or control." The C.I.A. men ... acknowledged among themselves that much of what they were setting out to do was "unethical," bordered on the illegal and would be repugnant to the American peop le. "Precautions must be taken," one agency official wrote in an internal memo, "not only to protect the operation from exposure to enemy forces, but also to co nceal these activities from the American public in general." They wanted to be a ble to get away with murder without leaving a trace. In attempts to develop ways to administer lethal and mind-altering drugs surreptitiously through clothing a s thick as a leather jacket, they tried out small spray guns and pencil-like inj ectors. They studied the writing of the psychologist who worked with Adolf Hitle r, wondered about the use of the "occult" and of "black psychiatry." Note: To see a free copy of this highly revealing New York Times article, click here. For lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a major cover-up of government mind control programs, click here.

Brainwash victims win cash claims 2004-10-17, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2090-1313808,00.html Hundreds of mentally ill patients who were subjected to barbaric CIA-funded brai nwashing experiments ... could be entitled to compensation following a landmark court ruling. Doctor Ewan Cameron, who became one of the world s leading psychiatr ists, developed techniques used by Nazi scientists to wipe out the existing pers onalities of people in his care. Cameron ... was recruited by the CIA during the cold war while working at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He carried out mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD on hundreds of patients, but o nly 77 of them were awarded compensation. Now a landmark ruling by a Federal Cou

rt judge in Montreal will allow more than 250 former patients, whose claims were rejected, to seek compensation. Last week, Alan Stein, of Montreal law firm Ste in and Stein ... confirmed he was in the process of contacting former clients wh o could now renew their appeal. There are about 200 people still due compensation , he said. Using techniques similar to those portrayed in the celebrated novel th e Manchurian Candidate, it was believed that people could be brainwashed and rep rogrammed to carry out specific acts. Cameron developed a range of depatterning t reatments . Patients were woken from drug-induced stupors two or three times a day for multiple electric shocks. In a specially designed sleep room made famous by A nne Collins s book of the same name, Cameron placed a speaker under the patient s pi llow and relayed negative messages for 16 hours a day. Cameron ... rose to becom e the first president of the World Psychiatric Association. Note: If the above link does not work, click here. This article clearly shows th at the Manchurian candidate (programmed assassin) is not just fiction. For a pow erful two-page summary of 18,000 pages of declassified CIA documents on this dis turbing mind control program, click here. Links to view the original top secret documents are included.

Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A. 1999-03-10, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F70A13FA355B0C738DDDA... Sidney Gottlieb, who presided over the Central Intelligence Agency's cold-war ef forts to control the human mind and provided the agency poisons to kill Fidel Ca stro, died on Sunday. He ... spent his later years caring for dying patients ... and fighting lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests. He will always be rem embered as the Government chemist who dosed Americans with psychedelics in the n ame of national security. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. in 1951. Two years late r, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. He served two decades as the senior scientist presiding over some of the C.I.A.'s darkest sec rets. The first of these were the LSD experiments. Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated b y the drug [and] took it hundreds of times. In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effo rt to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. Othe r experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. At least one participant died, others went m ad, and still others suffered psychological damage after participating in the pr oject, known as MK Ultra. The C.I.A. ... deliberately destroyed most of the MKUl tra records in 1973. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A.'s assassinatio n plots. [He] developed a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, an array of toxic gifts to be delivered to Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill a lef tist leader in the Congo.

CIA and DOD Human Subjects Research Scandals 2007-00-00, U.S. Department of Energy Website http://hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap/achre/chap3_4.html In December 1974, the New York Times reported that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens during the 1960s. T hat report prompted investigations by both Congress (in the form of the Church C ommittee) and a presidential commission (known as the Rockefeller Commission) in to the domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencie s of the military. Congressional hearings and the Rockefeller Commission report

revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the DOD had conducted experiments on both cognizant and unwitting human subjects as part of an extens ive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoact ive drugs (such as LSD and mescaline) and other chemical, biological, and psycho logical means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after admin istration of LSD. Frank Olson, an Army scientist, was given LSD without his know ledge or consent in 1953 as part of a CIA experiment and apparently committed su icide a week later. Subsequent reports would show that another person ... died a s a result of a secret Army experiment involving mescaline. The CIA program, kno wn principally by the codename MKULTRA, began in 1950 and was motivated largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean uses of mind-control te chniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. Most of the MKULTRA records were del iberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then-Director of Central Intelligence Ri chard Helms. Note: This highly revealing article on a U.S. government website shows that the CIA was actively involved in mind control projects. For an excellent summary bas ed on thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents showing the secret creati on of unknowing assassins or "Manchurian Candidates," click here.

CIA Brainwashing Suit Settled 1988-10-05, Chicago Tribune http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/access/24835384.html?dids=24835384... Eight elderly Canadians who were victims of CIA-funded brainwashing experiments in the 1950s reached a tentative out-of-court settlement Tuesday in their multim illion-dollar damage suit against the U.S. spy agency. The Canadian plaintiffs, who say they suffered permanent mental and physical damage as a result of the bi zarre experiments performed on them at a Montreal psychiatric hospital, will div ide a $750,000 payment among them, according to their attorney, James Turner. Th e Canadians, all patients of the late Dr. Ewen Cameron at Montreal's Allan Memor ial Institute in the late 1950s, were injected with repeated doses of mind-alter ing LSD, deprived of sleep, subjected to massive electroshock treatments and for ced to listen to thousands of repetitions of taped messages taken from the most sensitive moments of their therapy sessions. Note: Dr. Cameron was once President of the American and World Psychiatric Assoc iations. For more on the severe abuses of doctors in serving the CIA's mind cont rol programs, click here. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on CIA mind control experiments and programs, click here. The link above provides this abstract of the complete article, which can be accessed by payment of a small fe e.

80 Institutions Used in C.I.A. Mind Studies 1977-08-04, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20D15F63A5B167493C6A91783D85... Adm. Stansfield Turner, the Director of Central Intelligence, testified today th at the C.I.A. had secretly supported human behavior control research at 80 insti tutions, including 44 colleges or universities as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. He said that the main action years of MK-Ultra were f rom 1953 through 1963. The projects, he said, had included tests of LSD and of a "K," or "knockout drop." The agency had supported 185 nongovernment researchers in 149 separate research projects. Admiral Turner said that ... 8,000 pages of newly discovered documents do not contain the names of the subjects of the tests but do contain "leads" that might enable them to be found. Admiral Turner ackno

wledged under questioning that the C.I.A. had apparently planned to test drugs o n terminal cancer patients at the same institution where it secretly contributed $375,000 toward the construction of a hospital building. The New York Times has independently confirmed the institution is Georgetown University Medical School here. Admiral Turner [also] said that "some unwitting testing took place on cri minal sexual psychopaths confined at a state hospital." At the two-hour hearing today, Senator Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, pressed Admiral Turner to let the universities, researchers and possible subjects of the tests know of the C.I .A.'s involvement. "These individuals have a right to know who they are and why they were used," he said. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For lots more reliable, verifiable in formation suggesting a major cover-up of government mind control programs, click here.

'Matador' With a Radio Stops Wired Bull 1965-05-17, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20817F9395812738DDDAE0994DD4... The brave bull bore down on the unarmed "matador" a scientist who had never face d a fighting bull. But the charging animal's horns never reached the man behind the heavy red cape. Moments before that could happen, Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado, th e scientist, pressed a button on a small radio transmitter in his hand, and the bull braked to a halt. Then, he pressed another button on the transmitter and th e bull obediently turned to the right and trotted away. The bull was obeying com mands from his brain that had been called forth by electrical stimulation by the r adio signals of certain regions in which fine wire electrodes had been painlessly implanted the day before. [Experiments] have shown, he explained, that "function s traditionally related to the psyche, such as friendliness, pleasure or verbal expression, can be induced, modified and inhibited by direct electrical stimulat ion of the brain." For example, he has been able to "play" monkeys and cats 'lik e little electronic toys" that yawn, hide, fight, play, mate and go to sleep on command. With humans under treatment for epilepsy, he has increased word output sixfold in one person, has produced severe anxiety in another, and in several ot hers has induced feelings of profound friendliness all by electrical stimulation o f various specific regions of their brains. "I do not know why more work of this sort isn't done," he remarked recently, "because it is so economical and easy." Monkeys will learn to press a button that sends a stimulus to the brain of an e nraged member of the colony and calms it down, indicating that animals can be ta ught to control one another's behavior. Note: If the above link fails, click here. This article shows mind control was b eing developed over 40 years ago. Though this technology can be used for good pu rposes, it also can and secretly has been used to manipulate and control for man y years. For lots of information based on released CIA documents on how mind con trol has been secretly used for decades to affect both individual behavior and g lobal politics, click here and here.

Hypnotic Experimentation and Research 1954-02-10, WantToKnow.info/Declassified U.S. Government Document http://www.wanttoknow.info/mindcontrol10pg#cia190691 A posthypnotic of the night before (pointed finger, you will Misses [whited out] and [whited out] immediately progressed state with no further suggestion. Miss [whited out] was then previously expressed a fear of firearms in any fashion) that sleep) was enacted. to a deep hypnotic instructed (having she would use every

method at her disposal to awaken Miss [whited out] (now in a deep hypnotic slee p) and failing this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it at Miss [whit ed out]. She was instructed that her rage would be so great that she would not h esitate to kill [whited out] for failing to awaken. Miss [whited out] carried out these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded) gun at [whited o ut] and then proceeding to fall into a deep sleep. Both were awakened and expres sed complete amnesia for the entire sequence. Miss [whited out] was again handed the gun, which she refused (in an awakened state) to pick up or accept from the operator. She expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happene d. Note: This text is quoted from page 1 of declassified CIA document MORI ID 19069 1. To verify the statement in the text, make a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request as described here, or directly view a scanned copy online here. To acce ss thousands of pages of declassified CIA mind control documents online, click h ere. For lots more reliable information on this crucial topic, click here.

Ventura Turns Investigator for 'Conspiracy Theory' 2009-12-01, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=9219009 Jesse Ventura is back for another stab at TV stardom, this time hosting a progra m that digs into conspiracy theories, including alternate views of what was behi nd the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the purpose of a sprawling research center in remote Alaska. The former Minnesota governor, professional wrestler and Navy SEAL stars in "Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura," ... on truTV. The cable n etwork, part of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., has ordered seven episodes of t he hourlong weekly series. Marc Juris, executive vide president and general mana ger of truTV, said Ventura is passionate about the show and brings "knowledge fr om the inside" of government. "He's not doing this as an act or a gimmick. It's true to his heart. He's really looking for the answers," Juris told the AP. The premiere episode deals with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, a 35-acre compound of 180 antennas near Gakona, Alaska, that is used t o study the Earth's ionosphere. Ventura and those he interviews question whether the government is using the site to manipulate the weather or to bombard people with mind-controlling radio waves. Future "Conspiracy Theory" shows explore all eged cover-ups surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks and whether there are real "Manc hurian Candidate" assassins who are programmed to kill, said Juris. Note: Ventura was also a Navy Seal, where he personally was involved in top secr et activities and learned how what is presented to the public is very different from the deeper realities. Don't miss the highly educational episode on the vita lly important topic of HAARP by clicking here. And watch the excellent episode o n 9/11 by clicking here. You'll be surprised by the new angles presented.

40 years after RFK's death, questions linger 2008-06-03, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/03/MNN110S5KH.DTL Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy 40 years ago this week in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, is living out his days in the California st ate prison at Corcoran. He is 64 and has never fully explained what happened tha t night other than to say he can't remember it. "The interesting thing is how un der-examined the Robert Kennedy assassination is, compared to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.," said David Talbot of San Francisco, author of Broth ers, a book that looks into Robert Kennedy's own investigation into his brother'

s death and his conviction that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy. "Bobby remai ns the unknown territory," Talbot said. "But even if you look at it minimally, t here are questions that come to mind." Over the years, Sirhan has told investiga tors who interviewed him in prison that he was in a hypnotic trance during the s hooting and can't remember it at all. William Turner, a retired FBI agent who wr ote a book about the case, ... thinks Sirhan was "hypno-programmed to shoot" and that he was a real-life Manchurian Candidate - [a] brainwashed dupe whose contr ollers want to assassinate a presidential candidate. Turner suspects the same vi llains as do the JFK conspiracy theorists - "organized crime and, predominantly, people from the CIA." [Philip Van Praag, a retired electrical engineer and audi o expert,] and a fellow investigator, former American Academy of Forensic Scient ists president Robert Joling, ... have written a book about the killing, whose t itle, An Open and Shut Case, is a dig at the police investigation. Joling says a n "independent panel of forensic scientists" should be created to "reinvestigate this matter on all the evidence." Note: To listen to a highly revealing presentation by Sirhan's lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, on the many lines of evidence proving Sirhan was not a lone gunman, clic k here. For further revealing reports on major political assassinations, click h ere.

Agency's Strangeloves altered mind of a girl aged 4 2007-06-28, The Australian (Australia's national daily newspaper) http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21980496-2703,00.html Easily lost, on page 425, in the mass of the CIA's notorious "Family Jewels" fil es is a short paragraph outlining "potentially embarrassing Agency activities". "Experiments in influencing human behaviour through the administration of mindor personality-altering drugs to unwitting subjects." Of all the heinous acts co mmitted by the CIA in the name of national security, these experiments, done on the agency's behalf by prominent psychiatrists on innocent victims - including c hildren as young as four - may be the darkest. "We have no answer to the moral i ssue," former director Richard Helms infamously said when asked about the nature of the projects. The release of the Family Jewels documents revealed the CIA ha ndsomely funded these real-life Dr Strangeloves and engaged pharmaceutical compa nies to help its experiments. The agency appealed to Big Pharma to pass on any d rugs that could not be marketed because of "unfavourable side effects" to be tes ted on mice and monkeys. Any drugs that passed muster would then be used ... on volunteer US soldiers. The Family Jewels files do not provide further detail int o the numerous mind-control programs, such as MKULTRA, covertly propped up by th e agency. In 1953, MKULTRA was given 6 per cent of the total CIA budget without any oversight. The nature of the experiments, gathered from government documents and testimony in numerous lawsuits brought against the CIA, is shocking, from t esting LSD on children to implanting electrodes in victims' brains to deliberate ly poisoning people with uranium. "The CIA bought my services from my grandfathe r in 1952 starting at the tender age of four," wrote Carol Rutz of her experienc es. Note: The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have been posted on line by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking here. And fo r a 10-page summary of Carol Rutz's riveting book on her experiences as a govern ment-created Manchurian candidate, click here.

CIA role claim in Kennedy killing 2006-11-21, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6169006.stm

New video and photographic evidence...puts three senior CIA operatives at the sc ene of Robert Kennedy's assassination. It reveals that the operatives and four u nidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968. The CIA had no domestic jurisdict ion and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles. Kennedy had just won the California Democratic prim ary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House. A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin. Howev er, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and def ence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time. Witnesses placed Si rhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy but the autopsy showed the fatal sho t came from one inch behind. Dr Herbert Spiegel, a world authority on hypnosis a t Columbia University, believes Sirhan may have been hypnotically programmed to act as a decoy for the real assassin. Three of these men have been positively id entified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's Mia mi base. David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the l ittle bastard." George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinat ed. Note: There is ample evidence that Sirhan Sirhan was a programmed Manchurian Can didate. Declassified CIA documents show that U.S. intelligence services were cre ating programmed assassins back as early as the 1950s. For reliable, verifiable information on this key topic, click here.

John K. Vance; Uncovered LSD Project at CIA 2005-06-16, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/15/AR20050615026... John K. Vance [was] a member of the Central Intelligence Agency inspector genera l's staff in the early 1960s who discovered that the agency was running a resear ch project that included administering LSD and other drugs to unwitting human su bjects. Code-named MKULTRA (and pronounced m-k-ultra), the project Mr. Vance unc overed was the brainchild of CIA Director Allen Dulles, who was intrigued by rep orts of mind-control techniques allegedly conducted by Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War. The CIA wanted to use similar techniques on its own POWs and perhaps use LSD or other mind-bendin g substances on foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro a few years after the project got underway in 1953. Heading MKULTRA was a CIA chemist named Sidne y Gottlieb. In congressional testimony, Gottlieb, who died in 1999, acknowledged that the agency had administered LSD to as many as 40 unwitting subjects, inclu ding prison inmates and patrons of brothels set up and run by the agency. At lea st one participant died when he jumped out of a 10th-floor window in a hotel; ot hers claimed to have suffered serious psychological damage. Mr. Vance learned ab out MKULTRA in the spring of 1963 during a wide-ranging inspector general survey of the agency's technical services division. The inspector general's report sai d: "The concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many peopl e both within and outside the agency to be distasteful and unethical." MKULTRA c ame to public light in 1977 as a result of hearings conducted by a Senate commit tee on intelligence chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho). Note: If the above link fails, click here. For an excellent two-page summary of reliable verifiable information on CIA mind control programs which clearly viola ted ethical and moral standards, click here.

Son probes strange death of WMD worker 2004-09-12, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/09/12/MNG468MM8N1.DTL Eric Olson now has a new verb for what happened to his father, Frank Olson, who worked for the Army's top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, wh ere he developed bioweapons and experimented with mind-control drugs. Eric Olson found the verb in a 1950s CIA manual. The verb is "dropped." And the manual is a how-to guide for assassins. "The most efficient accident, in simple assassinat ion, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface," the manual says, adding helpfully: "It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before drop ping him." Eric Olson believes his father -- who developed misgivings about his work and tried to resign -- was murdered by government agents to protect dark go vernment secrets. "No assassination instructions should ever be written or recor ded," says the CIA assassination manual. "Decision and instructions should be co nfined to an absolute minimum of persons." It adds: "For secret assassination th e contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed , it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated." William P. Wal ter, 78, who supervised anthrax production at Detrick, says Olson's colleagues w ere divided about his death. "Some say he jumped. Some say he had help," Walter says. "I'm one of the 'had-help' people." So is James Starrs, a George Washingto n University forensic pathologist who ... called the evidence "rankly and starkl y suggestive of homicide." In a report to the CIA on the death, [Harold] Abramso n, [a doctor who had experimented with LSD] wrote that the LSD experiment was de signed "especially to trap (Olson)." This ... raised a troubling possibility: th at the LSD experiment was actually designed to see whether Olson could still be trusted to keep the agency's dark secrets. Note: Frank Olson was just one of many tragic casualties of the CIA's mind-contr ol programs. For revealing information on this secret history, click here.

What Did the C.I.A. Do to His Father? 2001-04-01, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D02E2DE113CF932A35... For a quarter of a century, [Eric Olson] has believed that the Central Intellige nce Agency murdered his father, a United States government scientist. On Nov. 28 , 1953, around 2 a.m. [the] night manager at the Statler Hotel ... in New York r ushed out the front door ... to find a middle-aged man lying on the sidewalk. Th e man had fallen from the 10th floor -- apparently after crashing through a clos ed window. [In late July, 1975] the C.I.A.'s director, William Colby [provided O lson's] family ... declassified documents relating to Frank Olson's death. Olson had not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. He had been a C .I.A. employee working at Fort Detrick. Olson's specialty, it turned out, had be en the development of aerosols for the delivery of anthrax. The Colby documents were ... full of unexplained terms like the ''Artichoke'' and ''Bluebird'' proje cts. These turned out to be the precursors of what became known as MK-ULTRA, a C .I.A. project, beginning in the Korean War, to explore the use of drugs like LSD as truth serums, as well as botulism and anthrax, for use in covert assassinati on. The documents claimed that during a meeting between the C.I.A. and Fort Detr ick scientists ... on Nov. 19,1953, Sidney Gottlieb of the C.I.A. slipped LSD in to Olson's glass of Cointreau. Olson, a scientist by training, would have known that he was working for a government that had put Nazi scientists on trial at Nu remberg for immoral experiments on human beings. Now, in the late summer of 1953 , [Olson] faced up to the possibility that his own government was doing the same thing. Slipping LSD into Olson's Cointreau was ... designed to get him to talk ... to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him if necessary.

Note: For those interested in this vital, yet disturbing topic, the entire Times article is well worth reading. For further verifiable information on the CIA mi nd control programs mentioned in this article, click here.

Professor Feels Himself Become Closer to the Machine 1998-09-23, ABC News http://web.archive.org/web/20001109140100/http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections... When Kevin Warwick enters his office building on the campus of Reading Universit y, strange things happen. As Warwick heads down the main hall, lights turn on. W hen he turns to the right, an office door unbolts and opens. Each step is clocke d and recorded. The building knows who he is, where he is, and what he expects t o happen. The building [even] says, Hello Professor Warwick. The structure knows W arwick because of the electrical fuse-sized smart card implanted in his left arm. In Britain, he s been dubbed The Cyborg Man, the first person known to have a microc hip implanted in his body for communication with outside machines. Warwick predi cts chip implants will one day replace time cards, criminal tracking devices, ev en credit cards. Capable of carrying huge amounts of data, they may, he says, on e day be used to identify individuals by Social Security numbers, blood type, ev en their banking information. No one knows yet how the body will respond to this type of invasion. Warwick is not blind to the ethical questions of this technol ogy. Implants ostensibly designed to clock workers in and out might be misused t o monitor where people are at all times and who they are meeting. Governments co uld move to use implants instead of I.D. cards and passports, but what would sto p them from using this new science to invade privacy? I feel mentally different. When I am in the building I feel much more closely connected with the computer. Note: Those who would like to control the public named these implants "smart car ds" to encourage us to accept them. For more reliable information on important t opic, click here and here.

Canada Will Pay '50s Test Victims 1992-11-19, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9E0CE7DD173AF93AA25... Canada has agreed to compensate victims of psychiatric experiments carried out m ainly in the 1950s and financed in part by the Central Intelligence Agency. An i nstitute at McGill University in Montreal, headed by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, a psyc hiatrist, ... was one of the centers where such experiments were carried out. No w, the Canadian Government says the 80 or so patients who underwent the so-calle d "psychic driving" treatment in Montreal ... can receive almost $80,000 each. T he patients at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill were put into a drugged sl eep for weeks or months, subjected to electroshock therapy until they were "de-p atterned," knowing neither who or where they were, and forced to listen repeated ly to recorded messages broadcast from speakers on the wall or under their pillo ws. Linda Macdonald, 55 years old, an employment counselor now in Vancouver, is one of those who sued for compensation. "I walked through those doors with a hus band on one arm and a guitar on the other and was a healthy person and coherent, " she said. She spent 86 days in the "sleep room" and was subjected to 109 shock treatments and megadoses of barbiturates and other drugs. When she got out of t he experiment, she could not read or write, had to be toilet-trained and could n ot remember her husband, her five children or any part of the first 26 years of her life. John Marks, a former State Department official whose 1979 book, The Se arch For the Manchurian Candidate, called attention to the experiments, said tha t a C.I.A. front called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology funne

led more than $60,000 to Dr. Cameron for the studies. Ottawa gave him more than $200,000. Note: For a concise summary of the CIA's mind control experiments, click here.

Nebraska Inquiry Is Given File on Sex Abuse of Foster Children 1988-12-25, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6D9133DF936A15751C1A96E94... A state file containing reports of physical and sexual abuse of foster children, based on interviews with some of the children and including one instance remini scent of slave auctions, has been turned over to the Executive Board of the Nebr aska Legislature. One of the reports in the file ... is an account by [a] victim who described parties at various places, including Omaha and cities to which sh e was flown on the East Coast ... including one in which the ... teen-ager was m ade to stand nude at a party while she was offered at auction to the highest bid der. ''I don't know if they can prove it,'' the source said, ''but if one-tenth of what that girl is saying is true, I'd sure hate to have her talking about me. '' The foster care agency's submission of the file is among the latest developme nts in a case that began surfacing Nov. 4, when the Government's National Credit Union Administration shut down the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union in O maha. The agency... subsequently filed suit against Lawrence E. King Jr., Frankl in Community's manager and treasurer, charging him with diverting millions of do llars of the institution's money to his own purposes. In all, the agency says, F ranklin Community is missing $38 million. Mr. King has not been accused of perso nally engaging in child sexual abuse. But a number of widening Federal and state investigations into the credit union's collapse are aimed in part at determinin g whether any of the money he is accused of embezzling was ever used to transpor t children or to pay them for sex. Note: This article reveals only a small part of what is known about a sophistica ted pedophile ring that reaches to the highest levels of government. For more on this key topic, don't miss excellent, reliable resources and the powerful Disco very Channel documentary available here. Note also the Christmas date of this ar ticle. The press often discloses the most deeply revealing information on key co ver-ups on holidays when few read the paper.

People 'still willing to torture' 2008-12-19, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7791278.stm Decades after a notorious experiment, scientists have found test subjects are st ill willing to inflict pain on others - if told to by an authority figure. US re searchers repeated the famous "Milgram test", with volunteers told to deliver el ectrical shocks to another volunteer - played by an actor. Even after faked scre ams of pain, 70% were prepared to increase the voltage, the American Psychologis t study found. Both may help explain why apparently ordinary people can commit a trocities. Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University, used a [format similar to Milgram's], although he did not allow the volunteers to carry on beyond 150 vol ts after they had shown their willingness to do so, suggesting that the distress caused to the original volunteers had been too great. Again, however, the vast majority of the 29 men and 41 women taking part were willing to push the button knowing it would cause pain to another human. Even when another actor entered th e room and questioned what was happening, most were still prepared to continue. He told Reuters: "What we found is validation of the same argument - if you put people in certain situations, they will act in surprising and maybe often even d

isturbing ways." He said that it was not that there was "something wrong" with t he volunteers, but that when placed under pressure, people will often do "unsett ling" things. Even though it was difficult to translate laboratory work to the r eal world, he said, it might partly explain why, in times of conflict, people co uld take part in genocide. Note: For more on the famous Milgram experiment, click here. For powerfully insp iring information on how we can change this and build a better world, click here .

Charting the psychology of evil, decades after 'shock' experiment 2008-12-19, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/12/19/milgram.experiment.obedience/index.html If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it? Common sense may say no, b ut decades of research suggests otherwise. In the early 1960s, [Stanley Milgram, ] a young psychologist at Yale began what became one of the most widely recogniz ed experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painfu l shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even wh en the victim screamed and pleaded. A new study to be published in the January i ssue of American Psychologist confirmed these results in an experiment that mimi cs many of Milgram's original conditions. This and other studies have corroborat ed the startling conclusion that the majority of people, when placed in certain kinds of situations, will follow orders, even if those orders entail harming ano ther person. "It's situations that make ordinary people into evil monsters, and it's situations that make ordinary people into heroes," said Philip Zimbardo, pr ofessor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. "Most heroes are everyday peopl e who do a heroic deed once in their lifetime because they [happen] to be in a s ituation of evil or danger," he said. Note: What's amazing about this is the willingness of many people responding to nothing more that verbal authority to deliver shocks up to 450 volts to victims who are writhing in pain, screaming and begging for them to stop. What would you do? For more, click here.

Israeli Mossad let Nazi Mengele get away 2008-09-03, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/09/02/international/i14... Israeli agents who kidnapped Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 19 60 found the notorious death camp doctor Josef Mengele but let him get away, one of the operatives said Tuesday. Mengele was one of the most wanted Nazi war cri minals, a doctor who conducted cruel experiments on twins and dwarves at the Aus chwitz concentration camp and killed children with lethal injections. He selecte d prisoners who would be subjected to his experiments and sent others straight t o their death in gas chambers. Rafi Eitan, now an 81-year-old Israeli Cabinet mi nister, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he and other Mossad agents loc ated Mengele living in a Buenos Aires apartment with his wife at the time of Eic hmann's capture in 1960. But they decided that trying to nab him would risk sabo taging the capture of Eichmann, who implemented Adolf Hitler's "final solution" to kill European Jewry and was deemed a more important target. Mengele was infam ous for his sadistic experiments in the death camps. He injected dye into the ey es of twins to change their color and sewed them together to try to create artif

icially conjoined twins. He ordered twins killed simultaneously and then dissect ed for examination of their organs. His horrors earned him the title "Angel of D eath." After the war, Mengele fled Germany under an assumed name and ended up in Argentina ... in 1949 but left in 1959 and became a naturalized citizen of Para guay. After Eichmann was captured in May 1960, Mengele moved to Brazil, accordin g to the report by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which tracks Nazi s. Note: It is suspected by many who have researched government mind control progra ms that after he escaped capture as mentioned above, Mengele was secretly brough t to the U.S., where he trained top operatives of the infamous MKULTRA program i n mind control techniques he perfected while experimenting without ethical limit ations on live humans at Auschwitz. For more on this, click here and here.

Advertisers using 'directed sound' to get in your head 2008-02-19, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Atlanta's leading newspaper) http://www.ajc.com/services/content/business/stories/2008/02/18/sound_0219.html If you hear mysterious voices in your head the next time you stroll down the str eet, they may be trying to sell you something. That was the case recently in New York when people walking beneath a billboard for the A&E show "Paranormal State " suddenly heard a woman's disembodied voice whisper: "Who's there? Who's there? " and "It's not your imagination." The creepy effect was caused by technology ca lled Audio Spotlight that projects sound in a focused beam so only people in a c ertain spot can hear it. "The idea of directing sound was a real uphill battle w hen we first started, but all of a sudden people are coming to us saying, 'We ha ve to have directional sound. We don't want all this noise in our store,' " said Woody Norris, founder of American Technology Corp. in San Diego. Norris said he has sold many units for use with video screens in checkout lines in ... grocery stores so audio can reach waiting customers without constantly bombarding store workers. While some of the advertising applications are recent, directed sound is often used in museums and other places where sound must be focused on people standing in front of an exhibit or display without disturbing those around them. Smithsonian museums in Washington have used [such] systems [as have] the New Yo rk Public Library, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and ... the observation deck o f the Seattle Space Needle. Directed-sound devices ... use narrow beams of ultra sound waves that can't be heard by human ears. The beam distorts air as it passe s through, generating sound people can hear along its length. Note: It's not hard to imagine non-advertising uses for this invasive technology . Could it possibly be used to influence people's thinking in ways other than ad vertising?

It's all Friedman's doing 2007-09-09, Toronto Star (Toronto's leading newspaper) http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/254550 [Naomi Klein in her new book The Shock Doctrine] argues persuasively that over t he last 40 years, no single thinker has shaped the economic and political polici es of corporate CEOs, military dictators, presidents, prime ministers and banker s more than [Milton] Friedman. His thesis was simple: The job of governments is to facilitate the free flow of capital across national borders by removing any i mpediments to trade [and establishing] a drastic regimen of market deregulation, free trade treaties, spending cuts to social programs, the breaking of labour u nions and mass privatization of publicly owned resources and industries ... chie fly through the careful manipulation of collective crises such as wars, military

coups, natural disasters and economic recessions and depressions. For Friedman' s ideas to be implemented, a nation's existing economy and civic society must fi rst be reduced to a state of tabula rasa before being rebuilt according to the [ Chicago School] model. [Klein contends] that this capitalist doctrine also has i ts roots in a series of mind-control experiments performed on often unwilling pa tients by psychiatrist Ewan Cameron, working out of McGill University in the lat e 1950s. He imposed a sustained regimen of sensory deprivation, isolation, enfor ced sleep and a cocktail of LSD, PCP, insulin and barbiturates [and] a barrage o f electroshock therapy. The CIA, which paid for Cameron's experiments, modified these techniques for use in prisoner-interrogation sessions. The results were so good that the CIA taught the methods to the Latin American security forces in c harge of reprogramming anyone who dared resist the devastating free market "refo rms" that swept through South and Central America after Augusto Pinochet's succe ssful, Chicago-School inspired (and CIA-sponsored) coup of populist leader Salva dor Allende in 1973. Special Note: For an incredibly revealing interview on the role of the Milton Fr iedman and the Chicago school of economists in promoting radical change against democracy by using states of public shock to push through unwanted changes, don' t miss the powerful talk with Naomi Klein available here.

Rise and shine: Wake up to an enhanced life 2007-01-25, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/01/25/ft.newdrugs A new breed of lifestyle drugs could allow us to choose how much we sleep, boost our memories and even allow us to enjoy ourselves more, without any side effect s. Will they unleash human capabilities never seen before or create a dystopian 24-hour society where we are dependent on drugs to regulate our lifestyle and be havior? One drug already available is modafinil, marketed as the vaguely Orwelli an-sounding Provigil. It enables those who take it to stay awake and alert for 4 8 hours. It is a eugeroic that delivers a feeling of wakefulness without the phy sical or mental jitter. There is already a market for it for those without any m edical need - it is developing a cult following among workaholics and students s tudying for exams. The military is also very interested in eugeroic. Their relia nce on amphetamines for lengthy operations have had catastrophic consequences in the past. The "friendly-fire" incidents in Afghanistan in 2002 when U.S. pilots killed Canadian troops was blamed on the "go pills" they had taken. The U.S. De fense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tested a compound called CX717 i n its quest to find a drug that can create a "metabolically dominant war-fighter of the future" able to function for seven days without sleep. CX717 is an ampak ine, a compound that increases the brains computing powers. It re-writes the rul es of what it takes to create a memory and just how strong those memories can be . Will cans of soda containing eugeroics or ampakines be as common as caffeine d rinks on the shelves of 24-hour stores? The potential is certainly there for a b rave new world of personality medication.

Mind Games 2007-01-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR20070110013... A community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their mi nds ... may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just tha t. An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the ide a of [such] a weapon. "The signal can be a 'message from God' that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender." In 2002, the Air

Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone's head. The patent was based on human experimentatio n in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit p hrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. T he official U.S. Air Force position is that there are no non-thermal effects of microwaves. Yet ... the military's use of weapons that employ electromagnetic ra diation to create pain is well-known. In 2001, the Pentagon declassified one ele ment of this research: the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses electromagne tic radiation to heat skin and create an intense burning sensation. While its ex act range is classified, Doug Beason, an expert in directed-energy weapons, puts it at about 700 meters, and the beam cannot penetrate a number of materials, su ch as aluminum. Given the history of America's clandestine research, it's reason able to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or l ong-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the po ssibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categoric ally dismissed. Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on the little-known, yet cr itical topic of nonlethal weapons, click here. For an excellent two-page summary of government mind control programs, click here.

Victim owed compensation in CIA case, judge told 2007-01-11, Globe and Mail (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070111.BRAINWASH11/TPStory... Patients were put in isolation, tied down or drugged, and subjected to hours and hours of taped recordings meant to brainwash them at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. They were subjected to massive electroshocks, experimental drugs and LSD, most of them unwilling and unknowingly part of the U.S. spy agenc y's experimentation. Now it's time for the federal government to compensate thos e victims, lawyer Alan Stein argued. Mr. Stein is seeking court approval for a c lass-action lawsuit on behalf of his client, Janine Huard, one of the hundreds o f patients of Ewen Cameron to be subjected to the Cold War-era experiments. "She never knew ... that she was being used by Dr. Cameron and his staff as a guinea pig," Mr. Stein told the court. The CIA ... recruited Dr. Cameron to experiment with mind-control techniques beginning in 1950. The experiments ... were jointl y funded by the CIA and the Canadian government. They were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which also saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge. Ms. Huard was one of nine Canad ian victims who received nearly $67,000 (U.S.) from the CIA in 1988 to compensat e her for her suffering. But her claim for compensation from the federal governm ent ... was rejected three times. In 1994, 77 patients were awarded $100,000 eac h from the federal government, but more than 250 others were denied compensation because they were not "totally depatterned." Note: What this article fails to mention is that Dr. Cameron was also the presid ent of both the American Psychicatric Association and the World Psychiatric Asso ciation. For more reliable information, click here.

Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon 2005-11-21, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4443934.stm Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such a s the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technol ogy which still leads the way today, but at a cost. Major-General Hugh Knerr, de

puty commander of the US Air Force in Europe, wrote: "Occupation of German scien tific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alar mingly backward in many fields of research. "If we do not take the opportunity t o seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it...we will remain several years behind." Thus began Project Paperclip, the US operation which saw von Brau n and more than 700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the U S's allies. Its aim was simple: "To exploit German scientists for American resea rch and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union." President Tru man authorised Paperclip in August 1945 and, on 18 November, the first Germans r eached America. All of these men were cleared to work for the US, their alleged crimes covered up and their backgrounds bleached by a military which saw winning the Cold War, and not upholding justice, as its first priority.

C.I.A. Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files 2005-01-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/international/europe/30nazis.html?ex=126482... The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sought by a government working group under a 1998 law that re quires full disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals. Some made public last year showed a closer relationship between the United States go vernment and Nazi war criminals than had previously been understood, including t he C.I.A.'s recruitment of war criminal suspects or Nazi collaborators. For near ly three years, the C.I.A. has interpreted the 1998 law narrowly and rebuffed re quests for additional records. The dispute has not previously been made public. The American government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators , allowing many of them to live in the United States after World War II. Histori ans who have studied the documents made public so far have said that at least fi ve associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's campa ign to exterminate Jews, had worked for the CIA. The records also indicate that the CIA tried to recruit two dozen more war criminals or Nazi collaborators. Amo ng former Nazis who were given refuge in the United States was Wernher von Braun , the German scientist who developed the V-2 rocket in World War II for the Nazi s and played a major role in the development of the American space program. Note: Operation Paperclip involved secretly importing hundreds of Nazi scientist s into the U.S. and providing them with aliases and influential work in U.S. gov ernment and intelligence services. Some of them were known experts in mind contr ol techniques. For more reliable information, click here.

Live rats driven by remote control 2002-05-05, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,708454,00.html Scientists have turned living rats into remote-controlled, pleasure-driven robot s which can be guided up ladders, through ruins and into minefields at the click of a laptop key. The project ... is funded by the US military's research arm. A nimals have often been used by humans in combat and in search and rescue, but no t under direct computer-to-brain electronic control. The advent of surgically al tered roborats marks the crossing of a new boundary in the mechanisation, and po tential militarisation, of nature. In 10 sessions the rats learned that if they ran forward and turned left or right on cue, they would be "rewarded" with a buz z of electrically delivered pleasure. Once trained they would move instantaneous ly and accurately as directed, for up to an hour at a time. The rats could be st eered up ladders, along narrow ledges and down ramps, up trees, and into collaps ed piles of concrete rubble. Roborats fitted with cameras or other sensors could

be used as search and rescue aids. In theory, be put to some unpleasant uses, s uch as assassination. [For] surveillance ... you could apply this to birds ... i f you could fit birds with sensors and cameras. Michael Reiss, professor of scie nce education at London's Institute of Education and a leading bioethics thinker ... said he was uneasy about humankind "subverting the autonomy" of animals. "T here is a part of me that is not entirely happy with the idea of our subverting a sentient animal's own aspirations and wish to lead a life of its own." Note: Remember that secret military projects are almost always at least a decade in advance of anything you read in the media. For lots more on this little-know n subject, click here.

Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush 1989-06-29, WantToKnow.info/Washington Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/890629washingtontimesfranklin A homosexual prostitution ring is under investigation by federal and District au thorities and includes among its clients key officials of the Reagan and Bush ad ministrations, military officers, congressional aides and US and foreign busines smen with close social ties to Washington's political elite. Reporters for this newspaper examined hundreds of credit-card vouchers, drawn on both corporate and personal cards and made payable to the escort service operated by the homosexua l ring. Among clients who charged homosexual prostitutes services on major credi t cards over the past 18 months are Charles K. Dutcher, former associate directo r of presidential personnel in the Reagan administration, and Paul R. Balach, La bor Secretary Elizabeth Dole s political personnel liaison to the White House. Mem bers of major news organizations also procured escort services from the ring, cr edit card documents show. These include Stanley Mark Tapscott, who was an assist ant managing editor of The Washington Times. Before joining The Times, Mr. Tapsc ott worked for the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan administration. A major concern, said the former official with longtime ties to top-ranking mili tary intelligence officers, was that hostile foreign intelligence services were using young male prostitutes to compromise top administration homosexuals, thus making them subject to blackmail. Note: How is it possible that this major story was not covered by any major medi a other than the Washington Times? For answers to this question, click here. For an insider's story of how prositution was regularly used to compromise politici ans, click here.

Tinker, tailor, soldier... illusionist? 2009-11-01, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/01/when_the_cia_trie... At the height of the Cold War - in the era of nuclear missiles and submarines, a mid the tangled cloak-and-dagger maneuverings of espionage and counterespionage - the [CIA] was also secretly doing something else. It was trying to learn to do magic. The CIA hired [magician John] Mulholland to explain techniques of sleigh t-of-hand and surreptitious signaling so that agents could use them in the field . His text, which was originally supposed to have been destroyed, has now been r ecovered, declassified, and reprinted as The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. It deals mostly with basic stagecraft, minus the stage. Former CIA d eputy director John McLaughlin writes in a [foreword] to the manual that [a]s bes t we know, the drink-spiking techniques were never actually used. The assurance wou ld be more reassuring if the authors who had recovered the manual, H. Keith Melt on and Robert Wallace, had not included their own historical overview of CIA tri

ckery. In it, they explain that Mulholland s writing was part of the secret MKULTR A program, whereby the CIA sought methods and materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior. And part of MKULTRA did involve dosing unsuspecting subjects with LSD and other drugs. Techniques of stage magi c ... were transferred to the realm of nonconsensual secrecy, to be used on peop le who were not asking to be fooled. Note: For a powerful and reliable overview of the CIA's mind control programs, i ncluding MK-Ultra, click here.

Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind 2008-09-23, FOX News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,426485,00.html Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testin g the next generation of security screening a body scanner that can read your mi nd. Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. Th is Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person not the device set to wreak hav oc. MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Home land Security's directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for n on-verbal cues that predict whether you mean harm to your fellow passengers. It has a series of sensors and imagers that read your body temperature, heart rate and respiration for unconscious [tell-tale signs] invisible to the naked eye. Bu t this is no polygraph test. Subjects do not get hooked up or strapped down for a careful reading; those sensors do all the work without any actual physical con tact. It's like an X-ray for bad intentions. When the sensors identify that some thing is off, they transmit warning data to analysts, who decide whether to flag passengers for further questioning. The next step involves micro-facial scannin g, which involves measuring minute muscle movements in the face for clues to moo d and intention. Homeland Security has developed a system to recognize, define a nd measure seven primary emotions and emotional cues that are reflected in contr actions of facial muscles. MALINTENT identifies these emotions and relays the in formation back to a security screener almost in real time. Note: For many more major-media reports on threats to civil liberties, click her e.

Decades Later, Still Asking: Would I Pull That Switch? 2008-07-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/health/research/01mind.html?partner=rssuser... Some of psychology's most famous experiments are those that expose the ... appar ent cowardice or depravity pooling in almost every heart. The findings force a q uestion. Would I really do that? Consider the psychologist Stanley Milgram's obe dience studies of the early 1960s. In a series of about 20 experiments, hundreds of decent, well-intentioned people agreed to deliver what appeared to be increa singly painful electric shocks to another person, as part of what they thought w as a learning experiment. The "learner" was in fact an actor, usually seated out of sight in an adjacent room, pretending to be zapped. Now, decades after the o riginal work ... two new papers illustrate the continuing power of the shock exp eriments. [One] verifies a crucial turning point in Milgram's experiments, the v oltage level at which participants were most likely to disobey the experimenter and quit delivering shocks. At 75 volts, the "learner" in the next room began gru nting in apparent pain. At 150 volts he cried out: "Stop, let me out! I don't wa nt to do this anymore." At that point about a third of the participants refused

to continue, found Dominic Packer, author of the new paper. "The previous expres sions of pain were insufficient," Dr. Packer said. But at 150 volts, he continued , those who disobeyed decided that the learner's right to stop trumped the exper imenter's right to continue. Before the end of the experiments, at 450 volts, an additional 10 to 15 percent had dropped out. The other paper ... replicates par t of the Milgram studies ... to see whether people today would still obey. The a nswer was yes. Once again, more than half the participants agreed to proceed wit h the experiment past the 150-volt mark. Note: For many key revelations on mind-control research from reliable, verifiabl e sources, click here.

Gov't settles with CIA brainwashing survivor 2007-07-03, CTV (Canada's largest private broadcaster) http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070703/cia_lawsuit_0707... A Montreal senior who survived Cold War-era brainwashing experiments picked up a cheque for compensation from the [Canadian] federal government on Tuesday. Jani ne Huard, 79, accepted an offer to end her class-action lawsuit against the fede ral government, which jointly funded the experiments with the [U.S.] Central Int elligence Agency. The terms of the settlement are confidential, but Huard says i t will allow her to live out her days in peace, with some peace of mind. "I was really so exhausted from fighting for so many years,'' Huard told The Canadian P ress in an interview. Huard was a young mother of four suffering from post-partu m depression when she checked herself into McGill's renowned Allen Memorial Inst itute in 1950. On and off for the next 15 years, she was one of hundreds of pati ents of Dr. Ewan Cameron subjected to experimental treatments that included mass ive electroshock therapy, experimental pills and LSD. The patients were induced into comas and exposed to repetitive messages for days on end to brainwash them. Cameron pioneered a technique called psychic driving, which he believed could e rase harmful memories and rebuild psyches without psychiatric defect. The idea i ntrigued the CIA, which recruited him to experiment with mind control beginning in 1950. Until 1964, Cameron conducted a range of experiments at the McGill inst itute, often without the knowledge or the permission of his patients. The experi ments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which saw LSD administe red to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge. Huar d said the treatment left her unable to care for her children. She suffered memo ry loss and migraines for many years. Note: For a powerful summary of MK-ULTRA and other CIA mind-control experiments, click here.

CIA Recruited Japanese War Criminals 2007-02-24, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/24/AR20070224005... Col. Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunt ed after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians. And then he became a U .S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records ... document more fully than ever how Ts uji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligen ce in the early days of the Cold War. The records [were] declassified in 2005 an d 2006 under an act of Congress in tandem with Nazi war crime-related files. In addition to Tsuji ... conspicuous figures in U.S.-funded operations included [a] mob boss and war profiteer [and] former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the w artime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948. The assessments ... show evidence that other U.S. agencies, such as the Air Force, were also looking int

o using some of the same people as spies, and that the CIA itself had contacts w ith former Japanese war criminals. Historians long ago concluded that the Allies turned a blind eye to many Japanese war crimes, particularly those committed ag ainst other Asians. Some of Japan's most notorious wartime killers [came] under U.S. sponsorship. Tsuji, for instance, was wanted for involvement in the Bataan Death March of early 1942, in which thousands of Americans and Filipinos perishe d. The U.S. Air Force attempted unsuccessfully to recruit him after he was taken off the war crimes list in 1949. The Army considered him a potentially valuable source. [Yet] a CIA assessment from 1954 ... says: "Tsuji is the type of man wh o, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings." Note: Those who claimed the U.S. government had links to former Nazi and Japanes e war criminals were once called "conspiracy theorists." Why does it take over 5 0 years for the truth to come out? For more, click here.

Montreal woman seeks compensation in '50s brainwashing case 2007-01-08, CBC (One of Canada's top TV stations) http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2007/01/08/brainwashing-suit.html A Montreal woman is seeking to launch a class-action lawsuit more than 50 years after she says she was subjected to controversial psychiatric treatments funded by the Canadian government and the CIA. Janine Huard, 78, was a patient at McGil l University's Allan Memorial Institute when a doctor there was conducting brain washing experiments. Dr. Ewen Cameron, an American doctor who believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches, was recruited by the C IA to experiment with mind-control techniques beginning in 1950. Cameron gave pa tients LSD and subjected them to massive and multiple electroshock treatments. S ome underwent sleep deprivation or total sensory deprivation. Others were kept i n drug-induced comas for months on end while speakers under their pillows broadc ast messages for up to 16 hours a day. The experiments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which also saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge, according to testimony before a 1977 U.S. Senate committee. The CIA eventually settled a class-action lawsuit by test subjects, including Huard, and the Canadian government ordered a judicia l report into Cameron's experiments. The McGill experiments were jointly funded by the U.S. spy agency and the Canadian government. Note: What this article fails to mention is that Dr. Cameron was also the presid ent of both the American Psychicatric Association and the World Psychiatric Asso ciation. For more reliable information, click here.

True Tales Odd Enough to Stop a Farm Animal's Heart 2005-04-07, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01EFDD163EF934A35757C0A9639C... At the start of the twisted treasure hunt that is "The Men Who Stare at Goats," the journalist Jon Ronson appears to be looking for furtive, paranoid quacks who play mind games. Take the goats of the title: Mr. Ronson cites a hundred of the m. They have been used in top-secret experiments by psychic spies whose existenc e is not officially acknowledged by the United States Army. Military psychics ar e so well hidden that they aren't covered by the Army's coffee budget. It makes them cranky to have to bring their own coffee to work. "The damn psychic spies s hould be keeping their damn mouths shut, instead of chitchatting all over town a bout what they did." So says retired Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III, the fi rst of the many characters redolent of "Dr. Strangelove" who are found in this j aw-dropper of a -- hard to believe, but, yes -- nonfiction story. Some of these

experts contend that a goat's heart can be stopped by the intense gaze of a cert ain kind of supersoldier. "Goat didn't have a chance," one of these tough guys [ says]. Mr. Ronson ... describes the effort to deploy a Moscow scientist who had previously sent subliminal messages to Red Army troops ... in the Branch Davidia n standoff. This scientist didn't work out because he was unwilling to transmit ... a bogus voice of God. He finds a prologue in MK-ULTRA, the real C.I.A. "Manc hurian Candidate" research of the 1950's, which involved the disastrous use of L SD as a potential truth serum. And somehow Mr. Ronson is able to keep his book b oth light and nightmarish. [He] remains terrifically adept at capturing the horr or of these developments without losing track of their lunacy. Note: For the above article and lots more reliable information on these mind con trol programs, click here. For another excellent book by Ronson titled "Them: Ad venture with Extremists," click here.

Scientists Find Ways to Make Us Slaves 2004-10-17, WantToKnow.info/London Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/monkeydrones Scientists have discovered a way of manipulating a gene that turns animals into drones that do not become bored with repetitive tasks. The experiments, conducte d on monkeys, are the first to demonstrate that animal behaviour can be permanen tly changed, turning the subjects from aggressive to "compliant" creatures. The genes are identical in humans and although the discovery could help to treat dep ression and other types of mental illness, it will raise images of the Epsilon c aste from Aldous Huxley's futuristic novel Brave New World. The experiments... i nvolved blocking the effect of a gene called D2 in a particular part of the brai n. This cut off the link between the rhesus monkeys' motivation and reward. Inst ead of speeding up with the approach of a deadline or the prospect of a "treat," the monkeys in the experiment could be made to work just as enthusiastically fo r long periods. The scientists say the identical technique would apply to humans . [They] found that they could make the monkeys work their hardest and fastest a ll the time, without any complaint or sign of slacking, just by manipulating D2 so that they forgot about the expectation of reward. Methods of manipulating hum an physical and psychological traits are just around the corner, and the technol ogy will emerge first as a lucrative add-on available from in vitro fertilizatio n clinics. "There's no doubt we will be able to influence behaviour," said Julia n Savulescu, a professor of ethics at Oxford University. Note: For lots more reliable information on how human behavior is already being manipulated, click here.

RNC [Republican National Convention] to Feature Unusual Forms of Sound 2004-08-25, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99472 Outside the convention hall, New York City police plan to control protesters usi ng a device that directs sound for up to 1,500 feet in a spotlight-like beam. Me anwhile, a display of former Republican presidents inside the hall will feature campaign speeches that are funneled to listeners through highly focused audio be ams. Both technologies feature unprecedented manipulation of sound, but for very different purposes. And while both technologies have unique, "gee-whiz" factors , some remain uneasy with the idea of using sound to control crowds. When in wea pon mode, LRAD blasts a tightly controlled stream of caustic sound that can be t urned up to high enough levels to trigger nausea or possibly fainting. LRAD ... has been used by the U.S. military in Iraq and at sea as a non-lethal force. In

these settings, operators can use the device not only to convey orders, but also as a weapon. In tests, police have shown how they can convey orders in a normal voice to someone as far as four blocks away. The sound beam is even equipped wi th a viewfinder so the operator can precisely target the audio by finding a pers on in cross hairs. Rather than using pure volume to throw sound far, the LRAD re aches distant ears by focusing the audio beam. Wherever the beam makes contact w ith air, the air molecules interact in a way that isolates the original audible sound. So if you're standing in front of the ultrasonic sound wave, you can hear the sound. If you're a few inches away, you hear nothing. Already, some Coca-Co la machines in Japan are equipped with the technology so passers-by hear the ent icing sound of soda being poured into a glass of ice. Note: For more reliable information on these "non-lethal weapons," click here.

Enough evidence for trial of CIA drugging 2004-05-25, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/25/BAGMH6R8OU1.DTL A San Jose man who claimed the CIA secretly had given him LSD in 1957 as part of a mind-control experiment -- causing him to try to hold up a San Francisco bar ... offered enough evidence of possible drugging to go to trial on his $12 milli on damages suit. The decision by Chief U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ci ted what appeared to be an admission by a former operative in the CIA program .. . that he had slipped LSD into one of Wayne Ritchie's drinks. "I drugged guys in volved in about 10, 12 (instances)," former federal narcotics agent Ira Feldman, who worked for the CIA's Project MKULTRA, told Ritchie's lawyer. The [MKULTRA] program ... was an attempt to find chemicals or techniques that could control hu man consciousness. The CIA and federal narcotics agents started giving mind-alte ring drugs to unsuspecting government employees, private citizens and prison vol unteers in the early 1950s. Ritchie believes he was drugged during an office Chr istmas party. He ... was overcome with depression and a feeling that everyone ha d turned against him. He ... drove to a Fillmore District bar, demanded money .. . and was hit over the head and knocked unconscious. He pleaded guilty to attemp ted robbery. Ritchie quit his job in disgrace, found work as a housepainter and spent years fighting off suicidal urges. Then in 1999, he read the obituary of M KULTRA's director, Sidney Gottlieb, and began to believe he had been one of the program's guinea pigs -- especially after the diary of a now-deceased MKULTRA ag ent showed he might have attended the same Christmas party. Note: Though Ritchie lost the first round in court, he plans to appeal. For an a bundance of reliable, verifiable information on secret government mind control p rograms, click here.

Professor has nightmare vision of global positioning technology 2003-05-07, WantToKnow.info/Kansas City Star (Leading newspaper of Kansas City) http://www.WantToKnow.info/030307kansascitystar Jerome Dobson is not joking. The University of Kansas research professor, a resp ected leader in the field of geographic information technologies [speculates abo ut] "geoslavery" -- a form of technological human control that could make "Georg e Orwell's `Big Brother' nightmare ... look amateurish." He's talking about over lords electronically punishing errant workers. He's talking about the possibilit y of people hooked to, tracked by, and potentially shocked or burned using inexp ensive electronic bracelets, manacles or implants. Dobson worked for 26 years at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory creating, for the government, the map s used in global tracking. He is the president of the American Geographical Soci

ety. And he is not alone in his thoughts. [In] the journal published by the Inst itute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a paper titled "Geoslavery" is co -written by Dobson and Peter F. Fisher, British editor of the International Jour nal of Geographical Information Science. "Human tracking systems, currently sold commercially without restrictions, already empower those who would be masters. Safeguards have not yet evolved to protect those destined to be slaves," they wr ote. With a laptop computer, employers can keep track of their drivers' every mo ve. Implanted chips ... keep track of livestock or pets. Whereify Wireless Inc. sells its GPS Kids Locator for $400. The device, which also looks like a watch, can be locked to a child's wrist. Dobson said that ... none of the companies was thinking of anything nefarious. [Yet he] worries that where there is an evil wi ll, there is an evil way. He hopes [to ] create debate and perhaps legislation o r safeguards around the technology that will keep it from being misused.

Scientists develop 'brain chip' 2003-03-12, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2843099.stm US scientists say a silicon chip could be used to replace the hippocampus, where the storage of memories is co-ordinated. They are due to start testing the devi ce on rats' brains shortly. If that goes well, the Californian researchers will test the artificial hippocampus in live rats within six months and then monkeys trained to carry out memory tasks before progressing to human trials once the ch ip has been proved to be safe. The hippocampus is an area at the base of the bra in in humans, close to the junction with the spinal cord. It is believed it "enc odes" experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories in another part of the brain. the researchers were able to devise a mathematical model of a whole hippocampus. The model was then programmed on to a chip. They suggest the chip w ould sit on a patient's skull, rather than inside the brain. Bernard Williams, a philosopher at Oxford University, UK, who is an expert in personal identity, sa id people might find the technology hard to accept at first. Note: Consider that top secret military experiments in almost all fields are gen erally at least a decade ahead of anything reported in the media. What do you th ink they might have developed by now? Could they have developed a way to erase a nd even replace memories? For more, click here.

History's Mysteries: Mind Control: America's Secret War 2001-08-01, History Channel http://store.aetv.com/html/product/index.jhtml?id=73738&browseCategoryId=&loc... It is one of the ill-kept secrets of America's intelligence agencies--for decade s, they have worked virtually non-stop to perfect means of controlling the human mind. But while many have suspected the existence of these projects, the detail s have long been preserved. MIND CONTROL blows the lid off years of chilling exp eriments, drawing on documents reluctantly released through the Freedom of Infor mation Act and interviews with some of the victims, including a woman whose past was literally taken away. Hear from John Marks, the author of In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, who broke the story of the CIA's abuses by unraveling the mysteries contained in financial records. All the other records pertaining to th e experiments were destroyed by the agency in an attempt to prevent the details from ever being known. Note: Interviews in this eye-opening documentary with top psychiatrists, lawyers , and victims send chills up the spine. A former head of the American Psychiatri c Association, Dr. Ewen Cameron, is one of many highly respected doctors who era

sed the personalities of thousands of unsuspecting victims, while many in the pr ofession simply turned a blind eye. To watch this powerful documentary free onli ne, click here.

JUSTICES GRANT C.I.A. WIDE DISCRETION ON SECRECY 1985-04-17, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40911FC3A5C0C748DDDA... The Supreme Court today gave the Central Intelligence Agency broad discretion to withhold the identities of its sources of intelligence information from public disclosure. The exemption applies regardless of whether the information is shown to have a bearing on national security and regardless of whether the source of the information is a newspaper or magazine in general circulation. The decision, written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, overturned a ruling by the United St ates Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. That court, in ordering the release of the names of researchers who participated in a long-running C.I.A. st udy of the control of human behavior, had adopted a considerably narrower defini tion of the ''intelligence sources'' entitled to exemption. The C.I.A. project, code-named MKULTRA, was in existence from 1953 to 1966 and was designed to devel op techniques for controlling human behavior. At least 185 private researchers a nd 80 institutions participated in the research. Officials of two organizations ... filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act in 1977 for the names of the researchers. Last fall Congress partly excluded from the Freedom of Informa tion Act the C.I.A.'s ''operational files,'' which involve intelligence methods and sources. Note: The official story is that all of the experiments to control human behavio r failed. Yet if this is true, why did they spend so much money and so many year s on it? And why is it necessary to keep secret who the researchers were? For re liable, verifiable information suggesting not only that the experiments were qui te successful, but that they may be ongoing to this day, click here.

Latest CIA Scandal Puts Focus on How Agency Polices Self 2009-03-20, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR20090319041... As a novice CIA case officer in the Middle East, Andrew Warren quickly learned t he value of sex in recruiting spies. Colleagues say that he made an early habit of taking informants to strip clubs, and that he later began arranging out-of-to wn visits to brothels for his best recruits. Often Warren would travel with them , according to two colleagues who worked with him for years. His methods earned him promotions and notoriety over a lengthy career, until Warren, 41, became ens nared in a sex scandal. Two Algerian women have accused the Virginia native of d rugging and sexually assaulting them, and, in one instance, videotaping the enco unter. The episode -- one of three sex-related scandals to shake the CIA this ye ar -- has drawn harsh questions from Congress about whether the agency adequatel y polices its far-flung workforce or takes sufficient steps to root out corrupt behavior. Former officers say the cases underscore a perennial challenge: guardi ng against scandal in a workforce -- the size of which is classified but is gene rally estimated to be 20,000 -- that prides itself on secrecy and deception. "Yo u have an organization of professional liars," said Tyler Drumheller, who oversa w hundreds of officers as chief of the agency's European division. Experienced f ield managers are needed, he said, because inevitably "some people will try to t ake advantage of the system . . . and it's a system that can be taken advantage of." The recent string of embarrassing revelations started with the CIA's former No. 3 officer, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who was indicted on corruption charges two y

ears ago. Note: For in-depth analysis of the continuing revelations of a long history of t he CIA's use of sex to control people, click here.

US veterans sue CIA for alleged drug and mind control experiments 2009-01-12, The Guardian/McClatchy News http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/12/cia-veterans-drug-test-mind-control It was 1968, and Frank Rochelle was 20 years old and fresh out of Army boot camp when he saw notices posted around his base in Virginia asking for volunteers to test uniforms and equipment. That might be a good break after the harsh weeks o f boot camp, he thought, and signed up. Instead of equipment testing, though, th e Onslow county, North Carolina, native found himself in a bizarre, CIA-funded d rug testing and mind-control programme, according to a lawsuit that he and five other veterans and Vietnam Veterans of America filed last week. The suit was fil ed in federal court in San Francisco against the US department of defence and th e CIA. The plaintiffs seek to force the government to contact all the subjects o f the experiments and give them proper healthcare. In 2003 the US department of veterans affairs released a pamphlet that said nearly 7,000 soldiers had been in volved and more than 250 chemicals used on them, including hallucinogens such as LSD and PCP as well as biological and chemical agents. Lasting from 1950 to 197 5, the experiments took place at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. According to the lawsuit, some of the volunteers were even implanted with electrical devices in a n effort to control their behaviour. Rochelle, 60, [said] there were about two d ozen volunteers when he was taken to Edgewood. Once there, they were asked to vo lunteer a second time, for drug testing. They were told that the experiments wer e harmless. Note: For a powerful summary of the decades-long mind control experiment program conducted by the CIA and other US government agencies, click here.

Forty years ago, public gained its right to know 2006-07-04, Kansas City Star http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/opinion/14960808.htm An important anniversary will likely go unnoticed today, amidst all the hoopla s urrounding the nation's 230th birthday. It's also the 40th anniversary of the fe deral Freedom of Information Act. Little known, poorly understood and, it seems, constantly embattled, the act stands as one of the most important pieces of leg islation ever passed by the U.S. Congress. So important, in fact, that the Congr ess quickly exempted itself from its provisions. It required for the first time that broad categories of federal records be made available to the public. Today, the act remains the public's only legislative window on how government really w orks -- or doesn't. We can thank the act for the fact that we know that servicem en were once used as human nuclear guinea pigs; that 'detainees' in the war on t error were abused, and that the Central Intelligence Agency conducted mind-contr ol experiments on Americans in the 1950s. But there is a mighty force working ag ainst open government. And that is the government itself. According to a report released last week, the federal government is falling further and further behind in filling requests under the law; is more often refusing to release documents, and is spending more money doing it. But perhaps the most distressing finding i n the report, from the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, is that the government has increased its use of broad discretionary exemptions to withhold documents from the public and the press.

US group implants electronic tags in workers 2006-02-13, MSNBC/Financial Times http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11314766/ An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first k nown case in which US workers have been "tagged" electronically as a way of iden tifying them. A private video surveillance company said it was testing the techn ology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video foo tage for government agencies and the police. Embedding slivers of silicon in wor kers is likely to add to the controversy over RFID technology, widely seen as on e of the next big growth industries. RFID chips inexpensive radio transmitters t hat give off a unique identifying signal have been implanted in pets or attached to goods so they can be tracked in transit. "There are very serious privacy and civil liberty issues of having people permanently numbered," said Liz McIntyre, who campaigns against the use of identification technology. "There's nothing pu lsing or sending out a signal," said Mr Darks, who has had a chip in his own arm . "It's not a GPS chip. My wife can't tell where I am." The technology's defende rs say it is acceptable as long as it is not compulsory. But critics say any imp lanted device could be used to track the "wearer" without their knowledge.

Energy-beam weapons still missing from action 2005-08-12, MSNBC/Associated Press http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8516353 For years, the U.S. military has explored a new kind of firepower that is instan taneous, precise and virtually inexhaustible: beams of electromagnetic energy. " Directed-energy" pulses can be throttled up or down depending on the situation, much like the phasers on "Star Trek" could be set to kill or merely stun. Such w eapons are now nearing fruition. The hallmark of all directed-energy weapons is that the target -- whether a human or a mechanical object -- has no chance to av oid the shot because it moves at the speed of light. At some frequencies, it can penetrate walls. "When you're dealing with people whose full intent is to die, you can't give people a choice of whether to comply," said George Gibbs, a syste ms engineer for the Marine Expeditionary Rifle Squad Program who oversees direct ed-energy projects. "What I'm looking for is a way to shoot everybody, and they' re all OK." Among the simplest forms are inexpensive, handheld lasers that fill people's field of vision, inducing a temporary blindness to ensure they stop at a checkpoint, for example. Some of these already are used in Iraq. A separate br anch of directed-energy research involves bigger, badder beams: lasers that coul d obliterate targets tens of miles away from ships or planes. Such a strike woul d be so surgical that, as some designers put it at a recent conference here, the military could plausibly deny responsibility. The directed-energy component in the project is the Active Denial System, developed by Air Force researchers and built by Raytheon Co. It produces a millimeter-wavelength burst of energy that p enetrates 1/64 of an inch into a person's skin, agitating water molecules to pro duce heat. The sensation is certain to get people to halt whatever they are doin g.

Woman awarded $100,000 for CIA-funded electroshock 2004-06-10, CBC News (Canada's PBS) http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/06/10/canada/shock_award040610 A Montreal woman who underwent intense electroshock treatment in a program funde d by the CIA 50 years ago has been awarded $100,000. Gail Kastner was given mass

ive electroshock therapy to treat depression in 1953 at the Allan Memorial Insti tute in Montreal. She was left out of a federal compensation package in 1994 bec ause her treatment was deemed to have been less intense than that of other victi ms of the experiments. Her treatment was also found to have had fewer long-term effects. A Federal Court judge reversed that ruling, and awarded her the same am ount Ottawa gave to 77 others as compensation for their treatment. Dr. Ewan Came ron, who was director of the Allan Memorial Institute, conducted experiments usi ng electroshock and drug-induced sleep. The research was funded from 1950 to 196 5 by the CIA and by the Canadian government. Note: Did you know that 78 people received awards of $100,000 each for having be en subjected to CIA and government-funded experiments in controlling the mind? T here is much more to this story. Don't miss our very well documented two-page su mmary on this little-known topic: click here.

How Technology May Soon "Read" Your Mind 2009-01-04, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/31/60minutes/main4694713.shtml The content of our thoughts is our own - private, secret, and unknowable by anyo ne else. [But] neuroscience research into how we think and what we're thinking i s advancing at a stunning rate, making it possible for the first time in human h istory to peer directly into the brain to read out the physical make-up of our t houghts, some would say to read our minds. The technology that is transforming w hat once was science fiction into just plain science is a specialized use of MRI scanning called "functional MRI," fMRI for short. "I always tell my students th at there is no science fiction anymore," [said] Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta. What [researchers] ... have d one is combine fMRI's ability to look at the brain in action with computer scien ce's new power to sort through massive amounts of data. "There are some other te chnologies that are being developed that may be able to be used covertly and eve n remotely. They're trying to develop now a beam of light that would be projecte d onto your forehead. It would go a couple of millimeters into your frontal cort ex, and then receptors would get the reflection of that light. And [there are] s ome studies that suggest that we could use that as a lie detection device. If yo u were sitting there in the airport and being questioned, they could beam that o n your forehead without your knowledge. We can't do that yet, but they're workin g on it," [Wolpe said]. Note: Remember that classified military technology is usually at least 10 years ahead of anything in the public realm. For more mind-altering information on thi s key topic, click here and here.

The Army's Totally Serious Mind-Control Project 2008-09-14, Time magazine http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1841108,00.html Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That's why the U.S. Ar my has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing "thought helmets" that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ult imately, the Army hopes the project will "lead to direct mental control of milit ary systems by thought alone." Improvements in computing power and a better unde rstanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctiv e neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to him self. The Army's initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly so phisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages

for other troops in the field. It's not as far-fetched as you might think: video gamers are eagerly awaiting a crude commercial version of brain wave technology a $299 headset from San Francisco-based Emotiv Systems in summer 2009. The mili tary's vastly more sophisticated system may be a decade or two away from reality , let alone implementation. The five-year contract it awarded last month to a co alition of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mell on University, and the University of Maryland, seeks to "decode the activity in brain networks" so that a soldier could radio commands to one or many comrades b y thinking of the message he wanted to relay and who should get it. Note: The US military and intelligence agencies have been conducting and funding research in mind control for decades. Click here for a summary of this research .

Bush Official Linked to Call-Girl Probe 2007-04-28, Washington Post/AP http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/27/AR20070427017... Randall Tobias, head of the Bush administration's foreign aid programs, abruptly resigned Friday after his name surfaced in an investigation into a high-priced call-girl ring. Tobias submitted his resignation a day after he was interviewed by ABC News for an upcoming program about an alleged prostitution service run by the so-called D.C. Madam. Tobias confirmed that he had called the Pamela Martin and Associates escort service to have women come to his condo and give him mass ages. Tobias, 65, who is married, [claimed] there had been "no sex" during the w omen's visits to his condo. His name was on a list of clients given to ABC by De borah Jeane Palfrey, who owns the escort service and has been charged with runni ng a prostitution ring in the nation's capital. Tobias held two titles: director of U.S. foreign assistance and administrator for the U.S. Agency for Internatio nal Development. His rank was equivalent to deputy secretary of state. Before jo ining the administration, Tobias was a director and chairman of Eli Lilly and Co ., the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company. Palfrey recently made good on her threat to identify high-profile clients, listing in court documents a milita ry strategist known for his "shock and awe" combat theories. Palfrey, 50, was in dicted in March by a federal grand jury on charges of running the alleged call-g irl ring from her home in Vallejo, Calif. Palfrey claimed she has 46 pounds of p hone records involving clients [and] threatened to sell phone records that would identify 10,000 clients to pay for her criminal defense, but a federal judge or dered her not to release them. Palfrey, however, gave them to ABC News before th e order took effect. Note: Keep your eyes on this Palfrey case. It could go big. Note also the link t o the incredibly powerful pharmaceutical industry. For a Discovery Channel docum entary which presents convincing evidence that major prostitution rings reach to the very highest levels of government, click here.

Dark history of mind control 2005-12-11, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/11/RVGMRG25PU1.DTL&type=... With the birth of the Cold War, a more nefarious collaboration began between gov ernment and social scientists, as the CIA funded universities' mind control and brainwashing experiments that left unsuspecting volunteers psychologically impai red. One example was the "psychic driving" of McGill University's Ewan Cameron, who played subjects an endless loop of one of their own statements from therapy, such as "You killed your mother," while keeping them packed with mind-altering

drugs and locked in sensory depravation chambers. They emerged broken, ready to "be built up again." This is real "Manchurian Candidate" stuff, and it is easy t o see how it could have a dramatic impact on human behavior. McGill's Cameron... actually helped prosecute Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg tribunals. Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on this disturbing, but imp ortant topic, see our Mind Control Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.i nfo/mindcontrolinformation

A remote control that controls humans 2005-10-26, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9816703/wid/11915829 Prepare to be remotely controlled. I was. Just imagine being rendered the rough equivalent of a radio-controlled toy car. Japan's top telephone company says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. But mor e sinister applications also come to mind. I can envision it being added to mili taries' arsenals of so-called "non-lethal" weapons. A special headset was placed on my cranium by my hosts during a recent demonstration. It sent a very low vol tage electric current from the back of my ears through my head -- either from le ft to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-co ntrol was moved. I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to st ep straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating curren ts literally threw me off. The technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulat ion -- essentially, electricity messes with the delicate nerves inside the ear t hat help maintain balance. I felt a mysterious, irresistible urge to start walki ng to the right whenever the researcher turned the switch to the right. I was co nvinced -- mistakenly -- that this was the only way to maintain my balance.

Pope 'obstructed' sex abuse inquiry 2005-04-24, The Observer (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1469055,00.html Confidential letter reveals Ratzinger ordered bishops to keep allegations secret . Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had 'obstructed justice' after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church's investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret. The order was made in a confidential lett er, obtained by The Observer, which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 200 1. It asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adul thood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected as Jo hn Paul II's successor last week.

Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors 2003-01-14, US Patent and Trademark Office Website http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&... Many computer monitors and TV tubes, when displaying pulsed images, emit pulsed electromagnetic fields of sufficient amplitudes to cause such excitation. It is therefore possible to manipulate the nervous system of a subject by pulsing imag es displayed on a nearby computer monitor or TV set. For the latter, the image p ulsing may be imbedded in the program material. The image displayed on a compute r monitor may be pulsed effectively by a simple computer program. The implementa tions of the invention are adapted to the source of video stream that drives the

monitor, be it a computer program, a TV broadcast, a video tape or a digital vi deo disc (DVD). The program that causes a monitor to display a pulsing image may be run on a remote computer that is connected to the user computer by a link; t he latter may partly belong to a network, which may be the Internet. A live TV b roadcast can be arranged to have the feature imbedded simply by slightly pulsing the illumination of the scene that is being broadcast. This method can of cours e also be used in making movies and recording video tapes and DVDs. Certain moni tors can emit ... pulses that are so weak as to be subliminal. This is unfortuna te since it opens a way for mischievous application of the invention, whereby pe ople are exposed unknowingly to manipulation of their nervous systems for someon e else's purposes. Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Robot puts human thoughts into action 2006-12-21, Seattle Times (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003488286_robot21m.html With 32 wires sprouting from a cap on his head, University of Washington researc h assistant C.J. Bell stared at a computer screen and thought: "Red." Across the room, a 2-foot-tall robot called Morpheus shuffled up to a table holding a gree n block and a red block. Tilting his head, the machine scanned the choices with camera "eyes." Morpheus paused, then picked up the red block. Morpheus has a 94 percent success rate at reading simple mental commands. But he's only a first st ep toward developing a practical household robot controlled solely by brain wave s, said Rajesh Rao, leader of the UW robot team and associate professor of compu ter science and engineering. Other researchers have wired humans to machines tha t allow them to move a cursor on a computer screen or operate a robotic arm with their thoughts. But those connections require electrodes inside the person's sk ull. With the system Rao and his colleagues have developed, the operator only su ffers a bad hair day. To prepare for the demonstration, Bell pulled on the tight -fitting cap while fellow graduate student Pradeep Shenoy filled a 4-inch syring e with conductive gel. Shenoy injected the gel into the openings in the cap, and fitted an electrode to each. "The electrodes don't actually touch the skull," h e explained. "They float in the goo, and the goo touches the skull. "Robotics is already an $11 billion-a-year industry. Bill Gates likens it to the computer bu siness in 1970, when he and Paul Allen founded Microsoft.

We are moving ever closer to the era of mind control 2006-02-06, The Guardian (one of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1702694,00.html There is increasing military interest in the development of techniques that can survey and possibly manipulate the mental processes of potential enemies, or enh ance the potential of one's own troops. There is nothing new about such an inter est. In the US, it stretches back at least half a century. Impressed by claims t hat the Soviet Union was developing psychological warfare, the CIA and the Defen ce Advanced Projects Agency (Darpa) began their own programmes. Early experiment s included the clandestine feeding of LSD to their own operatives and attempts a t 'brain-washing'. By the 1960s, Darpa, along with the US Navy, was funding almo st all US research into 'artificial intelligence', in order to develop methods a nd technologies for the 'automated battlefield' and the 'intelligent soldier'. C ontracts were let and patents taken out on techniques aimed at recording signals from the brains of enemy personnel at a distance, in order to 'read their minds '. These efforts have burgeoned in the aftermath of the so-called 'war on terror '. The step beyond reading thoughts is to attempt to control them directly. A ne

w technique - transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - has begun to generate in terest. This focuses an intense magnetic field on specific brain regions, and ha s been shown to affect thoughts, perceptions and behaviour. Note: These technologies are far more developed than this article suggests. For reliable, verifiable information on these little-known "non-lethal" weapons: htt p://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg#nonlethal

Scientists Create Remote-Controlled Flies 2005-04-09, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=656227 Yale University researchers say their study that used lasers to create remote-co ntrolled fruit flies could lead to a better understanding of overeating and viol ence in humans. Using the lasers to stimulate specific brain cells, researchers say they were able to make the flies jump, walk, flap their wings and fly. Even headless flies took flight when researchers stimulated the correct neurons. Gero Miesenbock, associate professor of cell biology at Yale, said if the process co uld be duplicated on mice, researchers might be able to better understand the ce llular activity that leads to certain behavior.

An E.S.P. Gap 1984-01-23, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949946,00.html Ronald McRae, a former investigative reporter [tells of] the military's forays i nto parapsychology, the quasi-science that studies the interaction of mind and m atter. According to McRae, who is skeptical of psychic claims, the Department of Defense has spent $6 million annually in recent years to research such phenomen a as extrasensory perception (E.S.P.) and mental telepathy. The Pentagon denies any interest in parapsychology. But in an interview with the New York Times, ret ired Lieut. General Daniel O. Graham, former head of the Defense Intelligence Ag ency, indicated that the military had unquestionably been involved in psychic re search. While he considered McRae's $6 million budget figure an exaggeration, he said, "I wouldn't be surprised if the intelligence community were following thi s. They would be remiss if they didn't." Back in December 1980, Military Review, a journal of the U.S. Army, carried a cover story titled "The New Mental Battle field" [in which] Lieut. Colonel John B. Alexander wrote that "there are weapons systems that operate on the power of the mind and whose lethal capacity has alr eady been demonstrated." He ... urged the U.S. to step up its research in the fi eld. "I know the Government's involved," says Physicist Russell Targ. "I did the work," he contends. He maintains that there was a "multimillion-dollar" project , part of which focused on "remote viewing" experiments. On a visit to the U.S.S .R. in October, Targ found that the Soviets had replicated some of the experimen ts he and his colleagues had reported in scientific journals. Says Targ: "In the Soviet Union, psychic research is taken seriously at the highest levels." Note: For those interested in the military's use of "psyops" (psychological oper ations), you can view all 170 pages of the official U.S. Army psyops manual from April 2005, available here. Remote viewing has been used extensively in the mil itary, intelligence, and police communities. For an excellent 50-minute video co vering this most fascinating topic, click here.

Basic Instincts: The Science of Evil

2007-01-03, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2765416 "Primetime" wanted to know if ordinary people today would still follow orders, e ven if they believed their actions were causing someone else pain. Would as many follow the seemingly dangerous and painful orders as in the original experiment [conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in 1963]? After contacting respected psyc hologist Jerry Burger at Santa Clara University in California, ABC News was able to replicate Milgram's study in a modified way. Burger said, "People have often asked the question, 'Would we find these kinds of results today?' and some peop le try to dismiss the Milgram findings by saying, 'That's something that happene d back in the '60s. People aren't like that anymore.'" In ABC News' version of t he Milgram experiment, we tested 18 men, and found that 65 percent of them agree d to administer increasingly painful electric shocks when ordered by an authorit y figure. 22 women signed up for our experiment. Even though most people said th at women would be less likely to inflict pain on the learner, a surprising 73 pe rcent yielded to the orders of the experimenter. Out of the 30 people we tested with an additional accomplice acting as a moral guide, 63 percent still inflicte d electric shocks, even though the accomplice refused to go on. Our subjects had an unusually high level of education. 22.9 percent had some college, 40 percent had bachelor's degrees and 20 percent had master's degrees. Note: For more on the famous Milgram experiment, click here. For powerfully insp iring information on how we can change this and build a better world, click here .

Tech Watch: Forecasting Pain 2006-12-00, Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4202262.html No longer a gleam in the Pentagon's eye, ray guns or radiofrequency (RF) weapons , to be exact officially have arrived. As troops are increasingly forced to serv e as an ad hoc police force, nonlethal weapons have become a priority for the mi litary. The Department of Defense is currently testing the Active Denial System (ADS), which fires pain-inducing beams of 95-GHz radio waves, for deployment on ground vehicles. This surface heating doesn't actually burn the target, but is p ainful enough to force a retreat. While the military continues to investigate th e safety of RF-based weapons, defense contractor Raytheon has released Silent Gu ardian, a stripped-down version of the ADS, marketed to law enforcement and secu rity providers as well as to the military. Using a joystick and a targeting scre en, operators can induce pain from over 250 yards away, as opposed to more than 500 yards with the ADS. Unlike its longer-ranged counterpart, Silent Guardian is available now. As futuristic and frightening as the ADS "pain ray" sounds, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding an even more ambitious use of RF energy. Researchers at the University of Nevada are investigating the feasib ility of a method that would immobilize targets without causing pain. Rather tha n heating the subject's skin, this approach would use microwaves at 0.75 to 6 GH z to affect skeletal muscle contractions. This project is still in the beginning stages. The ADS, on the other hand, is already a painful reality. Note: For lots more concerning information on non-lethal weapons, click here.

Nonlethal weapons touted for use on citizens 2006-09-12, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14806772/

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on America n citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday. The object is basically public relations. Dom estic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible saf ety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne. "If we're not willing to use i t here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people i f they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices. Note: The government has been developing potentially lethal "non-lethal weapons" for decades, as evidenced by released FOIA government documents. Don't miss our excellent summary on this critical topic available at http://www.WantToKnow.inf o/mindcontrol10pg#nonlethal and the in-depth Washington Post article on psycholo gical manipulations available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/060123psyops.

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi 2006-04-10, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR20060409008... [April 10, 2006] The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnif y the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military doc uments. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligen ce officials believe may have...helped the Bush administration tie the war to... Sept. 11. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted d eadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," [s aid] Col. Derek Harvey, who...was one of the top officers handling Iraq intellig ence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature...made him more important than he really is." One b riefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army G en. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home aud ience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war. There were d irect military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One sli de in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqaw i was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter. Filkins's resulting art icle...ran on the Times front page. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million. "Villainize Zarqawi" one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed..."PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work. One internal br iefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said..."The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

MI6 pays out over secret LSD mind control tests 2006-02-24, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1716708,00.html The Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, has paid thousands of pounds in compensati on to servicemen who were fed LSD without their consent in clandestine mind-cont rol experiments in the 1950s. MI6 has agreed an out-of-court settlement with the men, who said they were duped into taking part in the experiments and had waite d years to learn the truth. Don Webb, a former airman, said yesterday: "I feel v indicated; this has been a classic cover-up for years." MI6's counterparts at th e CIA also did LSD experiments on men without their knowledge to try to control their minds. Mr Webb said scientists gave him LSD at least twice in a week. He r emembers a nightmarish experience when he hallucinated for a long time. He saw " walls melting, cracks appearing in people's faces ... eyes would run down cheeks , Salvador Dali-type faces ... a flower would turn into a slug". He said he had

first made inquiries about the experiments in the 1960s but was "blanked by the government, which quoted the Official Secrets Act". He said he experienced flash backs for 10 years after the experiments. "They treated us just like guinea pigs ." Note: For lots more on the use of human guinea pigs by the government in attempt s to master mind control, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol and http:// www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg#lsd

Hidden history of US germ testing 2006-02-13, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/file_on_4/4701196.stm Fifty years ago, American scientists were in a frantic race to counter what they saw as the Soviet threat from germ warfare. Biological pathogens they developed were tested on volunteers from a pacifist church and were also released in publ ic places. In the 1950s, the Seventh-day Adventist Church struck an extraordinar y deal with the US Army. It would provide test subjects for experiments on biolo gical weapons at the Fort Detrick research centre near Washington DC. The volunt eers were conscientious objectors who agreed to be infected with debilitating pa thogens. In return, they were exempted from frontline warfare. The research invo lved anthrax, other lethal bacteria and biological poisons. But it wasn't just t he white coat volunteers and sailors who were subject to experiments. The scient ists also conducted tests on an unsuspecting American public. Scientists used wh at they thought was a harmless simulant in major bio-weapon tests across US citi es and on public transport. It was a bacteria which they believed was harmless b ut which would mimic the dispersal of deadly biological agents such as anthrax. But later research showed that the strain of Bacillus globigii, or BG, did pose a risk to people who were ill or whose immune system was failing. In a damning r eport, [a U.S. Senate committee] concluded that the Department of Defense (DoD) repeatedly failed to comply with required ethical standards when using human sub jects in military research - and that the DoD demonstrated a pattern of misrepre senting the danger of various exposures and continued to do so. Note: For other confirmed instances of governments using humans as guinea pigs i n order to forward a military agenda: http://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrollers 10pg#human

The Vision Thing 1995-12-11, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,983829,00.html First Star Wars. Now Star Gate. That is the real code name ... of a secret progr am that spent $20 million in the past 10 years to employ psychics in pursuit of the unknown. What the Pentagon's ultra-secret Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] hoped it might get from the paranormal was a real advantage in the world of mili tary intelligence. Last week ... the CIA (which spent $750,000 on psychic resear ch from 1972 to 1977) determined that the program was a waste of money and moved to shut it down. Congress had ordered the agency to take over Star Gate last ye ar and conduct a study of its effectiveness. "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community," says David Goslin, of the American Institute for Research, which the CIA hired to do the study. So the three fulltime psychics still operating on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Mar yland, will soon close up shop. At least a few powerful Senators on the Appropri ations Committee will miss them. Senators Daniel Inouye and Robert Byrd, intrigu ed by stories of psychic successes, pushed hard during many years to keep Star G

ate going. Tales of the effectiveness of psychics as spies have long been circul ated. DIA credited psychics with creating accurate pictures of Soviet submarine construction hidden from U.S. spy satellites, and a 1993 Pentagon report said ps ychics had correctly drawn 20 tunnels being built in North Korea near the demili tarized zone. Note: Though this article largely debunks remote viewing, it does reveal some ke y facts. Before 1995 the government consistently denied such a program ever exis ted. Former participants in remote viewing programs, many of them respected scie ntists, have spoken openly about their involvement. Many of these scientists bel ieve that the program was not shut down, but rather all civilians were terminate d from the program in order to take it to a higher level of secrecy. For an exce llent 50-minute video on this program, click here.

Brain Wave of The Future 2009-04-23, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/22/AR20090422040... Competing mind-over-matter toys from Mattel and Uncle Milton Industries are comi ng this fall to a store near you. They are the first "brain-computer interfaces" to enter the consumer mainstream. NeuroSky is in the forefront of turning brain -computer interfaces into cheap, ubiquitous consumer items. It's selling brain-r eading hardware and software headsets to all comers -- including Christmas compe titors like Mattel's $80 Mindflex and Uncle Milton's $130 Force Trainer, both of which involve levitating a ping-pong-like ball. NeuroSky has its sights set on providing brain-wave sensors for the automotive, health-care and education indus tries. The prospect for mind controlling matter dates to 1875, when Richard Cato n discovered that you could peer into the workings of the brain by detecting its electrical impulses. In 1929 came the first electroencephalograph -- the EEG ma chine. But hospital EEG machines are expensive, enormous and not good at fine co ntrol; plus you have to smear conductive goop on your head -- not a great sellin g point. Thus, NeuroSky's adaptation is no small thing. They get a single dry se nsor to read your bare forehead, no goop, no holes drilled through the skull. Th ey get the device to focus on the correct signals from that extremely noisy brai n area, filtering out everything else -- that's their big trick. "It's like bein g at a crowded party, and picking out one quiet conversation," says Liu. Then th ey make it small, light and cheap, and deliver it to market. Note: Don't miss the astonishing video demonstration on the Post website. And re member that the military is generally at least 10 years ahead of industry in any new technologies like this.

Cops Taser UCLA Student 2006-11-17, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2662158 There is [a] painful six-minute video that has suddenly spread all over the worl d. It shows part of what happened in front of students who had been studying in the UCLA library when an Iranian-American student reportedly did not show any ID to campus police. The excruciating video clip [shows] enraged students screamin g at police; police yelling back and using strong force trying to get students u nder control. "Here's your Patriot Act!" shouts a student, using profanity after screaming out in anguished pain from the electric jolts of a police Taser. "Sta nd up or you'll get Tasered again!" the police shout back. Appalled fellow stude nts crowd in, some demanding the badge numbers of the police. To watch the video , click here. Police Department Assistant Chief Jeff Young [said] "He had refuse

d to identify himself; he had refused to leave the library, and...he went limp, which is a form of resistance." Some students saw it differently. "Tabatabaineja d was also stunned with the Taser when he was already handcuffed," complained th ird-year student Carlos Zaragoza. Tasers are increasingly controversial a powerf ul means of control for police that is apparently sometimes too powerful. While it is often referred to as a "non-lethal" weapon [a study] found that since 1999 , 84 people in the United States and Canada have died after being shocked by a T aser. Four of UCLA's nearly 60 full-time police officers recently won "Taser Awa rds," given by the manufacturers of the electronic shock device. Note: For lots more reliable information on "non-lethal weapons," click here.

Foley's Behavior No Secret on Capitol Hill 2006-10-01, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2514770 [Congressman] Foley's obsession with 16- and 17-year-old male pages has been kno wn to Republicans on Capitol Hill for at least five years. But other than issue a warning, little else seems to have been done about the congressman. A former p age has come forward to tell ABC News warnings were issued about Foley to the pa ges in 2001. Internet messages [were] sent by Foley to three different pages aft er that warning. Two of them were sent to pages in the 2001-2002 class, with sex ually explicit messages, most too graphic to be broadcast, from Foley using the screen name Maf54. "Maf54: To be honest, I am a little to interested in you. So that's why I need to back off a little. Teen: Ya, slow things down a little im s till young like under 18. don't want to do anything illegal im not 18. Maf54: cool.. dont forget to measure for me." [This last sentence was] a reference to his requ est that the page provide the measurements of his sexual organ, a request he rep eatedly made to another page as well. Former pages tell ABC News the pages invol ved with Foley were afraid to offend the powerful Republican congressman. It's p ossible Foley could end up being prosecuted under laws he helped to enact as the co-chairman of the House caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. Note: If you want to know the degree of sexual corruption which reaches to the h ighest levels in government, see the incredibly well done Discovery Channel docu mentary Conspiracy of Silence available free online at http://www.WantToKnow.inf o/060501conspiracyofsilence

Read the book, seen the movie? Now smell it too 2005-04-07, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1453921,00.html Sony....has patented a device to evoke smells, flavours and even a sense of touc h in audience's brains, in the hope of enhancing the movie-watching experience. Sony has been granted a series of patents that outline how the device works. Acc ording to the documents, pulses of ultrasound would be fired at the audience's h eads to alter the normal neural activity in key parts of the brain. "Changes in the neural firing timing induce various sensory experiences, depending on the lo cation," the company's first patent states. Elizabeth Boukis, a spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, said the device remained only an idea at the moment. According to Sony's patents, carefully directed ultrasound beams could evoke different se nsations in people's brains, including tastes, smells and touch, and even moving images. "One of the advantages is that no invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live/recorded images," the patent says .

Military enforces 'Semper Fido' with microchips 2002-08-15, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0815/p01s04-usmi.html Abandoned pets are a growing part of the military culture. Dogs and cats are dro pped off in remote corners of the post at a rate of more than 20 a week. But the US Armed Forces are fighting back. Adopting a Big Brother approach, the militar y is implanting microchips in cats and dogs that live on government land as much for animal control as for owner control. Says Fort Polk, La., Garrison Command Sgt. Maj. Ricky L. Jones of the soldier who abandons a pet, "with the chip you c an't hide." Fort Polk has used the chip to track down soldiers who have abandone d their pets and forced them to pay an adoption fee. "It's a way to control our stray animal population and protect our working force, too," says Capt. Steven B aty, a veterinarian at Fort Carson, Colo., where microchipping has been mandator y since 1998. The tiny chips, the size of a grain of rice, are injected under th e skin on an animal's neck and contain a bar code that can be scanned and read b y humane societies and veterinary clinics nationwide. The procedure costs about $15, takes two to three seconds, and is no more painful than a typical vaccinati on. Microchip enforcement varies by base. At Fort Polk, La., animal controllers are part of a weekly housing patrol, joining inspectors who check to make sure l awns are cut and that soldiers aren't violating housing regulations. The animal controller carries a portable scanner and runs the wand over dogs and cats, look ing for numbers to light up the small screen. If the pets don't have a microchip , soldiers are warned, and if they don't comply, their animals are taken away. Note: The Monitor removed this article from their website. To see a copy of it o n the Internet archive, click here.

Documents Shed Light on C.I.A.'s Use of Ex-Nazis 2006-06-06, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/washington/06cnd-nazi.html?ex=1307246400&en... The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to C.I.A. documents that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informers after World War II. The United States government...had no policy a t the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The documents show the C.I.A. "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "forced us to confront not only the mora l harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis. As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers an d having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the C.I.A. to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hit ler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view tha t most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet K.G.B. Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has p ersuaded the government to declassify more than 8 million pages of documents. Bu t the group ran into resistance starting in 2002 from the C.I.A., which sought t o withhold operational files from the 1940's and 50's. Note: For more on clandestine government use of Nazi scientists in developing to p-secret mind control programs with links for verification, see http://www.WantT oKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg

The 30 greatest conspiracy theories 2008-11-19, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3483477/The-30-greate... From the assassination of John F Kennedy to the death of Diana, Princess of Wale s. From Roswell, New Mexico, to Nasa's moon landings. From the bloodline of Chri st to the death of Elvis Presley. From the Moscow appartment bombings to the Ind ian Ocean tsunami. From Pearl Harbour to Peak Oil, the Philadelphia experiment a nd Pan Am flight 103. Every major event of the last 2,000 years has prompted a c onspiracy theory and here we examine those with the biggest followings and the m ost longevity. 1. September 11, 2001. Thanks to the power of the web and live br oadcasts on television, the ... theories surrounding the events of 9/11 ... have surpassed those of Roswell and JFK in traction. The [alternative] theories cont inue to grow in strength. At the milder end of the spectrum are the theorists wh o believe that the US government had prior warning of the attacks but did not do enough to stop them. Others believe that the Bush administration deliberately t urned a blind eye to those warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch wars i n the Middle East to usher in another century of American hegemony. A large grou p of people - collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement - cite evidence that a n airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not ha ve been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. Many w itnesses - including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time - claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves. Note: For a concise two-page summary of many unanswered questions about what rea lly happened on 9/11, click here.

Brain will be battlefield of future, warns US intelligence report 2008-08-13, The Guardian (One of the U.K. s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/13/military.neuroscience Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have bee n told. In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading sci entists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologi es. They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, inc luding behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person's state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision. On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with "pharmacological land mines" that rele ase drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electron ic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says. "The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possi ble that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information fr om a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," the report states. T he report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct curren t stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firi ng of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person's ability to tel l a lie. Note: This is the public report, for little-known information relating what has already been going on, click here.

Clinical trials test potential of hallucinogenic drugs to help patients with ter minal illnesses 2008-08-12, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/12/medicalresearch.drugs Scientists are exploring the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to treat a ran ge of ailments from depression to cluster headaches and obsessive compulsive dis order. The first clinical trial using LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland i n June. It aims to use "psychedelic psychotherapy" to help patients with termina l illnesses come to terms with their imminent mortality and so improve their qua lity of life. Another psychedelic substance, psilocybin, has shown promising res ults in trials for treating symptoms of terminal cancer patients. In the Swiss t rial eight subjects will receive a dose of 200 microgrammes of LSD. This is enou gh to induce a powerful psychedelic experience. A further four subjects will rec eive a dose of 20 microgrammes. Every participant will know they have received s ome LSD, but neither the subjects nor the researchers observing them will know f or certain who received the full dose. During the course of therapy researchers will assess the patients' anxiety levels, quality of life and pain levels. Befor e hallucinogenic drugs became popular with the counter culture, they were at the forefront of brain science. They were used to help scientists understand the na ture of consciousness and how the brain works and as treatments for a range of c onditions. Dr Rick Doblin is president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in California, a nonprofit organisation which funds c linical studies into psychedelic drugs, including the Swiss LSD trial. "These dr ugs, these experiences are not for the mystic who wants to sit on the mountain t op and meditate. They are not for the counter-culture rebel. They are for everyb ody," he said.

Under the Radar, a Montauk Park 2006-11-24, New York Times http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/travel/escapes/24hero.html?ex=132202440... A sprawling waterfront state park known as Camp Hero [is situated] in Montauk on Long Island. Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that the park has been the site of sci-fi worthy events, including rifts in the time-space continuum [and] mind-control experiments. Such unsubstantiated reports were in large part ignite d by a 1992 book, The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, by Preston B. Nichols with Peter Moon.. All of the rumors, that s part of why we came here, said Patrick W enk, 26, of Stony Brook, N.Y., who was visiting one chilly autumn afternoon. His girlfriend, Sarah Holub, 25, [said] it was her friends who piqued her initial i nterest in the park by telling her about the conspiracy theories and rumors of p aranormal occurrences. A search on Google revealed several Web sites that elabor ated on the theories and suggested that Camp Hero was the site of time-travel ex periments that picked up where the Philadelphia Experiment in which a 1940s Navy ship and crew were said to have been made invisible and teleported from Philade lphia to Norfolk, Va. left off. when Ms. Holub shared a story about her friends being in Camp Hero at night only to have all their flashlights go dead simultane ously, we both laughed. Yet I was experiencing some technical difficulties of my own. My reliable digital camera was on the fritz. I changed the batteries. I pl ayed with the lens. It would not take a photograph. I slipped it into my coat po cket to fiddle with later and continued my hike. Note: Though it's difficult to find reliable information on these matters, those with an open mind and a desire to know might appreciate spending some time expl oring the links above.

Israel developing anti-militant "bionic hornet" 2006-11-17, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2660621 Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspap er reported on Friday. The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet," would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers. It is one of several weapons being developed b y scientists to combat militants. Others include super gloves that would give th e user the strength of a "bionic man" and miniature sensors to detect suicide bo mbers. Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres [said] "The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million aga inst a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons." Prototypes fo r the new weapons are expected within three years, he said.

Bishops reject Vatican abuse cover-up allegations 2006-10-02, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR20061002001... Roman Catholic bishops in England and Wales rejected as false and misleading a B BC documentary about what it said was a cover-up of child sexual abuse under a s ystem enforced by Pope Benedict XVI in his previous job. The documentary [examin ed] a secret document written in 1962 that sets out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. The document, called "Crimen Sollic itationis," imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing w ith the allegation and any witness. Breaking that oath would result in excommuni cation, the BBC said. "The man in charge of enforcing it for 20 years was Cardin al Joseph Ratzinger, the man made Pope last year," reporter Colm O'Gorman said i n the program "Sex Crimes and the Vatican." The Vatican...had no immediate comme nt. The existence of the document is not new. It first surfaced publicly in 2003 , when it was widely reported in the U.S. media. American lawyers representing a lleged victims of sexual abuse by priests at the time used it in law suits again st some American dioceses. Responding to the documentary, Archbishop Vincent Nic hols of Birmingham, central England, said the BBC should be "ashamed of the stan dard of the journalism used to create this unwarranted attack on Pope Benedict X VI." The public broadcaster defended its documentary. "The protection of childre n is clearly an issue of the strongest public interest," it said in a statement, responding to the bishops' criticism. "The BBC stands by tonight's 'Panorama' p rogram, and invites viewers to make up their own minds once they've seen it." Note: To watch this highly revealing BBC documentary free online and decide for yourself, see http://informationclearinghouse.info/article15190.htm. For governm ent involvement in sexual abuse of children, see the Discovery Channel documenta ry at http://www.WantToKnow.info/060501conspiracyofsilence

Slaves to American medicine 2006-09-10, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2338130_1,00.html In 1972, the Tuskegee experiments on black people shocked the world. Now, a new report reveals that the official inquiry was a cover-up. The [syphilis] "trial," conducted between 1932 and 1972, involved 400 black sharecroppers. The Tuskegee "volunteers" were not to be treated, either with Salvarsan or even antibiotics after their discovery. Ignorant of the true goal of the trial, the participants

were destined to be living, and dying, examples of the terrible course of the un treated illness. Tuskegee, after its exposure in the media in 1972, thus became a byword in America for racist medical experimentation. Soon after the Tuskegee revelations, fault was admitted, apologies made. Yet in time, historians of medi cine, sociologists and social anthropologists began to play down the scandal. Tu skegee, they argued, was an understandable error, given the absence of viable an tidotes in the 1930s. But renewed outrage over Tuskegee is about to explode with an investigation entitled Medical Apartheid, to be published in the US early ne xt year. The public-health historian Harriet Washington will reveal...that the T uskegee trial was even more inhumane and morally degenerate than previously susp ected. The role of Nurse Eunice Rivers became crucial. Above all, her task, aide d by the study's doctors, was to ensure that the syphilitic men would receive no treatment, despite the extraordinary advances in treatment from the 1940s onwar ds. "By 1955," according to Washington, "nearly one-third of the autopsied men h ad died directly of syphilis and many of the survivors were suffering its deadli est complications." Note: For lots more on the history humans used as guinea pigs in experiments by government: http://www.WantToKnow.info/humanguineapigs and http://www.WantToKnow .info/mindcontrollers10pg#human

Nationwide Child Abuse Ring In Free Discovery Channel Documentary 2006-05-01, Discovery Channel/WantToKnow.info http://www.WantToKnow.info/060501conspiracyofsilence "Conspiracy of Silence" is a powerful, disturbing documentary revealing a nation wide child abuse and pedophilia ring that leads to the highest levels of governm ent. Featuring intrepid investigator John DeCamp, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and 16-year Nebraska state senator, "Conspiracy of Silence" reveals how rogue elements at all levels of government have been involved in systematic chi ld abuse and pedophilia to feed the base desires of key politicians. Based on De Camp's riveting book, The Franklin Cover-up, "Conspiracy of Silence" begins with the shut-down of Nebraska's Franklin Community Federal Credit Union after a rai d by federal agencies in November 1988 revealed that $40 million was missing. Wh en the Nebraska legislature launched a probe into the affair, what initially loo ked like a financial swindle soon exploded into a startling tale of drugs, money laundering, and a nationwide child abuse ring. Nineteen months later, the legis lative committee's chief investigator died suddenly and violently, like more tha n a dozen other people linked to the Franklin case.

State Secret: Thousands Secretly Sterilized 2005-05-15, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Health/story?id=708780 From the early 1900s to the 1970s, some 65,000 men and women were sterilized in this country, many without their knowledge, as part of a government eugenics pro gram to keep so-called undesirables from reproducing. "The procedures that were done here were done to poor folks," said Steven Selden, professor at the Univers ity of Maryland. "They were thought to be poor because they had bad genes or bad inheritance, if you will. And so they would be the focus of the sterilization." Even though the practice ended more than 30 years ago, some say the time has co me to make amends. North Carolina was one of the first states out of 33 that onc e practiced sterilization to offer an apology. State Rep. Larry Womble is crafti ng a bill to provide financial reparations.

The brain scan that can read people's intentions 2007-02-09, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2009229,00.html A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions befor e they act. They have devised a system that analyses brain activity to work out a person's intentions before they have acted on them. The research breaks contro versial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading tech nology may be used in the future. The research builds on a series of recent stud ies in which brain imaging has been used to identify tell-tale activity linked t o lying, violent behaviour and racial prejudice. The computer learns unique patt erns of brain activity or signatures that correspond to different thoughts. It t hen scans the brain to look for these signatures and predicts what the person is thinking. More advanced versions may be able to read complex thoughts and even pick them up before the person is conscious of them. Barbara Sahakian, a profess or of neuro-psychology at Cambridge University, said the rapid advances in neuro science had forced scientists in the field to set up their own neuroethics socie ty late last year to consider the ramifications of their research. Note: Remember that secret projects within the military and other branches of go vernment are almost always at least a decade ahead of public research. For impor tant, reliable information on government-sponsored mind control programs, click here.

Radio frequency identification keeps tabs on goods, services, pets - even people 2006-05-11, Sacramento Bee (the leading newspaper of California's capital city) http://www.sacbee.com/content/lifestyle/story/14254188p-15069873c.html Feel like you're being followed? Maybe it's a tracking tag on your jeans or one implanted in a credit card. The tags are called radio frequency identification o r RFIDs, and every day they are becoming more and more a part of our lifestyle. These Orwellian microchips, as minute as a grain of sand, identify and track pro ducts and even lost children at theme parks. They're being implanted in humans t o alert hospitals about medical conditions. The tags can be so tiny, you may nev er know they are there. Retailers claim RFIDs are essential: alerting them when they're low on lipstick, air filters, sodas and other inventory. Embedded tags a ren't so obvious. Hitachi Europe recently developed the world's tiniest RFID int egrated circuit, small enough to be placed in a piece of paper. Some RFID chips are made to be imbedded in livestock, in pets and most recently in humans for a variety of reasons. RFID prices have dropped, and tagging has become practical f or businesses. In-Stat, a high-tech research firm, reports more than 1 billion R FID chips were made last year and predicts that by 2010 the number will increase to 33 billion. Slightly larger than a grain of rice, RFID chips from VeriChip o f Florida are manufactured for implanting in humans. The Food and Drug Administr ation approved human implants two years ago. Note: For lots more on microchip implants, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/microc hipimplants

Sex Slaves 2006-02-07, PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/slaves/etc/synopsis.html

Twenty-one-year-old Katia...left home on what she believed would be a trip to bu y goods in Turkey, but instead she was sold into sexual slavery for $1,000. In " Sex Slaves," FRONTLINE follows [her husband] Viorel on an extraordinary journey deep into the world of sex trafficking to try to find his wife...and then free h er from the violent pimp who now "owns" her. Along the way, the production team takes a rare, hidden-camera look at the various traffickers, pimps and middlemen who illegally buy and sell hundreds of thousands of women each year. Lured by t raffickers who prey on their dreams of employment abroad, many of the women are then kidnapped and "exported" to Europe, the Middle East, the United States and elsewhere. During this process, they may be sold to pimps, locked in brothels, d rugged, terrorized and raped repeatedly. "How much will a girl cost?" co-produce r Felix Golubev asks a trafficker in Moldova while posing undercover as an inter ested buyer from North America. "Five hundred to 600 dollars" replies the traffi cker." As Viorel searches for Katia, we learn what she might be enduring from ot her trafficked women. Twenty-eight-year-old Oksana was sold 13 times over an eig ht-month period before finally being allowed to return to her native Ukraine. "T here were 22 girls in a three-bedroom apartment, and each girl got beaten up at least once a day. One girl ran away and went to the police for help, but she was taken back. Policemen used our services." "Sex Slaves" exposes the government ind ifference that allows the global sex trade to continue virtually unchecked and w hat needs to be done. Note: If you want to know about secret government involvement in the sex trade a nd sex abuse, see the harrowing, yet powerful essay at http://www.WantToKnow.inf o/nationbetrayed10pg and a highly revealing, free Discovery Channel documentary at http://www.WantToKnow.info/060501conspiracyofsilence

Beam weapons almost ready for battle 2006-01-11, MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10805240/ LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - There is a new breed of weaponry fast approaching. They are l abeled "directed-energy weapons," and they may well signal a revolution in milit ary hardware -- perhaps more so than the atomic bomb. Directed-energy weapons ta ke the form of lasers, high-powered microwaves and particle beams. Their adoptio n for ground, air, sea, and space warfare depends not only on using the electrom agnetic spectrum, but also upon favorable political and budgetary wavelengths to o. After more than two decades of research, the United States is on the verge of deploying a new generation of weapons that discharge beams of energy, such as t he Airborne Laser and the Active Denial System, as well as the Tactical High Ene rgy Laser, or THEL. Then there s Active Denial Technology -- a non-lethal way to u se millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy to stop, deter and turn back an advanc ing adversary. This technology, supported by the U.S. Marines, uses a beam of mi llimeter waves to heat a foe s skin, causing severe pain without damage, and makin g the adversary flee the scene. By tuning the resonance of a laser onto Earth s io nosphere, you can create audible frequencies. Like some boom box in the sky, the laser-produced voice could bellow from above down to the target below: "Put dow n your weapons."

Brain sensor allows mind-control 2006-07-12, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5167938.stm A sensor implanted in a paralysed man's brain has enabled him to control objects by using his thoughts alone. The experimental set-up allowed the man, who has n o limb movement at all, to open e-mail ... and pinch a prosthetic hand's fingers

. The US team behind the sensor hopes its technology can one day be incorporated into the body to restore the movement of paralysed limbs themselves. A team of scientists inserted the device, called a neuromotor prosthesis (NMP), into an ar ea of the brain known as the motor cortex, which is responsible for voluntary mo vement. The NMP comprises an internal sensor that detects brain cell activity, a nd external processors that convert the activity into signals that can be recogn ised by a computer. Using the device, Mr Nagle was able to move a computer curso r to open an e-mail, play simple computer games, open and close a prosthetic han d, and use a robot limb to grasp and move objects. Mr Nagle said the sensor had restored some of his independence by allowing him to carry out a number of tasks - such as turning the lights on - that a nurse would normally do for him. He to ld the BBC: "I can't put it into words. It's just wild."

US 'plans stealth shark spies' 2006-03-02, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4767428.stm Pentagon scientists are planning to turn sharks into "stealth spies" capable of tracking vessels undetected, a British magazine has reported. They want to remot ely control the sharks by implanting electrodes in their brains, The New Scienti st says. It says the aim is "to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails". The research is being funded by the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects A gency (DARPA). It aims to build on latest developments in brain implant technolo gy which has already seen scientists controlling the movements of fish, rats and monkeys. Such devices are already being used by scientists at Boston University to "steer" a spiny dogfish in a fish tank. The next step for the Pentagon scien tists will be the release of blue sharks with similar devices into the ocean off the coast of Florida. Remote-controlled sharks...have advantages that robotic u nderwater surveillance vehicles just cannot match: they are silent, and they pow er themselves. Note: This article fails to mention that electronic implants we used over 40 yea rs ago to control the behavior of bulls, as reported on the front page of the Ne w York Times on May 17, 1965. To see the Times article, go to http://www.WantToK now.info/delgadobullnytimes.pdf. For lots more reliable information on governmen t mind control programs: http://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol

Mind Over Matter Becoming A Reality 2006-01-04, KGO/ABC Affiliate http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=edell&id=3782726 New research shows the power of thinking could be enough to control a computer d evice. It's a discovery that could someday give amputees and those who are paral yzed power over their lives. He's winning this round of pong, but what's really amazing is how Aaron is playing the game. Aaron Danforth, epilepsy patient: "I h ave to think of the word 'move' to get it to move to the right." That's right. N o hands. Aaron's brain controls the cursor. The computer can detect what he's th inking by the intensity and pattern of his brain activity. Jeffrey Ojemann, M.D. , neurosurgeon: "It's remarkable to watch almost as if there's a degree of mind control or something that you only see in science fiction movies."

Army's conquer by cannabis plan 2007-04-08, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/08/INGG3P14MD1.DTL The U.S. Army, in a search for "nonlethal incapacitating agents," tested cannabi s-based drugs on GI volunteers throughout the 1960s according to Dr. James Ketch um, the psychiatrist who led the classified research program at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Ketchum retired as a colonel in 1976. He has written a memoir, "Ch emical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten," in which he describes experiments con ducted at Edgewood and defends the Army's ethical standards. In a talk to the So ciety of Cannabis Clinicians in Los Angeles last month, Ketchum recounted to 20 doctors the Army's experiments with cannabinoid drugs. Only a small fraction of Ketchum's work at Edgewood involved THC derivatives. Ketchum says he was motivat ed to write his memoir because the media has conflated the ethical, scientific d rug studies conducted by the Army on knowing volunteers with the kinky, unsafe d rug studies conducted by the CIA on unwitting civilians. "None, to my knowledge, returned home with a significant injury or illness attributable to chemical exp osure," Ketchum says. "Nevertheless, years later, a few former volunteers did cl aim that the testing had caused them to suffer from some malady." Those claims c ame from subjects exposed to agents other than EA 2233, he says. Note: Though the Army may have been somewhat more ethical than the CIA, why has the media had so little coverage of these unethical programs to develop mind con trol capabilities. For more information on secret mind control programs based on 18,000 pages of declassified government documents, click here.

Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves 2006-07-24, CNN News http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/21/technology/googlebrain0721.biz2/ Kiss your keyboard goodbye: soon we'll jack our brains directly into the Net - a nd that's just the beginning. Two years ago, a quadriplegic man started playing video games using his brain as a controller. It spells the beginning of a radica l change in how we interact with computers. Someday, keyboards and computer mice will be remembered only as medieval-style torture devices for the wrists. All w ork - emails, spreadsheets, and Google searches - will be performed by mind cont rol. [Consider] the sensational research that's been done on the brain of one Ma tthew Nagle. Nagle, a 26-year-old quadriplegic, was hooked up to a computer via an implant smaller than an aspirin that sits on top of his brain and reads elect rical patterns. He learned how to move a cursor around a screen, play simple gam es, control a robotic arm, and even...turn his brain into a TV remote control [a ll] in less time than the average PC owner spends installing Microsoft Windows. Neurodevices - medical devices that compensate for damage to the brain, nerves, and spinal column - are a $3.4 billion business that grew 21 percent last year. There are currently some 300 companies working in the field. This kind of techno logy can enable a hooked-up human to write at 15 words a minute. Remember, thoug h, that silicon-based technology typically doubles in capacity every two years. Last year, Sony took out a patent on a game system that beams data directly into the mind without implants. It uses a pulsed ultrasonic signal that induces sens ory experiences such as smells, sounds and images.

Computer chips get under skin of enthusiasts 2006-01-06, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1477868 With a wave of his hand, Amal Graafstra, a 29-year-old entrepreneur based in Van couver, Canada, opens his front door. With another, he logs onto his computer. T iny radio frequency identification (RFID) computer chips inserted into Graafstra

's hands make it all possible. The computer chips, which cost about $2, interact with a device installed in computers and other electronics. The chips are activ ated when they come within 3 inches of a so-called reader, which scans the data on the chips. The "reader" devices are available for as little as $50. Graafstra said at least 20 of his tech-savvy pals have RFID implants. "I can't feel it at all. It doesn't impede me. It doesn't hurt at all. I almost can't tell it's the re," agreed Jennifer Tomblin, a 23-year-old marketing student and Graafstra's gi rlfriend. Mikey Sklar, a 28-year-old Brooklyn resident, said, "It does give you some sort of power of 'Abracadabra,' of making doors open and passwords enter ju st by a wave of your hand." The RFID chip in Sklar's hand, which is smaller than a grain of rice and can last up to 100 years, was injected by a surgeon in Los Angeles.

I, Cyborg 2005-08-01, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-080104bionicarm,1,7034437.... Sullivan, a Tennessee power company worker who lost both arms in a job-related a ccident, has been outfitted by Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago researchers w ith a kind of bionic arm, which is controlled directly by his thoughts. Sullivan doesn't have to think hard anymore about doing something; he simply does it the way he always did. "I feel my hand when I want to pick something up, then I jus t close my hand," he says. When he wants to grab a bottle of water, for instance , the computerized arm moves forward, the elbow bends and the mechanical hand gr asps the bottle, bringing it to his lips, as his natural arm once did.

Mind-Reading Computer 1974-07-01, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942916,00.html The experiment looks like some ingenious test of mental telepathy. Seated inside a small isolation booth with wires trailing from the helmet on her head, the su bject seems deep in concentration. She does not speak or move. Suddenly, a littl e white dot hovering in the center of the screen comes to life. It sweeps to the top of the screen, then it reverses itself and comes back down. After a pause, it veers to the right, stops, moves to the left, momentarily speeds up and final ly halts almost as if it were under the control of some external intelligence. I n fact, it is. The unusual experiment, conducted at the Stanford Research Instit ute in Menlo Park, Calif., is a graphic display of one of the newest and most da zzling breakthroughs in cybernetics. It shows that a computer can, in a very rea l sense, read human minds. Although the dot's gyrations were directed by a compu ter, the machine was only carrying out the orders of the test subject. She, in t urn, did nothing more than think about what the dot's movements should be. Brain child of S.R.I. Researcher Lawrence Pinneo, a ... neurophysiologist and electron ics engineer, the computer mind-reading technique is far more than a laboratory stunt. The key to his scheme: the electroencephalograph, a device used by medica l researchers to pick up electrical currents from various parts of the brain. If he could learn to identify brain waves generated by specific thoughts or comman ds ... he might be able to teach the same skill to a computer. Pinneo does not w orry that mind-reading computers might be abused by Big Brotherly governments or overly zealous police trying to ferret out the innermost thoughts of citizens. Note: This research conducted in 1974 shows that the respond to human thought was developed decades ago. top secret and continued to be developed secretly by , but kept well-hidden from public view. For more on capability for computers to The subject was classified the military and government this important topic, click

here.

'Mind over matter' no longer science fiction 2006-06-10, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/Mind-over-matter-no-longer-science-fict... Sitting stone still under a skull cap fitted with a couple dozen electrodes, Aus trian scientist Peter Brunner stares at a laptop computer. Without so much as mo ving a nostril hair, he suddenly begins to compose a message -- letter by letter -- on a giant screen overhead. "B-O-N-J-O-U-R" he writes with the power of his mind, much to the amazement of the largely French audience of scientists and cur ious onlookers gathered. Brunner and two colleagues from the state-financed Wads worth Center in Albany, New York were demonstrating a "brain computer interface (BCI)," an astounding technology which digitalizes brain signals emitted as elec trical impulses -- picked up by the electrodes -- to convey intent. Possible app lications extend beyond the written word into physical movement -- it is only a matter of time, Sellers says, before the same technology is used to operate moto rized wheel chairs.

Text might be hidden 'Gospel of Judas' 2006-04-06, CNN/Associated Press http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/04/06/gospel.judas.ap/ For 2,000 years Judas has been reviled for betraying Jesus. Now a newly translat ed ancient document seeks to tell his side of the story. The "Gospel of Judas".. .portrays Judas as a favored disciple who was given special knowledge by Jesus - and who turned him in at Jesus' request. The text, one of several ancient docu ments found in the Egyptian desert in 1970, was preserved and translated by a te am of scholars. It was made public in an English translation by the National Geo graphic Society. A "Gospel of Judas" was first mentioned around 180 A.D. by Bish op Irenaeus of Lyon, in what is now France. The bishop denounced the manuscript as heresy because it differed from mainstream Christianity. The actual text had been thought lost until this discovery. Christianity in the ancient world was mu ch more diverse than it is now, with a number of gospels circulating in addition to the four that were finally collected into the New Testament, noted Bart Ehrm an, chairman of religious studies at the University of North Carolina. Eventuall y, one point of view prevailed and the others were declared heresy, he said, inc luding the Gnostics who believed that salvation depended on secret knowledge tha t Jesus imparted.The newly translated document's text begins: "The secret accoun t of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot."

Photographer for White House child sex ring arrested 2005-03-13, tomflocco.com http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=107&mode=&order=0... According to a Nebraska state police report, Nebraska Senate s Franklin committee investigative report, and a 50-page report by Omaha s Boys Town welfare case offic er Mrs. Julie Walters, pedophile victims Nelly and Kimberly Webb detailed a mass ive child sex, homosexual and pornography operation run out of Nebraska by Larry King--but with close ties directly to the Congress and the White House. Note: This source is clearly less reliable than those usually provided. However, as this is very important news we believe to be largely true based on numerous independent confirmations received, we've included it here. The article includes

information on the Hunter Thompson suicide and the infamous Franklin case which you can learn about by clicking here.

9/11 News Articles Excerpts of Key 9/11 News Articles in Major Media Below are many highly revealing excerpts of important 9/11 articles from the mai nstream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major media websites. If any link should fail to function, click here. These 9/11 news articles are li sted by order of importance. For the same articles by date posted to this list, click here. For the list by date of news article click here. By choosing to educ ate ourselves on these important issues and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba 2001-05-01, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662 In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to k

ill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans repo rtedly included the possible assassination of Cuban migrs, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even or chestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways t o trick the American public and the international community into supporting a wa r to oust Cuba's ... Fidel Castro. America's top military brass even contemplate d causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Gu antanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would caus e a helpful wave of national indignation." The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defe nse secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years. The J oint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn duri ng the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war wi th Cuba. Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that the fault lies with the Communists." The scar y thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after. Note: Many military and political leaders tend to look at the world as a chess b oard. Sacrificing pawns (innocent civilians) is sometimes necessary to capture t he queen. Is it beyond comprehension that this might have been the case with 9/1 1? And why was ABC the only major news source to report this highly revealing st ory? To read the shocking declassified documents, click here.

9/11 conspiracy theorists multiply 2006-09-08, MSNBC/Washington Post http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14723997 A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 Americans found that 36 pe rcent suspect the U.S. government promoted the attacks or intentionally sat on i ts hands. Sixteen percent believe explosives brought down the towers. A Zogby In ternational poll of New York City residents two years ago found 49.3 percent bel ieved the government "consciously failed to act." The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped looking for truth from the government. The academic wing is led by [Prof. David Ray] Griffin, who founded the Center fo r a Postmodern World at Claremont University; James Fetzer, a tenured philosophe r at the University of Minnesota; and Daniel Orr, the retired chairman of the ec onomics department at the University of Illinois. The movement's de facto minist er of engineering is Steven Jones, a tenured physics professor at Brigham Young University, who's...concluded that the collapse of the twin towers is best expla ined as controlled demolition. Catherine Austin Fitts served as assistant secret ary of housing in the first President Bush's administration. [Robert] Bowman was chief of advanced space programs under presidents Ford and Carter. Fitts and Bo wman agree that the "most unbelievable conspiracy" theory is the one retailed by the government. It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theo logian and philosopher, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why...military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. He read the 9/11 Com mission report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no militar y or civilian official was reprimanded. Griffin's book, "The New Pearl Harbor".. .never reviewed in a major U.S. newspaper, sold more than 100,000 copies and bec ame a movement founding stone.

Connections And Then Some 2003-03-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A25...

The Carlyle Group [is] an investment house famous as one of the most well-connec ted companies anywhere. Former president George H.W. Bush is a Carlyle adviser. Former British prime minister John Major heads its European arm. Former secretar y of state James Baker is senior counselor, former White House budget chief Rich ard Darman is a partner, former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt is senior adviser -the list goes on. Those associations have brought Carlyle enormous success. The Washington-based merchant bank controls nearly $14 billion in investments, makin g it the largest private equity manager in the world. It buys and sells whole co mpanies the way some firms trade shares of stock. But the connections also have cost Carlyle. It has developed a reputation as the CIA of the business world -omnipresent, powerful, a little sinister. Media outlets from the Village Voice t o BusinessWeek have depicted Carlyle as manipulating the levers of government fr om shadowy back rooms. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) even suggested tha t Carlyle's and Bush's ties to the Middle East made them somehow complicitous in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It didn't help that as the World Trade Center burn ed on Sept. 11, 2001, the news interrupted a Carlyle business conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here attended by a brother of Osama bin Laden. Former preside nt Bush, a fellow investor, had been with him at the conference the previous day . Bush['s] primary function is to give speeches for Carlyle that attract wealthy foreigners in places where the former president is especially revered, such as Asia. The company has rewarded its faithful with a 36 percent average annual rat e of return. Note: If the above link fails, click here. To understand the amazingly powerful role of this low-profile, yet extremely wealthy and influential group, click her e to view free a 48-minute documentary shown on Dutch national TV which clearly depicts the depths of corruption and deceit at the highest levels of government. You will be thankful that you watched this highly educational film.

Tenet told 9/11 panel that he warned Rice of Al Qaeda 2006-10-03, Boston Globe/Washington Post http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/10/03/tenet_told_9... Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that he had warned of an imminent threat from Al Qaeda in a July 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice, a dding that he believed Rice took the warning seriously, according to a transcrip t of the interview and the recollection of a commissioner who was there. The mee ting has become the focus of a fierce and often confusing round of finger-pointi ng involving Rice, the White House, and the 9/11 Commission, all of whom dispatc hed staffers to the National Archives and other locations yesterday in attempts to sort out what had occurred. Members of the commission, an independent biparti san panel created by Congress to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, have said for days that they were not told about the July 10 meeting and were a ngry at being left out. As recently as yesterday afternoon, both commission chai rman Thomas H. Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said they believed the panel had not been told about the July 10 meeting. But it turns out that the panel was , in fact, told about the meeting, according to the interview transcript and Dem ocratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, who sat in on the interview with Tenet. Rice added to the confusion yesterday by strongly suggesting that the mee ting may never have occurred at all, even though administration officials had co nceded for several days that it had. Note: Could it be possible that some of our nation's top leaders are lying? How could they have just forgotten about such important matters? For lots more see h ttp://www.WantToKnow.info/911information.

Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman? 2005-01-11, Los Angeles Times http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/11/opinion/oe-scheer11 Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary fi lmmakers systematically challenges this. "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of t he Politics of Fear" ... argues coherently that much of what we have been told a bout the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerat ed and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestio ned ... around the world." Why have we heard so much frightening talk about "dir ty bombs" when experts say it is panic rather than radioactivity that would kill people? Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on "Meet the Press" in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, w hen British and U.S. military forces later found no such thing? The film ... dir ectly challenges the conventional wisdom by making a powerful case that the Bush administration, led by a tight-knit cabal of Machiavellian neoconservatives, ha s seized upon the false image of a unified international terrorist threat to rep lace the expired Soviet empire in order to push a political agenda. "The nightma re vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our socie ties is an illusion. Wherever one looks for this Al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the 'sleeper cells' in America, the British and Ame ricans are chasing a phantom enemy." Note: If above link fails, click here. This highly revealing film by one of Brit ain's most respected documentary makers is available for free viewing on the Int ernet. For the link and lots more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here. For an excellent review of the film in one of the U.K.'s leading newspape rs, click here.

9/11 third tower mystery 'solved' 2008-07-04, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7485331.stm The 47-storey third tower, known as Tower Seven, collapsed seven hours after the twin towers. Investigators are expected to say ordinary fires on several differ ent floors caused the collapse. Conspiracy theorists have argued that the third tower was brought down in a controlled demolition. Unlike the twin towers, Tower Seven was not hit by a plane. The National Institute of Standards and Technolog y [NIST] ... is expected to conclude in its long-awaited report this month that ordinary fires caused the building to collapse. That would make it the first and only steel skyscraper in the world to collapse because of fire. [NIST's] lead i nvestigator, Dr Shyam Sunder, spoke to BBC Two's "The Conspiracy Files": "Our wo rking hypothesis now actually suggests that it was normal building fires that we re growing and spreading throughout the multiple floors that may have caused the ultimate collapse of the buildings." However, a group of architects, engineers and scientists say the official explanation that fires caused the collapse is im possible. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth argue there must have been a c ontrolled demolition. The founder of the group, Richard Gage, says the collapse of the third tower is an obvious example of a controlled demolition using explos ives. "Building Seven is the smoking gun of 9/11. A sixth grader can look at thi s building falling at virtually freefall speed, symmetrically and smoothly, and see that it is not a natural process. Buildings that fall in natural processes f all to the path of least resistance", says Gage, "they don't go straight down th rough themselves."

Note: To watch a one-minute clip of the fall of WTC 7 from a PBS documentary, cl ick here. For a two-page summary of some unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Why The 9/11 Conspiracies Won't Go Away 2006-09-03, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1531304,00.html A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans con sider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either all owed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty -six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality. Although the 9/11 Truth Movement, as many conspi racy believers refer to their passion, has been largely ignored by the mainstrea m media, it is flourishing on the Internet. One of the most popular conspiracy v ideos online is Loose Change, a 90-min. blizzard of statistics, photographs, doc uments, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony set to a trippy hip-hop backbea t. It's designed to pick apart, point by point, the conventional narrative of wh at happened on Sept. 11, 2001. Loose Change is a compelling experience. Take the section about the attack on the Pentagon. As the film points out...the crash si te doesn't look right. There's not enough damage. The hole smashed in the Pentag on's outer wall was 75 ft. wide, but a Boeing 757 has a 124-ft. wingspan. Why wa sn't the hole wider? There's something empowering about just exploring such ques tions. Loose Change appeals to the viewer's common sense: it tells you to forget the official explanations and the expert testimony, and trust your eyes and you r brain instead. It implies that the world can be grasped by laymen without any help or interference from the talking heads. Watching Loose Change, you feel as if you are participating in the great American tradition of self-reliance and no nconformist, antiauthoritarian dissent. You're fighting the power. You're thinki ng different.

Lou Dobbs on CNN Asks Why Government is Lying about 9/11 2006-08-09, CNN News http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0608/09/ldt.01.html A shocking new book by the 9/11 Commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamil ton says Americans still don't know the whole truth about their government's ini tial response to those terrorist attacks that day. [The book] outlines repeated misstatements by the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration. Fog of war... could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations, and public testimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue. Untrue -- the military's original timeline of United Flight 93. Equ ally untrue, the government's timeline for American Flight 77 and details about fighter jets scrambled to intercept it. DOD did not accurately report to the 9/1 1 Commission on the response to the September 11, 2001 hijackings. So far, gover nment investigators stopped short of calling all of these inaccuracies lies. If all of the after-action reports are untrue, for whatever reason, that's a lie. I ncompetence and ineptitude on the part of this government...in the weeks leading up to 9/11 are established. The fact that the government would permit deception ...the fact that they would continue and perpetuate the lie suggests that we nee d a full investigation of what is going on and what is demonstrably an incompete nt and at worst deceitful federal government.

500 Conspiracy Buffs Meet to Seek the Truth of 9/11 2006-06-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/us/05conspiracy.html?ex=1307160000&en=2d326... In the ballroom foyer of the Embassy Suites Hotel, the two-day International Edu cation and Strategy Conference for 9/11 Truth was off to a rollicking start. Mor e than 500 people from Italy to Northern California gathered for the weekend at a major chain hotel near the runways of O'Hare International. There were talks o n the Reichstag fire and the sinking of the Battleship Maine as precedents for 9 /11. There were speeches by the lawyer for James Earl Ray, who claimed that a mi litary conspiracy killed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and by a former operat ive for the British secret service, MI5. 9/11 Truthers [are] a group that, in it s rank and file, includes professors, chain-saw operators, mothers, engineers, a ctivists, used-book sellers, pizza deliverymen, [and] college students. Steven E . Jones [is] a professor of physics at Brigham Young University and the movement 's expert in the matter of collapse. Dr. Jones...is a soft-spoken man who lets h is writing do the talking. He composed an account of the destruction of the towe rs...that holds that "pre-positioned cutter-charges" brought the buildings down. There is a plan by the British delegation...to get members of Parliament to wat ch "Loose Change," the seminal movement DVD. The Truthers are not alone in belie ving the whole truth has not come out. A poll released last month by Zogby Inter national found that 42 percent of all Americans believe the 9/11 Commission "con cealed or refused to investigate critical evidence" in the attacks. [And a] Zogb y poll two years ago that found that 49 percent of New York City residents agree d with the idea that some leaders "knew in advance" that the attacks were planne d and failed to act.

Why I Resigned From the CIA 2004-12-05, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-scheuer5dec05,1,471321... Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, wrote "Imperial Hubris: Why the W est is Losing the War on Terror." Between January 1996 and June 1999 I was in ch arge of running operations against Al Qaeda from Washington. When it comes to th is small slice of the large U.S. national security pie, I speak with firsthand e xperience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically tha t during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sou nd intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden eith er by capture or by U.S. military attack. I witnessed and documented, along with dozens of other CIA officers, instances where life-risking intelligence-gatheri ng work of the agency's men and women in the field was wasted. I was never charg ed with deciding whether to act against Bin Laden. That decision properly belong s solely to senior White House officials. However, as a now-private American cit izen, it is my right to question their judgment; I am entitled to know why the p rotection of Americans most selfishly, my own children and grandchildren was not the top priority of the senior officials who refused to act on the opportunitie s to attack Bin Laden provided by the clandestine service. Each of these officia ls have publicly argued that the intelligence was not "good enough" to act, but they almost always neglect to say that they were repeatedly advised that the int elligence was not going to get better and that Bin Laden was going to kill thous ands of Americans if he was not stopped. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For many other serious questions arou nd the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Write More About Skull And Bones

2004-10-27, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/10/27/notes102704.DTL I get this a lot: Hey Mark ... why don't you quit toeing the typical blas journal ism line ... and instead write about the real truths? Like for example how both Kerry and Bush are members of mega-yuppie Yale secret society/boys' club Skull & Bones. And why, furthermore, don't you talk about the real truths of 9/11? Have n't you seen that amazing [9/11] video on that Web site? And what about Building 7? Why did that 47-story tower adjacent to the WTC collapse when it had no fire and no plane crash? Why isn't the media reporting any of this? Does this make y ou laugh? Scoff? It is, after all, incredibly easy to dismiss conspiracy theorie s. But you know what? It's not that easy. These people ... have a point. They ar e indeed onto something quite large and ominous and it very much has to do with the media toeing the line of "safe" information. There is indeed ample evidence that the U.S. government, long before 9/11, had already discussed the quite plau sible possibilities and strategic benefits of unleashing a "Pearl Harbor"-type e vent on America. There are plenty of strangely unanswered questions about 9/11, about the stunning inaction of NORAD and Bush's stupefying nonreaction upon hear ing of the attack, not to mention his administration's incredible attempts to ha lt any independent 9/11 investigations. Of course, no one in any major media wil l touch this stuff. It is professional suicide to dare suggest an alternate trut h to the one supplied by the Pentagon and regurgitated by the media. And the tru th is, we don't really want such unstable questions answered. We simply cannot t olerate to have our world, our leaders, our foundations so questioned. We prefer stasis to growth, security to true knowledge.

The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket 2004-10-19, Los Angeles Times http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/19/opinion/oe-scheer19 It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 unti l after the election, and this one names names. "It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read t he report told me. [The] release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 1 7-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled. " First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the fo rmer Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who re cently was appointed CIA chief. The official stressed that the report was more b lunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bushappointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible." By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. None of this should surpris e us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist an y serious investigation. The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain. And then B ush refused to testify to the commission under oath. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For more reliable, verifiable informa tion on the 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet 2004-10-07, Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13059-2004Oct6.html Darren Williams spent four weeks this summer making a short but startling video that raises novel questions about the 2001 attack. The video, "9/11: Pentagon St rike," suggests that it was not American Airlines Flight 77 that slammed into th e Pentagon, but a missile or a small plane. The video offers flashes of photogra phs taken shortly after impact, interspersed with witness accounts. The pictures seem incompatible with damage caused by a jumbo jet. Firefighters stand outside a perfectly round hole in a Pentagon wall where the Boeing 757 punched through; it is less than 20 feet in diameter. Propelled by word of mouth, Internet searc h engines and e-mail, the video has been downloaded by millions of people around the world. Williams created a Web site for the video, www.pentagonstrike.co.uk. Then he e-mailed a copy to Laura Knight-Jadczyk [who] posted a link to the vide o on the group's Web site, www.Cassiopaea.org. Within 36 hours, Williams's site collapsed under the crush of tens of thousands of visitors. But there were other s to fill the void. In Texas, a former casino worker who downloaded the video be gan drawing almost 700,000 visitors a day. In Louisiana, a young Navy specialist put the video on his personal Web page. Suddenly, the site was inundated by mor e than 20,000 hits. "Pentagon Strike" is just the latest and flashiest example o f a growing number of Web sites, books and videos contending that something othe r than a commercial airliner hit the Pentagon. Knight-Jadczyk said she never ima gined anyone outside her group would ever view "Pentagon Strike." "The fact ever ybody's been sending it to his brother and his cousin ... reflects the fact that there is a deep unease," she said. Note: This five-minute video is well worth watching, even though it was made a f ew years ago. To view it free online, click here. For lots more information sugg esting a major 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Transcript: Rice's Testimony on 9/11 (for 9/11 Commissioner Lehman) 2004-04-08, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61252-2004Apr8_4.html LEHMAN. Were you told that there were numerous young Arab males in flight traini ng? RICE. I was not. LEHMAN. Were you told that the red team in F.A.A. for 10 ye ars had reported ... that the U.S. airport security system never got higher than 20 percent effective. RICE. To the best of my recollection I was not told that. LEHMAN. Were you aware that I.N.S. had quietly internally halved its internal s ecurity enforcement budget? RICE. I was not made aware of that. LEHMAN. Were you aware that it was the U.S. government established policy not to question or opp ose the sanctuary policies [which] prohibited the local police from cooperating at all with federal immigration authorities? RICE. I do not believe I was aware of that. LEHMAN. Were you aware of a program that was well established that allo wed Saudi citizens to get visas without interviews? RICE. I learned of that afte r 9/11. LEHMAN. Were you aware of the extensive activities [of] the Saudi govern ment in supporting over 300 radical teaching schools and mosques around the coun try, including right here in the United States? Were you aware at the time of th e fact that Saudi Arabia ... had in their custody the C.F.O. [Chief Financial Of ficer] and the closest confidante of Al Qaeda, of Osama bin Laden, and that they refused direct access to the United States? RICE. I don't remember anything of that kind. LEHMAN. Were you aware that they would not cooperate and give us acce ss to the perpetrators of the Cobar Towers attack? RICE. I was very involved in issues concerning Cobar Towers. LEHMAN. Were you aware that it was the policy of the Justice Department ... to fine airlines if they have more than two young Ar ab males in secondary questioning? RICE. No. Note: Don't miss the full revealing transcript at the link above. Most of the qu otes above are towards the bottom of the webpage. Why didn't we hear lots more a

bout these astounding facts put forward by one of the 9/11 commissioners, yet ha rdly mentioned in the final report? For lots more, click here.

Experts Urging Broader Inquiry In Towers' Fall 2001-12-25, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40A11FB3E550C768EDDAB0994D94... Saying that the current investigation into how and why the twin towers fell on S ept. 11 is inadequate, some of the nation's leading structural engineers and fir e-safety experts are calling for a new, independent and better-financed inquiry that could produce the kinds of conclusions vital for skyscrapers and future bui ldings nationwide. Experts critical of the current effort...point out that the c urrent team of 20 or so investigators has no subpoena power and little staff sup port and has even been unable to obtain basic information like detailed blueprin ts of the buildings that collapsed. Some structural engineers have said that one serious mistake has already been made...the decision to rapidly recycle the ste el columns, beams and trusses that held up the buildings. Interviews with a hand ful of members of the team, which includes some of the nation's most respected e ngineers, also uncovered complaints that they had at various times been shackled with bureaucratic restrictions that prevented them from interviewing witnesses, examining the disaster site and requesting crucial information like recorded di stress calls to the police and fire departments. Members have been threatened wi th dismissal for speaking to the press. Note: Our website has over 30 full articles posted from the New York Times. This is the only article for which the Times threated to sue us if we didn't remove it. We were allowed to replace it with this short summary. For more on this, cli ck here. For more reliable news articles suggesting a major cover-up of 9/11, cl ick here.

[9/11] Hijack 'suspects' alive and well 2001-09-23, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Wash ington and New York has turned up alive and well. The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt. Saudi Ar abian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberat ely crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 Septem ber. His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on te levision around the world. He told journalists there that he had nothing to do w ith the attacks. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities. He ac knowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the Unite d States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been refer ring. But, he says, he left the United States in September last year [and] becam e a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines. Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects ... says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver. Meanwhile ... a London-based Arabic daily says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi. He was listed by the FBI as a hija cker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. And there are suggestion s that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive. FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hi jackers is in doubt. Note: Yet these four are all later listed in the 9/11 Commission report as the h ijackers. Click here and scroll down a little over half way to see their photos

in the official report. For more on this, click here. For an abundance of reliab le information suggesting a major 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Material missing from Oklahoma bombing tapes, lawyer says 2009-09-27, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-09-27-okla-city-bombing-tapes_N.htm Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sun day. "The real story is what's missing," said Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney who obtained the recordings through the federal Freedom of Information Act as part of an unofficial inquiry he is conducting into the April 19, 1995, b ombing that killed 168 people and injured hundreds more. The tapes turned over b y the FBI came from security cameras various companies had mounted outside offic e buildings near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. They are blank at points before 9:02 a.m., when a truck bomb carrying a 4,000-pound fertilizer-and-fueloil bomb detonated in front of the building, Trentadue said. "Four cameras in fo ur different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain't no such thing as a coincidence," Trentadue said. He said government officials claim the security cameras did not record the minutes before the bombing because "they had run out of tape" or "the tape was being rep laced." "The absence of footage from these crucial time intervals is evidence th at there is something there that the FBI doesn't want anybody to see." Trentadue said he is seeking more tapes along with a variety of bombing-related documents from the FBI and the CIA. An FOIA request by Trentadue for 26 CIA documents was rejected in June. A letter from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, wh ich reviewed the documents, said their release "could cause grave damage to our national security." Note: This revealing article also tells how Trentadue's brother was murdered by FBI agents who mistakenly thought his brother was the bomber. For more valuable information on this and other evidence challenging the official story of the Okl ahoma City bombing, click here.

A New Look at the 9/11 Commission 2009-09-11, Time magazine http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1921659,00.html Former New Jersey attorney general John Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9 /11 Commission, tasked with investigating the government response to the attacks . His new book, The Ground Truth, picks up where the commission left off taking a deeper look at the government's ... response to the attacks and exposing offic ials determined to hide their failings from the inquiry. Farmer uses newly relea sed transcripts and recordings to cast doubt on the official version of events. He spoke with TIME about the attacks. [Time:] Why do you think officials tried t o obscure [the truth about 9/11]? [Farmer:] It's almost a culture of concealment , for lack of a better word. There were interviews made at the FAA's New York ce nter the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the inte rrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was disto rted and was completely different from the way things happened. [Time:] Some of the distortions you've discussed have fed various conspiracy theories surroundin g 9/11. Did you ever see any evidence of a conspiracy? [Farmer:] One of the harm ful byproducts of not telling the truth about what happened is that it did fuel all sorts of conspiracy theories about what might have happened. If what the gov ernment is telling you isn't true, then the truth could be anything. I think the

re is evidence that the truth wasn't told and that at least some of that was del iberate. Note: Many respected scholars, officials and professionals have questioned the 9 /11 Commission's report. Click here and here to read some of their statements.

What happened to building 7? 2008-06-06, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7d174b42-31fa-11dd-9b87-0000779fd2ac,s01=1.html To the ["9/11 Truth movement"], Building 7 the third building in the World Trade Center complex to collapse on September 11 is evidence that the mainstream medi a is in on the plot. On that day, the BBC reported the building s fall almost half an hour before it happened. Journalist Jane Standley was broadcast at 4.54pm ea stern time reporting that the tower had collapsed but in the background, it was still standing. It fell 26 minutes later, seven hours after the Twin Towers came down. When the Standley clip hit YouTube, truthers bombarded the BBC s website wi th questions and accusations. Richard Porter, head of BBC world news, was forced to deny that the broadcaster was reading from the Bush conspirators script. He s aid the BBC had misreported warnings from fire crews of the building s imminent co llapse and instead stated that it had already happened. He blamed the confusion of the day for the mix-up. CNN had earlier reported rumours that a third buildin g had either collapsed or was about to. This explanation was undermined by Porte r s admission that the BBC no longer had the original tapes of its coverage. Build ing 7 is [a] smoking gun for other reasons, too. How, they ask, could this moder n, steel-framed skyscraper collapse merely because of fire, without even being h it by an airliner? The 47-storey WTC7 fell straight down, at almost free-fall sp eed, largely into its own footprint: all the hallmarks, the sceptics say, of a c ontrolled demolition. Note: To read a related Financial Times report on the 9/11 Truth movement's clai ms, click here.

BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince 2008-02-15, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/15/bae.armstrade Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack Lond on unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday. Previously secret files describe how inv estigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence. Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi n ational security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to b e the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than 1bn in secret pay ments from the arms company BAE. He was accused in yesterday's high court hearin gs of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prim e minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation i nto bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family. The threats halted the fraud inquiry. Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sulliv an, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He sai d one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government. The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massiv e secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms

deals. Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn t he decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, ar guing the government had caved into blackmail. Note: This report comes very close to confirming the close link between terroris t attacks and high-level policy of certain states. For many revealing clues alon g these lines from reliable sources, click here.

The 9/11 conspiracy movement 2007-02-14, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/conspiracy_files/6354679.stm 9/11 was the first global event in the age of the internet. And now the world wi de web is being used as a platform for a wide range of conspiracy theories ... w hich allege that the US government was somehow involved in the attacks. Those wh o question the official account of 9/11 form a broad coalition. Loose Change has been viewed tens of millions of times and pulls no punches. [Creator Dylan Aver y claims] "our government will willingly kill its own citizens for whatever gain it deems necessary ... and then lie as much as they need to cover it up." At th e other extreme [Professor Jim] Fetzer is a former US Marine officer and retired professor of philosophy. Puzzled by the apparent discrepancies in the official account of 9/11, he founded a coalition of like-minded academics called Scholars For 9/11 Truth. Its purpose is to research exactly what happened that day, usin g the principles of scientific research. Alex Jones, a nationally syndicated rad io talk show host ... believes 9/11 was "an inside job." "It's a self inflicted wound, it's a false-flag terror operation," he claims. After the attacks, govern ment officials were summoned to give evidence before a Congressional Inquiry set up to investigate the intelligence failure before 9/11. Co-chairman Senator Bob Graham told ... of his frustration at the lack of co-operation from the FBI in that inquiry, and by the government's decision to censor over 30 pages of his re port which related to Saudi Arabia. "Within 9/11 there are too many secrets," he said, "withholding of those secrets has eroded public confidence in their gover nment." Note: Don't miss the BBC's impressive 9/11 Timeline available here which is rela ted to the above article. And for lots more reliable, verifiable information sug gesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here. If the above link to the BBC article does n ot function, click on The 9/11 Conspiracy Movement.

Losing bin Laden 2006-02-12, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR20060209016... Despite a huge and costly effort by the media, the public still has an incomplet e picture of what really happened during the [war in Afghanistan] and of how Osa ma bin Laden survived it. Gary Berntsen's Jawbreaker provides a valuable new acc ount by a major participant that fills in many blanks. Berntsen was a top CIA fi eld commander in the most critical sector of a new kind of war; at various times , the CIA veteran had elements of the Delta Force, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and tactical air units reporting to him. Crown Publishers has chosen unnecessarily t o position it as a diatribe that the CIA tried to suppress. In fact, while the C IA dragged its feet in reviewing the manuscript for classified material and reda cted plenty of specifics, the book is hardly an attack on the CIA. In fact, the overall picture of the CIA here is far more flattering than that in The 9/11 Com mission Report. Still, to portray Jawbreaker as "the book the CIA doesn't want y ou to read" (as the cover puts it), the publisher has displayed the redactions t

hroughout the book as large black lines. Contradicting Bush administration denia ls, Berntsen writes that his teams discovered bin Laden and the remnants of his entourage in the now famous Tora Bora Mountains along the lawless, rugged Afghan -Pakistani border. Berntsen recounts very credibly how he and others pleaded wit h Gen. Tommy Franks and the Pentagon brass to put in blocking forces so that bin Laden and the remnants of al Qaeda's leadership could not flee into Pakistan. B ut for reasons that remain unclear to Berntsen ... the Bush administration or Fr anks decided to depend instead on local Afghan warlords rather than put U.S. for ces on the ground to block bin Laden's escape. Note: To read a concise summary of reliable news reports that raise serious ques tions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Getting Agnostic About 9/11 2005-08-28, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-crgriffin35aug28,... Anyone who types the words "9/11" and "conspiracy" into an online search engine soon learns that not everybody buys the official narrative of what took place on Sept. 11, 2001. As a professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, 66 -year-old David Ray Griffin would seem to have more affinity for leather elbow p atches than tin hats, yet after friends and colleagues prodded him into sifting through the evidence, he experienced a conversion. "For the first year and a hal f I just accepted the conventional view ... that this was blowback for our forei gn policy. When a colleague suggested to me ... forces within our own government had arranged it, I didn't accept that. Then several months later another collea gue sent me a website that had a timeline. Once I ... saw all those stories draw n from mainstream sources that contradicted the official account, I decided I ne eded to look into it more carefully, and the more I looked, the worse it got. Th e fact that Building 7 ... collapsed when it had not been hit by an airplane ... that's a smoking gun. The fact that standard operating procedures were not foll owed that morning, and we've gotten three different stories now by the U.S. mili tary as to why they did not intercept the planes, that's a smoking gun. The 9/11 commission simply ignored those questions. The official account itself is a con spiracy theory. It says that 19 Arab Muslims...conspired to pull off this operat ion. The question is not whether one is a conspiracy theorist about 9/11. It's w hich conspiracy theory do you find most supported by the evidence?" Note: If the Los Angeles Times link does not work, click here for the full artic le. The timeline to which Prof. Griffin refers is the WantToKnow.info timeline a t http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up

CIA Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away 2005-08-15, Newsweek magazine http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853000/site/newsweek/ During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled abo ut whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the w ar in Afghanistan. Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border. But in a for thcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that ... bin Lad en was holed up at Tora Bora ... and could have been caught. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't kn ow to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks

wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. [CIA Commander] Berntsen says Franks i s "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was." In his book t itled "Jawbreaker" the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's D efense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora. Berntsen ... has sued the agency over what he calls unacceptable delays in approving his book. "They' re just holding the book," which is scheduled for October release, he says. "CIA officers, Special Forces and U.S. air power drove the Taliban out in 70 days. T he CIA has taken roughly 80 days to clear my book." Note: For a concise summary of reliable, verifiable information questioning the official account of 9/11, click here.

Was Use of Cell Phones on 9/11 Flights Possible? 2004-12-15, WantToKnow.info/Washington Post/SF Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.WantToKnow.info/911cellphonecalls Once you get to a certain height, you are no longer in the range of the cellular network, because cell phone towers aren't built to project their signals that hi gh. Washington Post, 12/9/04 Today's vote by the FCC is intended to address whether technology has improved to the extent that cell phone calls now are possible above 10,000 feet -- they wer en't in the past. San Francisco Chronicle, 12/15/04 "With television cameramen hovering, Qualcomm chief executive Irwin Jacobs sat i n the front row of coach and made one of the first legal cell phone calls from a commercial jetliner. Jacobs pronounced the [brand new] technology behind the ai rborne phone call a success, although adding that it will be improved over the n ext couple years. Connections from the plane were generally good, although some calls were dropped." USA Today/Associated Press, 7/16/04 Note: To find articles showing multiple cell phone use on Sept. 11, 2001, type " 9/11" and "cell phone calls" into your favorite search engine, or click here for a Washington Post report on an alleged 30-minute uninterrupted cell phone call from Flight 93. Click here for a CNN report on another call from that flight. Te sts have shown it is not possible to have an extended cell phone conversation ab ove 10,000 feet.

Lost In Translation 2004-08-08, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/25/60minutes/main526954.shtml Sibel Edmonds, a translator who worked at the FBI's language division, says [tha t hundreds, if not thousands, of foreign language intelligence documents] weren' t translated because the division was riddled with incompetence and corruption. Edmonds was fired after reporting her concerns to FBI officials. Because she is fluent in Turkish and other Middle Eastern languages, Edmonds, a Turkish-America n, was hired by the FBI soon after Sept. 11 and given top-secret security cleara nce to translate some of the reams of documents seized by FBI agents who have be

en rounding up suspected terrorists across the United States and abroad. In its rush to hire more foreign language translators after Sept. 11, the FBI admits it has had difficulty performing background checks to detect translators who may h ave loyalties to other governments, which could pose a threat to U.S. national s ecurity. Take the case of Jan Dickerson, a Turkish translator who worked with Ed monds. The FBI has admitted that when Dickerson was hired, the bureau didn't kno w that she had worked for a Turkish organization being investigated by the FBI's own counter-intelligence unit. They also didn't know she'd had a relationship w ith a Turkish intelligence officer stationed in Washington who was the target of that investigation. According to Edmonds, Dickerson tried to recruit her into t hat organization, and insisted that Dickerson be the only one to translate the F BI's wiretaps of that Turkish official. She got very angry, and later she threate ned me and my family's life, says Edmonds, when she decided not to go along with the plan. She said, Why would you want to place your life and your family's life i n danger by translating these tapes? Edmonds says that when she reviewed Dickerson 's translations of those tapes, she found that Dickerson had left out informatio n crucial to the FBI's investigation - information that Edmonds says would have revealed that the Turkish intelligence officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon. Note: This article should be read in its entirety. For many revealing articles o n the ongoing efforts by longtime whistleblower Sibel Edmonds to tell her story, click here.

Letter to Thomas Kean from Sibel Edmonds 2004-08-05, AsiaTimes ('Asia's most trusted news source') http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FH05Aa01.html Your commission ... has now issued its "9/11 Commission Report". After [9/11] we , the translators at the FBI's largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down, even stop, translation of critical information related to te rrorist activities. This issue has been confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Commit te. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, forged si gnatures on top-secret documents related to certain 9/11 detainees. Not only doe s the supervisor facilitating these criminal conducts remain in a supervisory po sition, he has been promoted. In April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset ... received information that: 1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist at tack in the United States targeting 4-5 major cities, 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes [and] the attack was going to be carried out soon. No action was taken. After 9/11, the agents and the translators were told to 'keep quiet' regarding this issue. The translator who was present ... reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing. Why did your report choose to exclude the inform ation ... despite the public confirmation by the FBI, witnesses provided to your investigators, and briefings you received directly? As you are fully aware, the se issues and incidents were found confirmed by a Senior Republican Senator, Cha rles Grassley, and a Senior Democrat Senator, Patrick Leahy. Even FBI officials 'confirmed all my allegations and denied none' during their unclassified meeting s with the Senate Judiciary staff. However, neither your commission's hearings, nor your commission's five hundred sixty seven-page report ... include these ser ious issues, major incidents, and systemic problems. Note: If the above link fails, click here. Sibel Edmonds is one of the great her oes of our day. She has been gagged directly by the U.S. Attorney General from t elling what she knows. The above letter was not published in any major U.S. medi a, though widely reported in alternative new sources. To understand how such vit al information is hidden from the public, click here. For lots more on Ms. Edmon ds, click here.

9-11 Commission Funding Woes 2003-03-26, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,437267,00.html Is the Bush White House trying to put the brakes on the congressional panel crea ted last fall to investigate 9-11 attacks? The White House brushed off a request quietly made last week by the 9-11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, to boost his budget by $11 million. The panel ha s until the end of May 2004 to complete its work, but it will spend the $3 milli on it was originally allotted by around August 2003 if it doesn't get the supple ment. Bush's recent move has miffed some members of the 9-11 panel. Kean and for mer congressman Lee Hamilton, the panel's top Democrat, requested additional fun ding in a letter to the administration last week. In denying the request, the Wh ite House irritated many of the members of the commission. The White House sides tepped the issue of why the request wasn't granted. The latest effort to curtail funding has angered victims of the attacks. Stephen Push, a leader of the 9/11 victims' families, who are closely monitoring the commission, said the White Hou se decision was another in a long line of efforts to water down or shrink the pa nel's role. Commission member Tim Roemer ... has gone so far as to draw comparis ons with the $50 million provided to investigate the recent Columbia tragedy in which seven people died. "If we're looking at well over $11 million for that, we certainly should be looking for at least the same vicinity of money for how 3,0 00 people died and how to strengthen our homeland security," he said. Note: MSNBC reported that "the Ken Starr investigation of Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky cost the tax-payer $64 million." The Columbia tragedy invstigation ran $50 million. Yet the White House wanted to limit the investigation of the worst terror attack ever to $3 million. What secrets are they hiding? Click here for m ore.

Clues Alerted White House to Potential Attacks 2002-05-17, Fox News/Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,53065,00.html [There are] many examples of "missed leads" that the Bush administration was giv en prior to Sept. 11. An Iranian in custody in New York City told local police l ast May of a plot to attack the World Trade Center. German intelligence alerted the Central Intelligence Agency, Britain's MI-6 intelligence service, Israel's M ossad in June 2001 that Middle Eastern terrorists were training for hijackings a nd targeting American and Israeli interests. Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided "general" information to the United States in the se cond week of August that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent. Russian President Vlad imir Putin has said publicly that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the United States last summer that suicide pilots were training for attacks on U .S. targets. An Islamic terrorist conspiracy was uncovered in 1996 in the Philip pines to hijack a dozen airplanes and fly them into CIA headquarters and other b uildings. U.S. investigators confirmed in October that a 29-year-old Iranian ... made phone calls to U.S. police from his deportation cell that an attack on the World Trade Center was imminent in "the days before the attack." [A] memo from the FBI Phoenix office about Arabs training in U.S. flight schools never reached headquarters. In 1999, the Federal Research Division at the Library of Congress published its own report ... which described that "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to Al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the [CIA], or the White House."

Note: For lots more evidence that suggest 9/11 at the very least may have been a llowed to happen, click here.

[9/11] Suicide hijackers hid behind stolen Arab identities 2001-09-20, WantToKnow.info/London Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/010920londontimes.hijackers Five of the [9/11] hijackers were using stolen identities, and investigators are studying the possibility that the entire suicide squad consisted of impostors. In Saudi Arabia, five of the alleged hijackers have emerged, alive, innocent and astonished to see their names and photographs appearing on satellite television . "The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine, but I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Centre," Abdulaziz Alomari told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. Mr Alomari, 28, ... said that he had left the United States in April 2000. The US-educated engineer had reported to police that his p assport was stolen when his flat in Denver, Colorado, was burgled in 1995. A Sau di diplomat formerly based in Washington, Ahmed al-Shehri, told al-Eqtisadiah ne wspaper that details of one of the hijackers matched his son, Waleed. The young man, a pilot with Saudi Arabian Airlines who graduated four years ago from Embry -Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, is living in Morocco. Another Saudi pilot, Said Hussein al-Ghamdi, whose photograph was broadcast on CNN when it por trayed him as a hijacker, is living in Tunis. The family of Ziad al-Jarrah, an a lcohol-drinking Lebanese partygoer, deny he could have been the fanatical Muslim hijacker whose aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania. Alarming reports claimed that three of the hijackers -Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Mani and Ahmed al-Ghamdi -had learned to fly at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, known as the "Cra dle of US Naval Aviation". Note: Yet these individuals are all later listed in the 9/11 Commission report a s the hijackers. Click here and scroll down a little over half way to see their photos in the official report. For more on this, click here. For an abundance of reliable information suggesting a major 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast 1993-10-28, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00617FE3A5C0C7B8EDDA... Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that wa s eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center. The informer was to have he lped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was ca lled off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Ema d A. Salem, should be used. The account, which is given in the transcript of hun dreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with lawenforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than pr eviously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City's tallest towers. Th e explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars. The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wan ted to complain to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington about the bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev. " He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, D.C." Another agent ... does not dispute M r. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it. Other Salem tapes and transcripts were being withheld pending Government review, of "security and othe r issues." William M. Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the case, accused the Govern ment this week of improper delay in handing over all the material. The transcrip ts he had seen, he said, "were filled with all sorts of Government misconduct."

But citing the judge's order, he said he could not provide any details. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For a two-minute CBS News clip the sa me day giving more information on this little-known story, click here.

The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis 1987-11-04, WantToKnow.info/PBS Documentary http://www.WantToKnow.info/050423secretgovernment The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spie s, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. The Russian s had been our ally against the Nazis, an expedient alliance for the sake of war . Now they were our enemy. To fight them we turned to some of the very men who h ad inflicted on humanity the horrors of Hitler s madness. We hired Nazis as America n spies. Admiral Gene La Rocque: That National Security Act of 1947 changed drama tically the direction of this great nation. It established the framework for a n ational security state. Never have we had a National Security Council so concern ed about the nation s security that we re always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was inven ted, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do. The National Security Act also gave us the Central Intelligence Agency." In 197 5 ... Congress took its first public look at the Secret Government. Senator Fran k Church chaired the Select Committee to study government operations. The hearin gs opened the books on a string of lethal activities. From the use of electric p istols and poison pellets, to Mafia connections and drug experiments. And they g ave us a detailed account of assassination plots against foreign leaders and the overthrowing of sovereign governments. This is a system easily corrupted. While freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends. Note: This highly revealing PBS documentary is available for free viewing on the Internet. For the link, written text, and much more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here.

Ventura Turns Investigator for 'Conspiracy Theory' 2009-12-01, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=9219009 Jesse Ventura is back for another stab at TV stardom, this time hosting a progra m that digs into conspiracy theories, including alternate views of what was behi nd the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the purpose of a sprawling research center in remote Alaska. The former Minnesota governor, professional wrestler and Navy SEAL stars in "Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura," ... on truTV. The cable n etwork, part of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., has ordered seven episodes of t he hourlong weekly series. Marc Juris, executive vide president and general mana ger of truTV, said Ventura is passionate about the show and brings "knowledge fr om the inside" of government. "He's not doing this as an act or a gimmick. It's true to his heart. He's really looking for the answers," Juris told the AP. The premiere episode deals with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, a 35-acre compound of 180 antennas near Gakona, Alaska, that is used t o study the Earth's ionosphere. Ventura and those he interviews question whether the government is using the site to manipulate the weather or to bombard people with mind-controlling radio waves. Future "Conspiracy Theory" shows explore all eged cover-ups surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks and whether there are real "Manc hurian Candidate" assassins who are programmed to kill, said Juris.

Note: Ventura was also a Navy Seal, where he personally was involved in top secr et activities and learned how what is presented to the public is very different from the deeper realities. Don't miss the highly educational episode on the vita lly important topic of HAARP by clicking here. And watch the excellent episode o n 9/11 by clicking here. You'll be surprised by the new angles presented.

The evolution of a conspiracy theory 2008-07-04, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7488159.stm Nearly seven years after the terrible events of that September day, the US autho rities are due to publish the final report on a third tower that also collapsed on 9/11. Unlike the Twin Towers, this 47-storey, 610-foot skyscraper was not hit by a plane. The official explanation is that ordinary fires were the main reaso n for the collapse of Tower 7. That makes this the first and only tall skyscrape r in the world to have collapsed because of fire. Yet despite that all the thous ands of tonnes of steel from the building were carted away and melted down. The way official bodies have investigated Tower 7 at the World Trade Center has made some people think they're hiding something. Its destruction was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. An inquiry by the Federal Emergency Management A gency said the building collapsed because intense fires had burned for hours, fe d by thousands of gallons of diesel stored in the building for emergency generat ors. But its report said this had "only a low probability of occurrence" and mor e work was needed. That was in May 2002. The task has now fallen to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) based at a sprawling campus near W ashington DC. For more than two-and-a-half years, scientists there have been stu dying Tower 7. The officials have been criticised for being slow and even of bei ng frightened to publish. Steven Jones, a former physics professor at Brigham Yo ung University, who has become [a] leading academic voice in the movement, first watched a video of the collapse of Tower 7 in the spring of 2005. But when he d id, he said he was taken aback as a physicist. Note: For a two-page summary of some unanswered questions about what really happ ened on 9/11, click here.

Controversy and conspiracies 2008-07-02, BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/07/controversy_conspiracies_iii.html World Trade Center Building 7 has become the subject of heated speculation and a host of conspiracy theories suggesting it was brought down by a controlled demo lition. And some people suggest it was not just the government and foreign intel ligence, but ... even the media that were involved. It is certainly true that on 9/11 the BBC broadcast that WTC7 had collapsed when it was still standing. Then the satellite transmission seemed to cut out mysteriously when the corresponden t was still talking. Then [head of BBC News] Richard Porter admitted in his blog last year that the BBC had lost those key tapes of BBC World News output from t he day. The internet movie Loose Change has been viewed by more than 100 million people according to its makers and it asks this question in the latest film rel ease: "Where did CNN and the BBC get their information especially considering th e building was still standing directly behind their reporters?" It turns out tha t the respected news agency Reuters picked up an incorrect report and passed it on. They have issued this statement: "On 11 September 2001 Reuters incorrectly r eported that one of the buildings at the New York World Trade Center, 7WTC, had collapsed before it actually did. The report was picked up from a local news sto

ry and was withdrawn as soon as it emerged that the building had not fallen." An d the reason the interview with the BBC correspondent, Jane Standley, ended so a bruptly? The satellite feed had an electronic timer, which cut out at 1715 exact ly. Note: How many "coincidences" does it take for people to start to ask questions? How could people know that the building was going to collapse when a skyscraper had never collapsed before from fire? For a useful BBC FAQ on 9/11 alternative theories, click here.

What FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds found in translation 2008-02-17, Dallas Morning News (Dallas' leading newspaper) http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-sibe... Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistle-blower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington's highest levels sale of nuclear s ecrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics traff icking, money laundering, espionage. Ms. Edmonds' account is full of dates, plac es and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to I sraeli, Pakistani and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper ec helons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirm ed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to invest igators. But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shroude d Ms. Edmonds' case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so swe eping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with to p-secret security clearances. Ms. Edmonds' revelations have attracted corroborat ion in the form of anonymous letters apparently written by FBI employees. There have been frequent reports of FBI field agents being frustrated by the premature closure of cases dealing with foreign spying, particularly when those cases inv olve Israel, and the State Department has frequently intervened to shut down inv estigations based on "sensitive foreign diplomatic relations." Curiously, the st ate-secrets gag order binding Ms. Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, wa s not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon which employ ed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her a llegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary. Note: The author of this article, Philip Giraldi, is a retired career CIA office r. For further powerful details of Sibel Edmonds' revelations, click here.

Stonewalled by the C.I.A. 2008-01-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02kean.html More than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commissio n. Soon after its creation, the president s chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission. The commission s mandate was swe eping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revel ations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives l eads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes and did not tell us about them obstructed our investigation. No one in the administratio n ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogat ions. We did ask, repeatedly, for the kind of information that would have been c ontained in such videotapes. Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of

intelligence information ... that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 1 18 named individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, t wo senior Qaeda operatives, portions of whose interrogations were apparently rec orded and then destroyed. The C.I.A. gave us many reports summarizing informatio n gained in the interrogations. But the reports raised almost as many questions as they answered. So, in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A. s general counsel. The general counsel responded in writing with non-specif ic replies. The agency did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been re corded or that it had held any further relevant information, in any form. Govern ment officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Con gress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront t his country. We call that obstruction. Note: The authors of this op-ed, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, served as c hairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the 9/11 Commission.

"One of the Eeriest Moments Amid the Carnage of 9/11" 2007-09-12, CNN http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0709/12/acd.01.html JOHN KING: Today, six years after 9/11, a mystery endures about just what happen ed in the skies over the White House that terrible day. A plane flew right over it, but why, and what was it? For conspiracy theorists, the image is a gold mine . It appeared overhead just before 10 a.m., a four- engine jet ... in the nation 's most off-limits airspace. On the White House grounds and the rooftop, a nervo us scramble. And still today, no one will offer an official explanation of what we saw. Two government sources familiar with the incident tell CNN it was a mili tary aircraft. They say the details are classified. This comparison of the CNN v ideo and an official Air Force photo suggests the mystery plane is among the mil itary's most sensitive aircraft, an Air Force E-4B. Note the flag on the tail, t he stripe around the fuselage, and the telltale bubble just behind the 747 cockp it area. MAJ. GEN. DON SHEPPERD (RET.), U.S. AIR FORCE: There are many commercia l versions of the 747 ... that look similar, but I don't think any of them that have the communications pod like the ... Air Force E-4 does behind the cockpit. KING: The E-4B is a state of the art flying command post, built and equipped for one reason: to keep the government running no matter what, even in the event of a nuclear war, the reason it was nicknamed the doomsday plane during the Cold W ar. Ask the Pentagon, and it insists this is not a military aircraft, and there is no mention of it in the official report of the 9/11 Commission. [In] sum: the lack of any official explanation feeds an ominous conspiracy. This is from an o nline discussion about the plane on the web site 911blogger.com. "I have always thought these planes were exactly that, mission control for the 9/11 attack on o ur country." Note: For many other anomalous major media reports which collectively suggest th at the official story of 9/11 may be a cover-up, click here.

Ex-CIA official, contractor face new charges 2007-05-11, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18622361 New charges have been filed alleging that a former top CIA official pushed a pro posed $100 million government contract for his best friend in return for lavish vacations, private jet flights and a lucrative job offer. The indictment [brings ] charges ... against Kyle Dusty Foggo, who resigned from the spy agency a year ag o, and ... defense contractor Brent Wilkes. The charges grew from the bribery sc

andal that landed former U.S. Rep. Randy Duke Cunningham in prison. The pair now f ace 30 wide-ranging counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering [including that] Foggo provided Wilkes with sensitive, internal information related to ... n ational security, including classified information, to help him prepare proposals for providing undercover flights for the CIA under the guise of a civil aviatio n company and armored vehicles for agency operations. Then, he pushed his CIA co lleagues to hire Wilkes companies without disclosing their friendship, prosecutor s allege. In a June 2005 e-mail to the head of CIA air operations quoted in the indictment, Foggo offered to use some EXDIR grease on Wilkes behalf. Foggo was the ag ency s executive director at the time. In return, Wilkes offered to hire Foggo aft er he retired from government service. [An] initial indictment in February charg ed the pair with 11 counts of the same charges in connection with a $1.7 million water-supply contract Foggo allegedly helped win for one of Wilkes companies whi le he was working as a logistics coordinator at a CIA supply hub overseas. Foggo , the former No. 3 official at the CIA, resigned from the spy agency after his h ouse and office were raided by federal agents. Note: Until just a few years ago, there was a virtual blackout in the media on a ny negative coverage of the CIA. The prosecution of the #3 man in the CIA is an external manifestation of huge shake-ups going on behind the scenes. Buzzy Krong ard, the previous #3 at the CIA has been linked to the millions of dollars in su spicious stock option trades made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, th ough this received little media coverage.

Opium, thugs bloom under U.S. policies in Afghanistan war 2006-12-17, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/17/ING08MTPMB1.DTL The Taliban ... briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U. S. diplomatic recognition and aid. When the Bush administration invaded Afghanis tan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the Americ an occupation ... poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall produc tion has increased exponentially ever since -- this year by 60 percent. Within A fghanistan, where perhaps 3 million people draw direct income from poppy, profit s may reach $3 billion this year. In-country profit adds up to an estimated 60 p ercent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, or more than half the country's annual income. Afghanistan provides 92 percent of the world's heroin. Through ma ny administrations, the U.S. government has been implicated in the Afghan drug t rade. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced a very small amount of opium for regional markets , and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army, it was the world's top producer of both drugs. The CIA made it all possible by providin g legal cover for these operations. The United States [encouraged] Islamist extr emists (then "our" soldiers) and ... set the stage for the Taliban. [Currently,] President Hamid Karzai['s] strategy is to avoid confrontation, befriend potenti al adversaries and give them offices, often in his Cabinet. The trade penetrates even the elected Parliament. Among the 249 members of the Wolesi Jirga (lower h ouse) are at least 17 known drug traffickers, in addition to 40 commanders of ar med militias, 24 members of criminal gangs, and 19 men facing serious allegation s of war crimes. Note: Could it be that some U.S. officials are turning a blind eye, or even supp orting this drug trade? For some very strong evidence of this from a former awar d-winning DEA agent turned journalist and author, click here.

Pentagon resists pleas for help in Afghan opium fight

2006-12-05, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-afghandrugs5dec05,... The Pentagon ... has resisted entreaties from U.S. anti-narcotics officials to p lay an aggressive role in the faltering campaign to curb the country's opium tra de. Military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some req uests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized c rime syndicates shipping the drug to Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States. Poppy cultivation has exploded, increasing by more than half this year. Afghanistan supplies about 92% of the world's opium. "It is surprising to me tha t we have allowed things to get to the point that they have," said ... a former top State Department counter-narcotics official. Outgoing Defense Secretary Dona ld H. Rumsfeld has said that Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade is a law enfo rcement problem, not a military one. The opium trade is one-third of the country 's economy. Several dozen kingpins ... have become more brazen, richer and power ful. [They] openly run huge opium bazaars and labs that turn opium into heroin. [The] head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said ... that the loc ation of major drug operations were "well-known to us and to the authorities." T he Pentagon has balked at drug interdiction efforts even when it had the resourc es, said a former senior U.S. anti-drug official. "There were [drug] convoys whe re military people looked the other way," the former official said. "DEA would i dentify a lab to go hit or a storage facility and [the Pentagon] would find a re ason to ground the helicopters." A recent congressional report said the DEA aske d the Pentagon for airlifts on 26 occasions in 2005, and the requests were denie d in all but three cases. Note: Some observers and insiders believe the reason Afghanistan was attacked is because the Taliban had virtually stopped the opium trade in 2001. For reliable evidence supporting these allegations, click here.

FBI to Fire Dissident Agent 2005-04-23, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10381-2005Apr22.html The FBI has moved to fire a veteran agent who alleged that the bureau had mishan dled domestic investigations. On Thursday, Robert Wright was ordered by superior s at an FBI counterterrorism command office in Washington to hand over his badge and weapon, was suspended and was told he would be fired within 30 days, said a n official with Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group whose attorneys repr esent Wright. Wright was told he was being dismissed for, among other things, pu blicly discussing sensitive FBI matters in 2003, the official said. Wright has b een under disciplinary investigation for almost three years. He has two lawsuits pending against the FBI. Yesterday, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Patr ick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) sent FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III a letter repeating their support for Wright and expressing concern that the FBI was retaliating aga inst him for his public statements. Note: What the Post article completely fails to mention is that Robert Wright wa s hot on the trail of key terrorists before 9/11, yet he was ordered to stop the investigation by his FBI supervisors. For past media stories on this with links to original sources, click here, here, and here. Mr. Wright is one of the FBI a gents who approached renowned attorney David Schippers just weeks before 9/11 to warn that a major terrorist attack was going to take place in lower Manhattan. For more, click here.

New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11

2005-03-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/politics/27exodus.html?ex=1269579600&en=e2d... In the frenzied days after Sept. 11, 2001, when some flights were still grounded , dozens of well-connected Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, manag ed to leave the United States on specially chartered flights. Newly released gov ernment records show previously undisclosed flights ... and point to a more acti ve role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in t heir departure. The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to le ave the country without first being interviewed. The material ... provides detai ls about the F.B.I.'s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the d eparting Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden. In several ... cases, Saudi tra velers were not interviewed before departing the country, and F.B.I. officials s ought to determine how what seemed to be lapses had occurred. "From these docume nts, [the Saudi interviews that did occur] look like they were courtesy chats, w ithout the time that would have been needed for thorough debriefings," said Chri stopher J. Farrell, who is ... a former counterintelligence interrogator for the Army. "It seems as if the F.B.I. was more interested in achieving diplomatic su ccess than investigative success." The F.B.I. documents left open the possibilit y that some departing Saudis had information relevant to the Sept. 11 investigat ion. Note: For lots more crucial, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Inspector General Rebukes F.B.I. over Espionage Case and Firing of Whistle-Blowe r 2005-01-15, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F60F15F73F5C0C768DDDA... The F.B.I. has failed to aggressively investigate accusations of espionage again st a translator at the bureau and fired the translator's co-worker in large part for bringing the accusations, the Justice Department's inspector general conclu ded. In a long-awaited report that the Justice Department sought for months to k eep classified, the inspector general issued a sharp rebuke to the F.B.I. over i ts handling of claims of espionage and ineptitude made by Sibel Edmonds, a burea u translator who was fired in 2002 after superiors deemed her conduct "disruptiv e." The report [came] from the office of Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department's inspector general. Mr. Fine's investigation found that many of Ms. Edmonds's ac cusations "were supported, that the F.B.I. did not take them seriously enough an d that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the F.B.I.' s decision to terminate her services." Ms. Edmonds's case has become a cause clbre for critics who accused the bureau of retaliating against her and other whistle -blowers who have sought to expose management problems related to the campaign a gainst terrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union joined her cause earlier th is week, asking an appellate court to reinstate a whistle-blower lawsuit she bro ught against the government. The suit was dismissed last year after Attorney Gen eral John Ashcroft, invoking a rarely used power, declared her case to be a matt er of "state secret" privilege, and the Justice Department retroactively classif ied a 2002 Congressional briefing about it. Note: What this article completely fails to mention is that Ms. Edmonds has clai med repeatedly that she has key information revealing major corruption related t o 9/11. For a highly revealing report written by Ms. Edmonds to the 9/11 Commiss ion chairman, click here. Another highly revealing article is available here. Th e Times link above requires payment. To view the above article free, click here.

A Hidden Story Behind Sept. 11? One Man's Ad Campaign Says So 2004-11-08, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/nyregion/08ads.html?ex=1257656400&en=730dbc... The grainy 30-second commercials ... suggest a government cover-up of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The advertisements, which ran repeatedly ... on several cable networks, including CNN, Fox News and ESPN, offer a Web site, an address and a phone number. The ads are the latest salvo from James W. Walter ... who over the years has financed programs promoting voter registration in low-income neighbor hoods and prison reform. The television commercials, as well as ads in magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The D aily News, are part of a $3 million national campaign paid for by Mr. Walter in an effort to press for the reopening of the investigation by the independent Sep t. 11 commission. "We've never gotten solid answers on why Tower 7 collapsed whe n it was two full blocks away from where the planes hit," he said. "We've also n ever received an answer for how such a large plane left such a small hole in the side of the Pentagon." A Zogby poll of New Yorkers' opinions about the 9/11 inv estigation, released last month, indicated that 49 percent of New York City resi dents and 41 percent of New York state residents believed that some federal offi cials "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001 , and that they consciously failed to act." The poll also found that 66 percent of New York City residents and 56 percent of state residents wanted a fuller inv estigation of the "still unanswered questions." Note: For lots more reliable information suggesting a major cover-up of 9/11, cl ick here.

The Pakistan connection 2004-07-22, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1266520,00.html There is evidence of foreign intelligence backing for the 9/11 hijackers. Why is the US government so keen to cover it up? Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, is waiting to be hanged in Pakistan for a murder he almost certainly d idn't commit - of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. Both th e US government and Pearl's wife have since acknowledged that Sheikh was not res ponsible. Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of Gene ral Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) , wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Wa shington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White H ouse, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then h ead of the CIA. Why hasn't the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in co urt? [Another] witness is Sibel Edmonds ... former FBI translator of intelligenc e. She tried to blow the whistle on the cover-up of intelligence that names some of the culprits who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, but is now under two gagging orders that forbid her from testifying in court or mentioning the names of the people or the countries involved. The FBI, illegally, [also] continues to refuse the to release of their agent Robert Wright's 500-page manuscript Fatal Betraya ls of the Intelligence Mission, and has even refused to turn the manuscript over to Senator Shelby, vice-chairman of the joint intelligence committee charged wi th investigating America's 9/11 intelligence failures. Note: The above article was written by Michael Meacher, who served as the U.K. M

inster of Environment from 1997 to 2003. For lots more reliable information sugg esting a major cover-up around 9/11, click here.

NORAD had drills of jets as weapons 2004-04-18, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defen se Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimagin able at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and c ause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise ... the target was the Pentagon but that drill was not run aft er Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say. N ORAD, in a written statement, confirmed that such hijacking exercises occurred. "Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked air craft," the statement said. "These exercises tested track detection and identifi cation; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agen cy coordination and operational security and communications security procedures. " On April 8, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks heard testimony from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that the White House didn't anti cipate hijacked planes being used as weapons. President Bush said ... "Nobody in our government ... could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a mas sive scale." One operation, planned in July 2001 ... involved planes from airpor ts in Utah and Washington state that were "hijacked." NORAD officials have ackno wledged that "scriptwriters" for the drills included the idea of hijacked aircra ft being used as weapons. "Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the scriptwriters to invoke creativity and broaden the required response," Maj. Gen. Craig McKinley, a NORAD official, told the 9/11 commission. Note: This highly revealing news was reported on the front page of USA Today, ye t no other major media even picked up the story. Why? For lots more, click here and here.

This war on terrorism is bogus (by past U.K. Minister of Environment) 2003-09-06, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1036571,00.html At least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Tw o senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation. The li st they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested. In November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida an d Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly e nough. The BBC reported [that] a former Pakistan foreign secretary was told by s enior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Zacarias Mo ussaoui ... was arrested in August 2001. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, t hat Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers. US agents ... sou ght a warrant to search his computer. They were turned down by the FBI. [A] PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document ... which said the US must "discourage a dvanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership". The document also c alls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total cont rol of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet. It also hints that th e US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genoty pes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politic

ally useful tool". The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the " global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pav e the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built a round securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whol e project. Note: This is one of the very few articles recommended as a must read. Michael M eacher was the U.K. Minister of Environment from May 1997 to June 2003. Mr. Meac her lays out a wealth of highly revealing information backed by reliable sources . To confirm most of his statements on our 9/11 timeline, click here. Mr. Meache r's cliams were reported on BBC News, as well, though the BBC mentioned amazingl y little on his claims of U.S. involvement in 9/11. To see the BBC article click here.

Fearing Harm, bin Laden Kin Fled From U.S. 2001-09-30, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60F14F63F590C738FDDA00894D94... In the first days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Saudi Ara bia supervised the urgent evacuation of 24 members of Osama bin Laden's extended family from the United States, fearing that they might be subjected to violence . Most of Mr. bin Laden's relatives were attending high school and college. They are among the 4,000 Saudi students in the United States. King Fahd, the ailing Saudi ruler, sent an urgent message to his embassy here saying there were "bin L aden children all over America" and ordered, "Take measures to protect the innoc ents," the ambassador said. The young members of the bin Laden clan were driven or flown under F.B.I. supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then t o Washington from where they left the country on a private charter plane when ai rports reopened three days after the attacks. A majority of the men who hijacked four airliners in the attacks carried Saudi passports. Surprisingly, Osama bin Laden was not a stranger even to a royal family member like Prince Bandar. In th e early 1980's, bin Laden came to greet the prince and thank him for helping to build the coalition that fought against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Mr . bin Laden is one of 52 children of a Yemeni-born migrant who made a vast fortu ne building roads and palaces in Saudi Arabia. Note: Should the above link fail to function, click here. For a Boston Globe art icle on this key topic, click here. For more detailed information which both the Times and Globe neglected to report, click here.

Bin Laden comes home to roost 1998-08-24, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101 At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply define d, this is the term describing an agent, an operative or an operation that has t urned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the pe rsonification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow. There are ti mes when the United States, faced with ... moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists i n Afghanistan during the 1980s ... was one of those times. Bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who ... has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests. Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as ... the MA K - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afgh

an war. MAK was nurtured by Pakistan s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow s occupation. The CIA ... had conclusive evidence by the mid-19 80s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director Robert Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top ad visors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technolog ical capabilities. Given that context, a decision was made to provide America s po tential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of h ow to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a super power. That decision is coming home to roost. Note: The #2 man (who later became #1) at the CIA acknowledges that the CIA dece ived the president in order to forward its own confrontational objectives. How o ften do you think this might happen? Who's really in charge here? For a highly r evealing documentary titled "Secrets of the CIA," click here.

Was 9/11 a conspiracy? Truthers' make their case 2009-11-26, The Globe and Mail (One of Toronto's leading newspapers) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/was-911-a-conspiracy-truthers-make-t... Though rarely shown on TV these days ... 9/11 footage is replayed more than once in "The Unofficial Story" [on the CBC News program the fifth estate]. The docum entary follows up on some fairly startling public-opinion polls of late. To wit: More than half of all Americans believe the Bush administration had advance kno wledge of 9/11, and did nothing to stop it; slightly more than one-third of the Canadian population believes likewise. The number of people who believe the U.S. government was involved in the attacks appears to be growing, says fifth estate v eteran Bob McKeown, who helms the report. Most of them believe there are still qu estions that have gone unanswered. Among the group's more prominent proponents is Richard Gage, a well-regarded architect interviewed by McKeown in the program. Gage is fervent in his belief that the destruction was intentional, and was not accomplished with airplanes, but with explosives. Also speaking out for the Trut hers movement is academic and Nobel Peace Prize nominee David Ray Griffin who qu estions the lack of NORAD response after the first plane struck the tower and Ca nadian professor Kee Dewdney, who insists the fabled on-board struggle between h ijackers and passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 could only be a hoax. The re ally interesting thing to me is that you cannot get these people to speculate, ob serves McKeown. They will say, That is not my job.' Note: Watch this first-ever North American major media network news documentary on the 9/11 truth movement by clicking here. And for what may be the best ever d ocumentary on 9/11 for opening people's eyes, click here.

Who s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds? 2009-11-01, The American Conservative http://amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/0000 Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi trans lator for the FBI five days after 9/11. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a memb er of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior gov ernment officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sal es, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. On Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. PHILIP GIRALDI: You map

out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congr ess and agents of foreign governments. So the network starts with a person like [Marc] Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turki sh and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who t hen provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies? EDMON DS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in t he Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of tho se Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensi tive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chroni c gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were goin g through divorces. Note: Sibel Edmonds is the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coali tion. For lots more on her key testimony, click here. Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer and The American Conservative s Deep Background columnist. An ever in creasing number of people are waking up to the truth of 9/11.

Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain cov ering it up to continue war on terror? 2009-09-11, Daily Mail (One of the UK's largest-circulation newspapers) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seve... [President] Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find [Osama bin Laden ]. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special for ces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror. Th is new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff? Wha t if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Weste rn allies to stir up support for the war on terror? Incredibly, this is the brea thtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts. Still more questions have been raised with t he publication in America and Britain of a book called Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? Written by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, ... it is provoking shock waves - for it goes into far more detail about his su pposed death and suggests there has been a cover-up by the West. The book claims that Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on December 13, 2 001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with Waziristan. His burial took place within 24 hours, in line with Muslim religious rules, and in an unmarked grave, which is a Wahhabi custom. The author insists that the many Bin Laden tapes made since that date have been concocted by the We st to make the world believe Bin Laden is alive. Could it be that, for years, he 's just been smoke and mirrors? Note: Hundreds of scholars, officials and professionals have raised questions ab out bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and other aspects of the official conspiracy about the events of 9/11. Click here and here to read their concerns.

Explosive Theory 2009-09-09, MetroActive (Silicon Valley's leading weekly newspaper)

http://www.metroactive.com/metro/09.09.09/cover-0936.html Just a few years ago Ed Munyak, a fire protection engineer for the city of San J ose, seemed like a lonely, out-there figure, a sometimes-target because of his o utspoken position on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. These days, hundreds of other building trade professionals have joined him in challenging the official narrat ive about the collapse of three buildings at New York's World Trade Center (WTC) on that fateful, traumatic day. Munyak, of Los Altos Hills, is a mechanical and fire engineer whose job is to review building plans to ensure they comply with the California Building and Fire Code. In 2007, after speaking out on his own fo r a few years, Munyak signed on with a then-fledging organization called Archite cts and Engineers for 911 Truth, founded by Bay Area architect Richard Gage. Tod ay, far from being isolated, Munyak now counts as allies 804 professional archit ects and building engineers from around the country. Collectively, they have joi ned Munyak's call for an independent technical investigation of the causes of th e WTC buildings collapse. In doing so, they reject the federal government's conc lusions that two airplanes alone brought the buildings down without the aid of pre -planted explosives. Munyak and his fellow AE911 supporters recently received ac knowledgement from the FBI's counterterrorism division, which concluded that the organization's core evidence deserves and will get FBI scrutiny. In a letter, Deput y Director Michael J. Heimbach assessed AE911's presentation as "backed by thoro ugh research and analysis." Note: WantToKnow Team member David Ray Griffin has just published a detailed cri tique of the fraudulent "science" in the latest government publication defending the official account of the collapse of WTC 7.

The 9/11 Commission and Torture 2009-03-14, Newsweek Magazine http://www.newsweek.com/id/189251 Powerful Democrats on Capitol Hill are clamoring for creation of a bipartisan "9 /11 style" commission to investigate the legality of the Bush administration's a ntiterrorism tactics especially its use of harsh interrogation techniques. The cas e for a "truth" commission was bolstered by the disclosure this month that the C IA had destroyed 92 videotapes of the interrogations and confinement of Al Qaeda suspects. A dozen showed the use of ... torture. Lawmakers say the obvious mode l for such an inquiry would be the 9/11 Commission. [But] the commission appears to have ignored obvious clues throughout 2003 and 2004 that its account of the 9/11 plot and Al Qaeda's history relied heavily on information obtained from det ainees who had been subjected to torture, or something not far from it. The [Com mission] raised no public protest over the CIA's interrogation methods. In fact, the Commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions. That has troubling implications for the cr edibility of the commission's final report. In intelligence circles, testimony o btained through torture is typically discredited; research shows that people wil l say anything under threat of intense physical pain. Former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat on the commission, told me last year he had long feared that the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda detainee s who were physically coerced into talking. Kerrey said it might take "a permane nt 9/11 commission" to end the remaining mysteries of September 11. Note: For key statements by hundreds of respected scholars and professionals que stioning the accuracy of the 9/11 Commission's report, click here.

Bruce Ivins Wasn't the Anthrax Culprit

2008-08-05, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121789293570011775.html Over the past week the media was gripped by the news that the FBI was about to c harge Bruce Ivins, a leading anthrax expert, as the man responsible for the anth rax letter attacks in September/October 2001. But despite the seemingly powerful narrative that Ivins committed suicide because investigators were closing in, t his is still far from a shut case. The FBI needs to explain why it zeroed in on Ivins, how he could have made the anthrax mailed to lawmakers and the media, and how he (or anyone else) could have pulled off the attacks, acting alone. The sp ores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the i nstitute. The product contained essentially pure spores. The particle size was 1 .5 to 3 microns in diameter. There are several methods used to produce anthrax t hat small. But most of them require milling the spores to a size small enough th at it can be inhaled into the lower reaches of the lungs. In this case, however, the anthrax spores were not milled. They were also tailored to make them potent ially more dangerous. The spores were coated with a polyglass which tightly boun d hydrophilic silica to each particle. Each particle was given a weak electric c harge, thereby causing the particles to repel each other at the molecular level. This made it easier for the spores to float in the air, and increased their ret ention in the lungs. In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case f ar exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program.

9/11 Commission Chief's Ties to White House 2008-03-08, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/they-knew-but-did-nothing/2008/03/07/1204780... The members of Mike Hurley's [9/11 Commisson investigative] team were ... alarme d by the revelations, week by week, month by month, of how close the commission' s chief director, Philip Zelikow, was to Rice and others at the White House. The y learned early on about Zelikow's work on the Bush transition team in 2000 and early 2001, and about how much antipathy there was between him and ["Counterterr orism Czar"] Richard Clarke. They heard the stories about Zelikow's role in deve loping the "pre-emptive war" strategy at the White House in 2002. Zelikow's frie ndships with Rice and others were a particular problem for Warren Bass, since Ri ce and Clarke were at the heart of his part of the investigation. It was clear t o some members of team that they could not have an open discussion in front of Z elikow about Rice and her performance as National Security Adviser. For Hurley's team, there was a reverse problem with Clarke. It was easy to talk about Clarke in Zelikow's presence, as long as the conversation centred on Clarke's failings at the NSC and his purported dishonesty. Long before Bass had seen Clarke's fil es, Zelikow made it clear to the team's investigators that Clarke should not be believed, that his testimony would be suspect. He argued that Clarke was a bragg art who would try to rewrite history to justify his errors and slander his enemi es, Rice in particular. Note: This critique of the close ties to the White House of Philip Zelikow, Exec utive Director of the 9/11 Commission, is an excerpt from Philip Shenon's new bo ok, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. For an eve n deeper analysis of the Commission's failings, read WantToKnow.info team member David Ray Griffin's book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions .

RUDY, INTERRUPTED 2007-05-29, MSNBC http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/05/29/206666.aspx On what should [have been] a happy day of fundraising in the four boroughs of Ne w York City ... for Rudy Giuliani's 63rd birthday, a few protestors ruined his f irst event. At City Island's Sea Shore Restaurant in the Bronx, a young woman na med Sabrina approached the Mayor with a prepared question, reading it word for w ord off of a notepad. "You reported to Peter Jennings on 9/11 that the World Tra de Center towers were going to collapse. No steel structure in history has ever collapsed due to fire. How come the people in the buildings weren't notified and who else knew about this? How do you sleep at night?" Matthew Lepaceak, who sto od on the other side of Giuliani, joined in. "But you said on ABC video with Pet er Jennings in an interview that you were aware the towers were going to collaps e in advance. Who told you the towers were going to collapse in advance, sir?" D uring this time, Giuliani had an incredulous look on his face, completely caught off guard. The statement they were referring to is from a phoner Giuliani had w ith Jennings. "We set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street which was right there with the police commissioner and the fire commissioner, the head of emergency m anagement, and we were operating out of there when we were told the World Traded Center was going to collapse." After being interrupted again, Giuliani responde d with an explanation. "Our understanding was that over a long period of time, t he way other buildings collapse, the towers could collapse. Meaning over a seven -, eight-, nine-, ten-hour period. No one that I knew of had any idea that they would implode. That was a complete surprise." Note: To view a video clip of Rudy Giuliani describing how he was told of the To wers' collapse ahead of time, click here. To watch him deny what he said on this clip, watch this one. When so many have said no one could have predicted the fa ll of the towers, how is it that Giuliani knew otherwise -- and then denied ever knowing it?

Call to reopen Oklahoma bomb case 2007-03-02, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/6275147.stm The FBI man in charge of collecting evidence from the government building destro yed by the Oklahoma bomb has called for the case to be reopened. Former deputy a ssistant director Danny Coulson ... said a federal grand jury is now needed to f ind out what really happened. He argues this is the only way to prove whether ot her people were involved in the bombing in a wider conspiracy beyond Timothy McV eigh and Terry Nichols. Mr Coulson spent 31 years in the FBI. Between 1991 and 1 997 he was the deputy assistant director of the Criminal Division of the FBI in Washington, responsible for all violent crime cases in the United States. Mr Cou lson said there were some "very strong indicators" that other people were involv ed with Timothy McVeigh. The FBI interviewed 24 people who claimed to have seen McVeigh in Oklahoma City with someone else on the morning of the attack, yet the only known accomplice of McVeigh, Terry Nichols, was at home in Kansas over 200 miles away on that day. The FBI's investigation concluded that the eyewitnesses were unreliable. However, Danny Coulson says they were "extremely credible" and had no reason to make it up. "If only one person had seen it, or two of three, but 24?" he said. "I know FBI headquarters told [agents] to close down the inves tigation in Elohim City which has some very significant connections to Mr McVeig h. "Never in my career did I have FBI headquarters tell me not to investigate so mething." Last December a US Congressional report found no conclusive evidence o f a wider conspiracy, but the report concluded that "questions remain unanswered and mysteries remain unsolved."

Note: Don't miss a highly revealing four-minute video-clip showing live media co verage of the Oklahoma City bomb available here. The official story is that one truck with a huge bomb was parked in front of the Oklahoma City federal building and only Timothy McVeigh and his partner were involved. The news footage proves that others must have been involved, as multiple unexploded bombs were recovere d from points inside the building. Yet none of this was questioned in later test imony.

The 9/11 Truth Movement's Dangers 2006-12-10, CBS News/The Nation http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/08/opinion/main2242387.shtml Tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in t he murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens. The government these Americans susp ect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: wea pons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. The Truth Movemen t's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed document ary "Loose Change." It's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Comple menting "Loose Change" are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers a nd scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of th ese academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young Un iversity physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that se rve as the movement's canon. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt. For the Administrat ion, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of boun Bush would only ds. Of course, the ommission report was something of a whitewash be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses, and ... a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer b efore the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda's plotting ... was now here mentioned in the report. It's hard to blame people for thinking we're not g etting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the p ress has largely failed to point out this simple truth. Note: Though this article belittles the 9/11 movement, there is abundant evidenc e to support the claim that the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash and the attacks may have been orchestrated. For more, click here.

9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon 2006-08-02, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR20060801013... Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pe ntagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public. Suspi cion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meetin g at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the J ustice Department for criminal investigation. Staff members and some commissione rs thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to bel ieve that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false state ments to Congress and to the commission. Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey R epublican governor who led the commission [said], "It was just so far from the t ruth." In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine r eports aspects of the commission debate...and publishes lengthy excerpts from mi litary audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night. For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided

inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and me dia appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickl y, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington. In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD 's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military ne ver had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights. Note: Why didn't they report this in the media when the 9/11 report was issued?

9/11 Attacks: Avoiding the hard questions 2006-02-01, Miami Herald http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/robert_steinback/1376072... Our nation was irretrievably transformed by 9/11 -- and yet there remain troubli ng questions about what really happened. Why did building WTC-7 fall, though no aircraft struck it? Fire alone had never before caused a steel skyscraper to col lapse. Why did no U.S. military jet intercept the wayward aircraft? Why has ther e been no investigation of BBC reports that five of the alleged 9/11 hijackers w ere alive and accounted for after the event? A group of experts and academicians devoted to applying the principles of scientific reasoning to the available evi dence [and] 'letting the chips fall where they may,' last week accused the gover nment of covering up evidence that the three destroyed New York City buildings w ere brought down that day by controlled demolition rather than structural failur e. The group, called Scholars for 9/11 Truth, has a website, www.st911.org. Note: This article is also available at http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0201 -28.htm

Why did the 9/11 Commission ignore "Able Danger"? 2005-11-17, Wall Street Journal Article by Former FBI Director Louis Freeh http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007559 The Able Danger intelligence, if confirmed, is undoubtedly the most relevant fac t of the entire post-9/11 inquiry. Even the most junior investigator would immed iately know that the name and photo ID of Atta in 2000 is precisely the kind of tactical intelligence the FBI has many times employed to prevent attacks. Yet th e 9/11 Commission inexplicably concluded that it "was not historically significa nt." This astounding conclusion -- in combination with the failure to investigat e Able Danger and incorporate it into its findings -- raises serious challenges to the commission's credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render t he commission historically insignificant itself. The Able Danger team had identi fied Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers by mid-2000 but were prevented by milit ary lawyers from giving this information to the FBI. The Pentagon...blocked seve ral military officers from testifying...about the Able Danger program. The chair man of the 9/11 Commission reacted to Able Danger with the standard Washington P R approach. [He] demanded that the Pentagon conduct an "investigation" to evalua te the "credibility" of Col. Shaffer and Capt. Phillpott. The final 9/11 Commiss ion report...concluded that "American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks." This now looks to be embarrassingly wrong. T he Joint Intelligence Committees should reconvene and, in addition to Able Dange r team members, we should have the 9/11 commissioners appear as witnesses so the families can hear their explanation why this doesn't matter.

Senators Accuse Pentagon of Obstructing Inquiry on Sept. 11 Plot 2005-09-22, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/politics/22intel.html?ex=1285041600&en=be75... Senators from both parties accused the Defense Department on Wednesday of obstru cting an investigation into whether a highly classified intelligence program kno wn as Able Danger did indeed identify Mohamed Atta and other future hijackers as potential threats well before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The comp laints came after the Pentagon blocked several witnesses from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a public hearing on Wednesday. The only testim ony provided by the Defense Department came from a senior official who would say only that he did not know whether the claims were true. But members of the pane l, led by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said they regarded as credible assertions by current and former officers in the program. The office rs have said they were prevented by the Pentagon from sharing information about Mr. Atta and others with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Pentagon has a cknowledged that at least five members of Able Danger have said they recall a ch art produced in 2000 that identified Mr. Atta, who became the lead hijacker in t he Sept. 11 plot, as a potential terrorist.

Military Bars 9/11 Intel Testimony 2005-09-21, CBS/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/21/terror/main871800.shtml The Department of Defense forbade a military intelligence officer to testify Wed nesday about a secret military unit that the officer says identified four Sept. 11 hijackers as terrorists more than a year before the attacks, according to the man's attorney. The Judiciary Committee was hearing testimony about the work of a classified unit code named "Able Danger." Zaid, appearing on behalf of Shaffe r and contractor John Smith [stated] that Able Danger, using data mining techniq ues, identified four of the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, 2001 - including mastermind Mohamed Atta. "At least one chart, and possibly more, featured a phot ograph of Mohamed Atta," Zaid said. Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department sp okesman, said Wednesday that open testimony would not be appropriate. "There's n othing more to say than that," Swiergosz said. "It's not possible to discuss the Able Danger program because there are security concerns." Zaid also charged tha t records associated with the unit were destroyed during 2000 and March 2001, an d copies were destroyed in spring 2004. Former members of the Sept. 11 commissio n have dismissed the "Able Danger" assertions.

London Bombings: Strange Coincidences Raise Serious Questions 2005-07-13, BBC/MSNBC/London Times/More http://www.WantToKnow.info/050713londonbombingcoverup At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a compan y of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off prec isely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have th e hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now. -- Former Scotland Yard Of ficial Peter Power on BBC Radio, 7/7/05 (the day of the bombings) "The explosives appear to be of military origin, which is very worrying," said C hristophe Chaboud, head of the French Anti-Terrorism Coordination Unit and one o f five top officials sent by Paris to London immediately after Thursday's attack s. -- Reuters, 7/11/05 A SINGLE bombmaker using high-grade military explosives is believed to be respon

sible for building the four devices that killed more than 50 people last week. S imilar components from the explosive devices have been found at all four murder sites, leading detectives to believe that each of the 10lb rucksack bombs was th e work of one man. They also believe that the materials used were not home made but sophisticated military explosives. -- London Times, 7/12/05 Translator Jacob Keryakes, who said that a copy of the message was later posted on a secular Web site, noted that the claim of responsibility contained an error in one of the Quranic verses it cited. That suggests that the claim may be phon y. "This is not something al-Qaida would do." he said. - MSNBC News, 7/7/05

Court Dismisses FBI Contractor's Suit Against U.S. 2005-05-07, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR20050506018... A federal appeals court rejected a fired FBI contractor's bid to revive her laws uit against the government. Sibel Edmonds said she was fired from her job as a w iretap translator because she told superiors she suspected that a co-worker was leaking information to targets of an ongoing FBI investigation. The FBI said it fired her because she committed security violations and disrupted the office. Th e Justice Department's inspector general said Edmonds's allegations about a cowo rker "raised serious concerns that, if true, could potentially have extremely da maging consequences for the FBI." Note: This article doesn't even mention 9/11, yet Ms. Edmonds has stated publicl y that her testimony would put top government officials behind bars for their ro le in blocking information which could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. For more e ye-opening information, click here and here. Read Ms. Edmond's open letter to th e chairman of the 9/11 Commission to find out what key people in government don' t want you to know about her testimony. See also her excellent website http://ww w.justacitizen.com She was also instrumental in forming a National Security Whi stleblowers Coalition.

Lost in Translation: How Bush Interpreter Got Through Security 2005-02-22, Wall Street Journal (Article on website founder Fred Burks) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110901231065260117,00.html?mod=todays_us_p... Frederick Burks believes in UFOs, communes with dolphins, [and] runs a Web site that promotes conspiracy theories about U.S. complicity in the 9/11 attacks. And , until last October, he had the ear of the world's most powerful man ... George W. Bush. When President Bush traveled to Bali for a meeting with President Mega wati in October 2003 ... [Karen] Brooks, then the National Security Council's In donesia expert, says she personally requested that he get the job because he was so good and "Megawati loved him." Now Mr. Burks has popped up in Jakarta as a s tar witness for the defense in the terrorism trial of a fundamentalist Islamic c leric. Speaking to the Jakarta court in fluent Indonesian, Mr. Burks described a secret 2002 meeting between a U.S. presidential envoy and Indonesia's then pres ident, Megawati Sukarnoputri. Mr. Burks's testimony, delivered last month in a s outh Jakarta court, turned the former White House interpreter ... into a nationa l celebrity here in Indonesia. While working as Mr. Bush's Indonesian-language i nterpreter, Mr. Burks set up several Web sites, including momentoflove.org, webo flove.org and WantToKnow.info. After 9/11, he began collecting and then posting documents he believes show that parts of the U.S. government knew an attack was coming and may even have been complicit in its execution. "I'm sometimes labeled a conspiracy theorist, but I'm not," he says. "I'm someone who can handle dark energy, the really ugly things that are going on behind the scenes, without gett

ing too upset." Note: This article surprisingly was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal . The above link requires payment to read the full article. To read it free and learn much more, click here.

FAA Managers Destroyed 9/11 Tape 2004-05-06, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A6892-200... Six air traffic controllers provided accounts of their communications with hijac ked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, on a tape recording that was later destroyed by Fe deral Aviation Administration managers. It is unclear what information was on th e tape because no one ever listened to, transcribed or duplicated it. The FAA .. . said it took disciplinary action against the employee who destroyed the tape b ut declined to elaborate on what kind of action they took. [Earlier, an FAA offi cial incorrectly stated that the agency took action against two employees in the case.] Hours after the [9/11 attacks] an FAA manager at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center gathered six controllers who communicated or tracked two of the hijacked planes and recorded in a one-hour interview their personal accou nts of what occurred. The manager, who is not named in the report, said that his intentions were to provide quick information to federal officials investigating the attack before the air traffic controllers involved took sick leave for the stress of their experiences, as is common practice. A second manager ... destroy ed the tape between December 2001 and January 2002 by crushing the tape with his hand, cutting it into small pieces and depositing the pieces into trash cans ar ound the building. The tape's existence was never made known to federal official s investigating the attack. The New York managers acknowledged that they receive d an e-mail from FAA officials instructing them to retain all materials related to the Sept. 11 attacks. But the managers decided not to include the tape in a N ovember 2001 "Formal Accident Package" report the office prepared. Note: Why on earth wouldn't this most important tape have been included in the F AA's official report. And more importantly, why did someone later destroy it so carefully and thoroughly. For lots more, click here.

The Secret War 2002-10-27, WantToKnow.info/Los Angeles Times http://www.wanttoknow.info/021027latimes The Defense Department is dramatically expanding its 'black world' of covert ope rations. The Bush administration has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "blac k world" to press the war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The incr easingly dominant role of the military ... reflects the desire of Secretary of D efense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of the war on terror. "Ou r task is to find and destroy the enemy before they strike us." Though covert ac tion can bring quick results, because it is isolated from the normal review proc esses it can just as quickly bring mistakes and larger problems. The epicenter o f the Pentagon's covert operations remains the North Carolina-based Joint Specia l Operations Command, often referred to as Delta Force. The super-secret command is still not officially acknowledged to exist. Rumsfeld's influential Defense S cience Board ... recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, a n organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to br ing together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception. This body would launch secret operations aimed at "stim ulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destru

ction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposin g themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces. The Air Force is design ing its own Global Response Task Force ... capable of delivering a "worldwide at tack within an hour." Note: For an amazing expos by a highly decorated U.S. general on the hidden reaso ns behind war, click here.

Federal agency planned plane-crashing-into-building drill [on] Sept. 11 2002-08-22, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-08-22-sept-11-plane-drill-_x.htm In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism it was to be a simulated accident. Officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissanc e Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet w ould crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building. Th e agency is about four miles from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport. "It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve a n aircraft crashing into our facility," [NRO spokesman Art] Haubold said. "As so on as the real world events began, we canceled the exercise." Adding to the coin cidence, American Airlines Flight 77 the Boeing 767 that was hijacked and crashe d into the Pentagon took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 50 minutes be fore the exercise was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64 aboard the plane and 125 on the ground. The National Reconnaissance Office o perates many of the nation's spy satellites. It draws its personnel from the mil itary and the CIA. In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigne d as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement says, "On the mo rning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-pla nned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created i f a plane were to strike a building." Note: For many more disturbing coincindences and outright cover-ups around 9/11, click here. And for yet another amazing "coincidence" surrounding the London bo mbings, click here.

Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases 2001-09-15, WantToKnow.info/Newsweek http://www.WantToKnow.info/010915newsweek U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the a lleged [9/11] hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday s terror attacks r eceived training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s. Three of th e alleged hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registratio ns as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla. known as the Cradle of U.S. Navy Avi ation, according to a high-ranking U.S. Navy source. Another of the alleged hijac kers may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War College in Mon tgomery, Ala., said another high-ranking Pentagon official. The fifth man may ha ve received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex. The five men were on a list of 19 people identified as hijackers by the FBI on Friday. The three foreign nationals training in Pensacola appear to be Saeed Alg hamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who were among the four men who allegedly commandeered U nited Airlines Flight 93. The third man who may have trained in Pensacola, Ahmed Alghamdi, allegedly helped highjack United Airlines Flight 75, which hit the so uth tower of the World Trade Center. NEWSWEEK visited the base early Saturday mo

rning, where military police confirmed that the address housed foreign military flight trainees but denied access past front barricades. Officials at the base c onfirmed that the FBI is investigating the three students. Note: Why would these high-ranking Pentagon officials be making such statements just days after 9/11 if they didn't suspect foul play? Two other hijackers also had possible military connections. For more reliable information on this crucial matter, click here.

Plane Lands In Cleveland; Bomb Feared Aboard 2001-09-11, WCPO - Cincinnati's ABC Affiliate http://www.wcpo.com/specials/2001/americaattacked/news_local/story14.html Reported by: 9News Staff, 9/11/01 11:43:57 AM. A Boeing 767 out of Boston made a n emergency landing Tuesday at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport due to co ncerns that it may have a bomb aboard, said Mayor Michael R. White. White said t he plane had been moved to a secure area of the airport, and was evacuated. Unit ed identified the plane as Flight 93. The airline did say how many people were a board the flight. United said it was also "deeply concerned" about another fligh t, Flight 175, a Boeing 767, which was bound from Boston to Los Angeles. On beha lf of the airline CEO James Goodwin said: "The thoughts of everyone at United ar e with the passengers and crew of these flights. Our prayers are also with every one on the ground who may have been involved. "United is working with all the re levant authorities, including the FBI, to obtain further information on these fl ights," he said. Note: Remember that Flight 93 reportedly crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11, with a ll aboard killed. This story was posted within hours of the 9/11 attacks. Click on the link above and you will see, "This story has been removed from WCPO.com. It was a preliminary AP story, and was factually incorrect." However, using the powerful Internet Archive, you can see the original article here. Click here and you can see the article continued to be posted for all dates through June 2004, and was only removed later. How can this be?

Colorful Outsider Is Named No. 3 at the CIA 2001-03-17, Washington Post http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16570-2001Mar16.html A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, a ... former investment banker ... was named yesterday ex ecutive director of the CIA, bringing a fast-paced management style to the agenc y's No. 3 job. Central Intelligence Agency Director George J. Tenet announced th e appointment, saying he treasures Krongard's "wise counsel and 'no-nonsense' bu siness-like views." Krongard, 64, former head of Alex. Brown & Co., an investmen t bank based in Baltimore, joined the agency three years ago as a counselor to T enet. He switched careers shortly after helping engineer the $2.5 billion merger of Alex. Brown and Bankers Trust New York Corp., gaining $71 million in Bankers Trust stock. Few of his former colleagues were surprised by his decision to tra de a $4 million salary and stock options for the far less remunerative job of Te net's consigliere. A graduate of Princeton and the University of Maryland Law Sc hool, Krongard has a fondness for extreme military-style activities. Even as a b anking executive, he trained with police SWAT teams for recreation and worked ou t with a kung fu master. He maintained a shooting range on the park-like grounds of his home on the northern edge of Baltimore. In an interview yesterday, Krong ard described his past duties as those of a "minister without portfolio" whom se nior managers felt comfortable talking to about "sticky subjects." But Krongard exhibited the requisite secretiveness when asked to explain his interest in inte

lligence and how he came to land a job in Tenet's inner circle. If you go back t o the CIA's origins during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services, he explained, "the whole OSS was really nothing but Wall Street bankers and lawyers ." Note: Buzzy Krongard was the executive director of the CIA on 9/11. His past tie s to the investment firm which placed most of the extraordinarily high volume of "put options" on United and American Airlines stocks the week before the attack s is one of many strange "coincidences" unexplained by the official story of wha t happened on that horrific day. For more on this, click here. To read the entir e article free of charge, click here.

Twin Towers, Twin Myths? 2009-09-17, Santa Barbara Independent (Santa Barbara's leading weekly) http://www.independent.com/news/2009/sep/17/twin-towers-twin-myths One of the crucial technical disputes in American history, perhaps second only t o global warming, is underway. It pits hundreds of government technicians who sa y the World Trade Center buildings were brought down by airplane impact against hundreds of professional architects and building engineers who insist that the T win Towers could never have collapsed solely due to the planes and are calling f or a new independent investigation. It is a fight that is not going away and is likely to get louder as more building trade professionals sign on to one side or the other. Better than anyone, David Ray Griffin understands the enormous import ance of Richard Gage, the Bay Area architect and staunch Republican who founded A rchitects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911 Truth). Griffin, [a] retired Santa Barbara philosophy professor/theologian (Claremont School of Theology), is rega rded as the leading investigative force within what is called the 9/11 Truth mov ement, with seven 9/11 books to his credit, including his bestseller The New Pea rl Harbor. Griffin found his greatest stumbling block in public appearances to b e this question: If his analysis was true that two planes could not have brought down three World Trade Center (WTC) buildings without the aid of pre-planted ex plosives why didn t a single U.S. architect or building engineer publicly support him? Now, in three years, Gage has signed up 804 architects and structural engin eers, some from top firms, who challenge the official version of the buildings co llapses. AE911 Truth has grown rapidly, igniting a struggling grassroots movemen t of hundreds of other 9/11 Truth organizations, and spearheading a growing assaul t on the official story. Note: WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin has just published a thorough deb unking of the latest official explanation of the collapse of three steel-framed skyscrapers at the World Trade Center after two of them were struck by aircraft, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7.

Sheen wants to discuss his 9/11 theories with Obama 2009-09-09, Houston Chronicle (One of Houston's leading newspapers) http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/celebrities/6609335.html Actor Charlie Sheen has written a letter to President Barack Obama requesting a meeting over Sheen's theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The day of Sept. 11, 2001, saw America hit by the worst terrorist atrocities in the country's hi story, including an attack in New York which killed almost 3,000 people. Sheen h as always been outspoken about his views on the attacks, supporting a conspiracy theory that the U.S. government at the time defrauded the public with its offic ial story about the incident. The star has now written to Obama asking him to re open the investigation into 9/11. The note, entitled "20 Minutes With The Presid

ent," is written as a fictional meeting with Obama, in which Sheen urges the lea der to follow through his promises of change, accountability and government tran sparency by using his powers to look into the actions of George W. Bush's previo us administration. Sheen hopes the president will take note of his campaign and grant him a meeting. Note: To watch an excellent six-minute video narrated by Sheen asking hard quest ions to the president, click here. For a powerful summary of many unanswered que stions raised by the official account of 9/11, click here.

Historic Broadcast of "9/11 Press For Truth" 2009-06-06, KBDI-TV (Colorado Public Television station) http://www.kbdi.org/tv_schedule/program_details.cfm?id=120090606210000 Following the attacks of September 11th, a small group of grieving families wage d a tenacious battle against those who sought to bury the truth about the event. In this documentary, six of them including three of the famous 9/11 widows know n as the "Jersey Girls" tell the powerful story of how they took on the greatest powers in Washington, compelling lawmakers to launch an investigation that ulti mately failed to answer most of their questions. The filmmakers collaborated wit h the media group Globalvision to stitch together overlooked news clips, buried stories, and government press conferences, revealing a pattern of official lies, deception, and spin. As a result, a very different picture of 9/11 emerges one that raises new, and more pressing, questions. To mark the film's U.S. broadcast premiere, Executive Producer Kyle Hence, Director Ray Nowosielski, and family m ember Bob McIlvaine who lost his son Bobby in the attacks on New York will be in the KBDI studios to discuss the film throughout the evening. Additionally, volu nteers from Colorado 911 Visibility will be on hand to answer phones. Note: To watch this important, landmark 9/11 documentary, click here. This highl y engaging, well researched film may be the best way yet to open the eyes of tho se who don't know about the major 9/11 cover-up.

Great Day Talks To Architect Richard Gage About 9/11 2009-05-28, KMPH-TV (Fresno, CA Fox Network affiliate) http://www.kmph.com/Global/story.asp?s=10445264 Kim Stephens: He s an architect experienced in steel structures. Now Richard Gage is touring the country with a controversial message about September 11. Kopi Sot iropulos: Richard Gage is here to show us why he s calling for a more thorough inv estigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. First of all g ive us a little bit more about your background. Gage: I m an architect of twenty y ears, a member of the American Institute of Architects, and have been studying s teel frame fire proof buildings for about that long. Kim Stephens: We ask that f or clarification because as we get into this, we want people to make sure that y ou re not just somebody with a wacky idea. You come with some science to you. What is the official reason for the collapse of the World Trade Center towers? Gage: Well we re told that the planes hit the buildings, and there was an explosion and a fire, and about a hour and a half later, in the case of the north tower, the buildings collapsed due to structural weakening, due to the fires. The problem i s that we don t have large gradual deformations associated with collapses. And fir es in high rises have never brought down a steel frame high rise building at all , ever. And what we have, unfortunately, is the evidence in the twin towers and the third skyscraper to collapse that day, which most people don t know anything a bout it. We have the evidence of the ten key features of controlled demolition. In the case of building seven, it collapses straight down into its own footprint

, at free fall speed, in the first hundred feet. It s dropping, as you can see sym metrically, smoothly, at free fall speed, in the first hundred feet. Two and a h alf seconds. This is uncanny, there s forty thousand tons of structural steel desi gned to resist this collapse. Note: The above text is taken from the KMPH interview available here. Richard Ga ge, AIA, is the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Remarkably, this interview, though short, was respectful and evenhanded. No ridicule, no deb unking, no "conspiracy theory" dismissals! To watch a 7-minute video of the inte rview, click on the link above. To read a transcript of the interview, click her e. For an astonishing comment on PBS by the owner of the building's decision to "pull" the building, click here.

Traces of explosives in 9/11 dust, scientists say 2009-04-06, Deseret News (One of Salt Lake City's leading newspapers) http://www.deseretnews.com/article/0,5143,705295677,00.html Tiny red and gray chips found in the dust from the collapse of the World Trade C enter contain highly explosive materials proof, according to a former BYU profes sor, that 9/11 is still a sinister mystery. Physicist Steven E. Jones, who retir ed from Brigham Young University in 2006 after the school recoiled from the cont roversy surrounding his 9/11 theories, is one of nine authors on a paper publish ed last week in the online, peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal. Also li sted as authors are BYU physics professor Jeffrey Farrer and a professor of nano chemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. For several years, Jones h as theorized that pre-positioned explosives, not fires from jet fuel, caused the rapid, symmetrical collapse of the two World Trade Center buildings, plus the c ollapse of a third building, WTC-7. The newest research, according to the journa l authors, shows that dust from the collapsing towers contained a "nano-thermite " material that is highly explosive. A layer of dust lay over parts of Manhattan immediately following the collapse of the towers, and it was samples of this du st that Jones and fellow researchers requested in a 2006 paper, hoping to determ ine "the whole truth of the events of that day." They eventually tested four sam ples they received from New Yorkers. Red/gray chips ... were found in all four d ust samples. The chips were then analyzed using scanning electron microscopy and other high-tech tools. The red layer of the chips, according to the researchers , contains a "highly energetic" form of thermite. Note: For the full text of this path-breaking scientific report, click here. Not e that other major media failed to pick up this important news, though you can w atch a Dutch news report (with English subtitles) on YouTube available here. For more key reports on the cutting-edge research of Prof. Steven Jones, click here .

Former CIA executive pleads guilty to defrauding government 2008-09-30, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-foggo30-2008sep30,0,5681841.story The former No. 3 official at the CIA pleaded guilty Monday to defrauding the gov ernment, closing an investigation that linked the nation's preeminent spy servic e to the corruption scandal involving former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. In ad mitting that he abused his rank to steer lucrative contracts to cronies, Kyle Du stin "Dusty" Foggo, the agency's onetime executive director, became one of the h ighest-ranking officials in CIA history to be convicted of criminal charges. But the deal also involved major concessions from prosecutors, who allowed Foggo to admit guilt to a single fraud charge, wiping out 27 additional counts that incl

uded money laundering and conspiracy. Prosecutors indicated that they would reco mmend he serve no more than 37 months. The revelations of Foggo's crimes surface d two years ago during one of the most tumultuous periods in recent agency histo ry, and added to the pressure on the Bush administration to remove Porter J. Gos s as CIA director in 2006. Goss selected Foggo for the agency's third-ranking po sition. Foggo had never served as a case officer or an analyst -- the jobs that typically garner the most respect within the CIA. But as a procurement officer a t a secret CIA post in Frankfurt, Germany, he was in a position to cultivate con tacts with members of Congress and other influential officials who visited durin g overseas trips to war zones. Note: Interesting that a guilty plea for one count was exchanged for dismissing numerous other charges of fraud and money laundering. For an excellent analysis of the reasons behind this unusual prosecutorial strategy, click here. Buzzy Kro ngard, the previous #3 man at the CIA, has been linked to the millions of dollar s in suspicious stock option trades made just prior to 9/11 that were never clai med, though this received little media coverage.

The truth is out there 2008-06-07, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8d66e778-3128-11dd-ab22-000077b07658.html

When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound th rough the church with some of Kings cadence. A time comes, declares the former US swoman from Georgia, when silence is betrayal. Before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American governm ents war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict ... began on S eptember 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through. According to a show of hands that Fe bruary afternoon, several hundred people in the immaculate church believe this t o be true. They had all come to hear the message of Architects, Engineers & Scie ntists for 9/11 Truth, one of the dozens of [9/11 truth] groups across the US. L ast winter, Investigate 9/11 banners seemed to be popping up all over the place. Bill Clinton was heckled by truthers in Denver while campaigning for his wife. Country mus c star Willie Nelson ... described as naive the notion that the implosion of the Twin Towers was caused by crashing jets. Meanwhile the European Parliament screened t he Italian documentary Zero, in which Gore Vidal, Italian playwright Dario Fo, a nd Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa blame the US government, not al-Qaeda, for 9/11. The following month, Japanese MP Yukihisa Fujita raised his own doubts about th e official story at a seminar in Sydney. A busy season for the 9/11 Truth movement. Note: This extensive story in The Financial Times shows that the 9/11 movement i s having a major impact. For a detailed two-page summary of many questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

9/11 Commission controversy 2008-01-30, NBC News http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx The 9/11 Commission suspected that critical information it used in its ... Repor t was the product of harsh interrogations of al-Qaida operatives - interrogation s that many critics have labeled torture. Yet, commission staffers never questio ned the agency about the interrogation techniques and in fact ordered a second r ound of interrogations specifically to ask additional questions of the same oper atives. Much of what was reported about the planning and execution of the terror attacks on New York and Washington was derived from the interrogations of high-

ranking al-Qaida operatives. Each had been subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques." Some were even subjected to waterboarding. There was a separate, se cond round of interrogations in early 2004, done specifically to answer new ques tions from the Commission, [involving] more than 30 separate interrogation sessi ons. According to both current and former senior U.S. intelligence officials, th e operatives cited by the Commission were subjected to the harshest of the CIA s m ethods, the "enhanced interrogation techniques." The techniques included physica l and mental abuse, exposure to extreme heat and cold, sleep deprivation and wat erboarding. In addition, officials of both the 9/11 Commission and CIA confirm t he Commission specifically asked the agency to push the operatives on a new roun d of interrogations months after their first interrogations. The Commission, in fact, supplied specific questions for the operatives to the agency. This new rou nd took place in early 2004, when the agency was still engaged in the full range of harsh techniques. Note: WantToKnow team member and renowned theologian David Ray Griffin's detaile d exposure of the many lies put forth by the 9/11 Commission is available here. And for a succinct, eye-opening summary of many unanswered questions about the o fficial account of 9/11, click here.

Ex-9/11 Panel Chief Denies Secret White House Ties 2008-01-30, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4218157 The former executive director of the 9/11 Commission denies explosive charges of undisclosed ties to the Bush White House or interference with the panel's repor t. The charges are ... contained in New York Times reporter Philip Shenon's [new ] book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, [and a re] confirmed by the book's publisher. [When] 9/11 Commission co-chairs [Thomas] Kean and Lee Hamilton hired former Condoleezza Rice aide Philip Zelikow to be e xecutive director, Zelikow failed to tell them ... that he was "instrumental" in demoting Richard Clarke, the onetime White House counterterrorism czar. In his book, Shenon also says that while working for the panel, Zelikow appears to have had private conversations with former White House political director Karl Rove, despite a ban on such communication. Shenon reports that Zelikow later ordered his assistant to stop keeping a log of his calls. Zelikow told ABC News he was u nder no prohibition that barred his conversations with Rove, and did not recall asking his assistant to stop logging his calls. Shenon directed calls to his pub lisher, Twelve Books, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group. Cary Goldstein, a spo kesman for Hachette, confirmed the [above] characterization of the book's conten ts, but said he could not confirm direct quotes. "It's not a surprise," Goldstei n said when asked his reaction to the leak of the book's details before its Feb. 5 publication date. "I think people are really curious to see what the report h ad looked like if it hadn't been neutered in [the panel's] effort to be unanimou s." Note: Philip Zelikow co-authored a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, "Catastrophic T errorism: Tackling the New Danger," which warned of a possible catastrophic atta ck on the World Trade Center and accurately predicted the governmental aftermath of 9/11. And a highly significant fact is that before he was selected as Execut ive Director of the 9/11 Commission, he authored the Bush administration's Natio nal Security Strategy of the United States of America for 2002. This document fo r the first time asserted a national policy of pre-emptive war (the "Bush Doctri ne"), and paved the way for the war on Iraq.

Special Operations Prepared for Domestic Missions

2007-06-22, washingtonpost.com http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/06/special_operations_prepar... The U.S. Northern Command, the military command responsible for "homeland defens e," has asked the Pentagon if it can establish its own special operations comman d for domestic missions. The request ... would establish a permanent sub-command for responses to incidents of domestic terrorism as well as other occasions whe re special operators may be necessary on American soil. The establishment of a d omestic special operations mission, and the preparation of contingency plans to employ commandos in the United States, would upend decades of tradition. Militar y actions within the United States are the responsibility of state militias (the National Guard), and federal law enforcement is a function of the FBI. Employin g special operations for domestic missions sounds very ominous, and NORTHCOM's r equest earlier this year should receive the closest possible Pentagon and congre ssional scrutiny. There's only one problem: NORTHCOM is already doing what it ha s requested permission to do. When NORTHCOM was established after 9/11 to be the military counterpart to the Department of Homeland Security, within its headqua rters staff it established a Compartmented Planning and Operations Cell (CPOC) r esponsible for planning and directing a set of "compartmented" and "sensitive" o perations on U.S., Canadian and Mexican soil. In other words, these are the very special operations that NORTHCOM is now formally asking the Pentagon to beef up into a public and acknowledged sub-command.

Osama Flight Shocker 2007-06-21, New York Post http://www.nypost.com/seven/06212007/news/nationalnews/osama_flight_shocker_n... Osama bin Laden was suspected of chartering a plane that carried his family and other Saudis from the United States shortly after 9/11, according to FBI documen ts released yesterday. One FBI document referred to a Ryan Air 727 plane that le ft Los Angeles on Sept. 19, 2001, carrying Saudi nationals. "The plane was chart ered either by the Saudi Arabian royal family or Osama bin Laden," according to the document obtained by Judicial Watch. The flight made stops in Orlando, Washi ngton, D.C. and Boston, and terminated in Paris. Asked about the documents' asse rtion, an FBI spokesman said, "There is no new information here. Osama bin Laden did not charter a flight out of the U.S." Note: To read an excellent article on the implications of this brief report, cli ck here.

FBI Terror Watch List "Out of Control" 2007-06-13, ABC News http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/06/fbi_terror_watc.html A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include mor e than half a million names. Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror. The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified. A por tion of the FBI's unclassified 2008 budget request posted to the Department of J ustice Web site, however, refers to "the entire watch list of 509,000 names." A spokesman for the interagency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which mai ntains the government's list of all suspected terrorists with links to internati onal organizations, said they had 465,000 names covering 350,000 individuals. Ma ny names are different versions of the same identity. In addition to the NCTC li st, the FBI keeps a list of U.S. persons who are believed to be domestic terrori sts - abortion clinic bombers, for example, or firebombing environmental extremi

sts, who have no known tie to an international terrorist group. Combined, the NC TC and FBI compendia comprise the watch list used by federal security screening personnel on the lookout for terrorists. While the NCTC has made no secret of it s terrorist tally, the FBI has consistently declined to tell the public how many names are on its list. "It grows seemingly without control or limitation," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani of the terrorism watch list. Spar apani called the 509,000 figure "stunning. If we have 509,000 names on that list , the watch list is virtually useless," he told ABC News. "You'll be capturing i nnocent individuals with no connection to crime or terror." U.S. lawmakers and t heir spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list.

Claims of 9/11 conspiracy have suspect running scared 2007-05-25, Rocky Mountain News (One of Denver's two leading newspapers) http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5555425,00... A former Federal Emergency Management Agency videographer accused of killing his wife in Denver is seeking political asylum in Argentina, claiming the U.S. gove rnment wants him silenced for what he saw in the smoldering ruins of the Twin To wers after 9/11. Kurt Sonnenfeld's efforts to avoid extradition have gained inte rest from human rights organizations in South America and broad attention from c onspiracy theorists on the Internet. Sonnenfeld, 44, is charged with first-degre e murder in the New Year's Day 2002 shooting death of his 36-year-old wife, Nanc y. Sonnenfeld is quoted by the Argentine newspaper el Pais as saying, "I realize d that they were after something else: the tapes of Ground Zero in my possession ." Sonnenfeld said he was arrested by Interpol agents on the new Denver charges a week after delivering a demo video of 9/11 footage to a TV producer in Argenti na. "I find that extremely coincidental," he said. In other interviews with Arge ntine media, Sonnenfeld is quoted as saying, "What I saw (at 9/11) leads me to t he terrible conclusion that there was foreknowledge of what was going to happen the precautions that were taken to save certain things that the authorities ther e considered irreplaceable or invaluable. For example, certain things were missi ng that could only have been removed with a truck. Yet after the first plane hit one of the towers, everything in Manhattan collapsed and no one could have gott en near the towers to do that." Sonnenfeld is quoted as saying documentation was removed from U.S. intelligence agencies in the World Trade Center, including th e CIA, prior to the attacks. Note: To read a more recent, powerful Voltaire Network interview with Kurt Sonne nfeld, click here. The truth is coming out more all the time!

An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 2007-02-09, The Daily Mail (The U.K.'s second most popular newspaper) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article... A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Am ericans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. Thi s proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story. [The] accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie, [Loose Change, which is] so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched [it]. Why were no military a ircraft scrambled in time to head off the attacks? How could a rookie pilot - as one of the terrorists was - fly a Boeing 757 aircraft so precisely into the Pen tagon? The movie's assertions are being explored by a number of commentators in America and Britain. Former Labour Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher ... has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery." These words were written in a foreword for Prof

essor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour. Griffin ... i s emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a res pected philosopher. Together, the book and the movie have raised the question: c ould the attack be a carbon copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan by Pre sident Kennedy to stage terror attacks in America and blame them on Communist Cu ba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro? Initially ... Pro fessor Griffin dismissed claims the attacks could have been an inside job. It wa s only a year later ... that the professor was sent a 'timeline' on the day's ev ents based entirely on newspaper and television accounts. It was then that he ch anged his mind. Note: The timeline which opened Prof. Griffin's eyes was the two-page 9/11 timel ine from WantToKnow.info available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up. T his is the most supportive article yet by the mainstream media. The word is spre ading. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on 9/11, click here.

'They're all forced to listen to us' 2007-01-26, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1998430,00.html Like it or loathe it, you can't ignore Loose Change ... the most successful movi e to emerge from what followers call the 9/11 Truth Movement. They believe ... t hat the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 2001 were [the work o f] of elements within the US government. Recent polls suggest more than a third of Americans believe that either the official version of events never happened, or that US officials knew the attacks were imminent, but did nothing to stop the m. Google Video acts as a portal for the movie. The running tally of the number of times it has been viewed since last August ... stands at 4,048,990. On top of that, the movie was shown on television to up to 50 million people in 12 countr ies on September 11 last year; 100,000 DVDs have been sold and 50,000 more given away free. The film gained airplay on old media platforms such as Air America a nd Pacifica radio stations, local Fox TV outlets and on stations around the worl d, including state outlets in Belgium, Ireland and Portugal. The power of the fi lm is that it lays down layer upon layer of seemingly rational analysis to end u p with a conclusion many would find incredible. It is compiled from original foo tage from numerous news sources. Yet to come [is] Loose Change: the Final Cut, [ which] filmed original interviews with Washington players, employed lawyers to i ron out copyright issues with borrowed footage, [and] commissioned 3D graphics f rom Germany. The end result ... will be seen at Cannes and have a cinema release in America and across the world on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. Note: To view this highly revealing 9/11 documentary, click here. For an abundan ce of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.

'State secrets privilege' blocks fired translator from suing FBI 2006-11-24, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-23-whistleblower-translator_x... Sibel Edmonds, who formed the 100-plus member National Security whistle-blowers Coalition in 2002, began working as a linguist for the FBI the week after the Se pt. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. Several months into her contract, she discovered "shoddy" translations relevant to 9/11 created by translators who had "failed t he proficiency exams." Edmonds says the translator was sent to Guantanamo Bay to translate "the most sensitive terrorist-related information" from interviews of detainees. Edmonds also notified her superiors that a co-worker was responsible for translating wiretaps of a company the latter used to work for. [Edmonds] wa

s fired in March 2002. When Edmonds asked why, she received a letter saying her contract had been "terminated completely for the government's convenience." In i ts final report, the inspector general concluded that "we believe that many of ( Edmonds') allegations were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously e nough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in th e FBI's decision to terminate her services." The same month the report was relea sed, Edmonds' lawsuit to contest her firing was dismissed. Legal briefs show the government had invoked the so-called state secrets privilege, arguing that the lawsuit would jeopardize national security. "Instead of protecting and standing up for whistle-blowers, this is just giving the complete green light to retaliat e," says Edmonds, who lost her appeal. Note: This article fails to mention that Edmonds has repeatedly stated in public forums and in the press that she has specific information on the involvement of certain high officials in 9/11. For more on this vital topic, click here.

Senior Government Officials Question 9/11 Commission Report 2006-09-11, Boston Globe/Fox News/Wall Street Journal, More http://www.WantToKnow.info/officialsquestion911commissionreport Many respected senior members of the U.S. military, intelligence services, and g overnment have expressed significant criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report. So me even allege government complicity in the terrible acts of 9/11. Below are the highly revealing statements on this vital topic of over 50 prominent public ser vants with links for verification and further investigation. The collective voic es of these respected senior officials give credibility to the claim that the 9/ 11 Commission Report is tragically flawed. These dedicated individuals from both political parties cannot be simply dismissed as irresponsible believers in some 9/11 conspiracy theory. Their sincere concern, backed by decades of service to their country, demonstrate that criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report is not o nly reasonable and responsible, it is in fact a patriotic duty.

Bin Laden, Most Wanted For Embassy Bombings? 2006-08-28, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR20060827006... Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is a longtime and prominent member of the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list, which notes his role as the suspected mastermind of the deadly U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa on Aug. 7, 1998. But another more in famous date -- Sept. 11, 2001 -- is nowhere to be found on the same FBI notice. The curious omission underscores the Justice Department's decision, so far, to n ot seek formal criminal charges against bin Laden for approving al-Qaeda's most notorious and successful terrorist attack. The notice says bin Laden is "a suspe ct in other terrorist attacks throughout the world" but does not provide details . The absence has also provided fodder for conspiracy theorists who think the U. S. government or another power was behind the Sept. 11 hijackings. From this poi nt of view, the lack of a Sept. 11 reference suggests that the connection to alQaeda is uncertain. FBI officials say the wanted poster merely reflects the gove rnment's long-standing practice of relying on actual criminal charges. Bin Laden was placed on the Ten Most Wanted list in June 1999 after being indicted for mu rder, conspiracy and other charges in connection with the embassy bombings, and a $5 million reward was put on his head at that time. The listing was updated af ter Sept. 11, 2001, to include a higher reward of $25 million, but no mention of the attacks was added. Note: For an article in the Ithaca Journal which probes much deeper into this ma

tter, click here. To see the FBI's page on bin Laden: http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/ terrorists/terbinladen.htm. Many people forget that Bin Laden initially stated t hat though he applauded the attacks, he did not plan them. To see this reported on CNN, click here. Why would he deny involvement? For lots more, click here.

The 9/11 Commission Second-Guesses the Pentagon 2006-08-02, CNN News http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0608/02/sitroom.01.html BLITZER: The 9/11 Commission second-guesses the Pentagon on the timeline of even ts on that fateful day. What kind of impact might that have? Let's check ... wit h Jack Cafferty in New York. CAFFERTY: A member of the 9/11 Commission says that the commission didn't trust some of the testimony from Pentagon officials about the timeline of events on that fateful day, September 11. The question we asked is: What does it mean if the 9/11 Commission thought the Pentagon wasn't tellin g the truth? Marie in Bartlett, Illinois, [writes]: "The 9/11 Commission failed. If they mulled criminal charges because they doubted the veracity of testimony from Pentagon personnel, why did they stop at that? And why say so now? If perso ns are suspected of lying, they must be brought up on charges, and found either guilty or innocent. The commission declared themselves to be judge and jury. And the kangaroo court verdict was not guilty." Paul in Rockville, Maryland [writes ]: "The fact that Henry Kissinger and George Mitchell both took the job, and the n quit, should have been a tip-off to how big a can of worms they were opening." BLITZER: And, as commercial airliners approached Washington and New York on 9/1 1, what did the Pentagon know and when? Note: The above summary is taken from the section at the very bottom of the CNN News transcript at the link above. For a three-minute video clip of this report, click here. For a two-page summary of some other unanswered questions about wha t really happened on 9/11, click here.

The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll 2006-03-27, New York Magazine http://www.nymetro.com/news/features/16464 Why, if the impact destroyed the planes supposedly crash-proof flight-recorder bl ack boxes, was the FBI able to find, in perfect condition, the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the...Flight 11 hijackers? How could they, an hour after the first World Trade Center crash, allow an obviously hostile airplane to smash int o the Pentagon, headquarters of the entire military-industrial complex? A story in Newsweek...said these generals were told earlier that week not to fly. [On 9/ 11 a] fireman indicated the building in front of us. That building is coming down , he said. At 47 stories, it would be a skyscraper in most cities. Five minutes l ater, at 5:20, the building, 7 World Trade Center, crumbled. What happened at 7 WTC might be the key to the entire mystery. The $500 million insurance profit ma de by Larry Silverstein [and] the list of 7 WTC tenants sets conspiracy heads sp inning: The IRS, the Department of Defense, and the CIA kept offices on the 25th floor. The Secret Service occupied the ninth and tenth. The Securities and Exch ange Commission (home to vast records of bank transactions) was on floors 11 thr ough 13. The 23rd floor was home to Rudy Giuliani s Office of Emergency Management , his crisis center. Central to the scenario is a comment made by Silverstein in a 2002 PBS documentary. We ve had such a terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it. Pull it ...is the term usually used for controlled demoliti on. 7 WTC is not even mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report.

More than half of the U.S. House of Representatives wants open hearings on Able Danger 2005-11-18, US House of Representatives Website of Curt Weldon (R-Pa) http://curtweldon.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=37076 U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Hom eland Security Committees, has sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rums feld signed by over half of the House of Representatives requesting that he allo w "former participants in the intelligence program known as ABLE DANGER to testi fy in an open hearing before the United States Congress." The letter has 246 sig natures (144 Republicans, 101 Democrats, and one Independent), including senior members and leadership on both sides of the isle. "The full story of ABLE DANGER deserves to be heard by the American people," said Weldon. "Secretary Rumsfeld must understand that the will of Congress is behind allowing members of the ABLE DANGER effort to testify in an open hearing about the work they were doing prio r to 9-11 to track the linkages and relationships of al-Qaeda worldwide. Congres sional efforts to investigate ABLE DANGER have been obstructed by Department of Defense insistence that certain individuals with knowledge of ABLE DANGER be pre vented from freely and frankly testifying in an open hearing. Note: Why did no media found this key story worth covering? The request was neve r granted, while the investigation was eventually declared closed by the militar y without any significant outside investigation.

Congressman Curt Weldon's Speech to Congress 2005-10-19, Official Website of Congressman Weldon (R-Pa) http://curtweldon.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=35792 "I have been in this institution 19 years. I am the vice chairman of [the Commit tee on Armed Services] and chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the purcha se of our weapons systems. I am a strong supporter of our military. I am a stron g supporter of President Bush. I campaigned for him. I am a strong supporter of Secretary Rumsfeld. I say all of that, Mr. Speaker, because...there is something desperately wrong here. There is a bureaucracy in the Defense Intelligence Agen cy that is out of control. They want to destroy the reputation of a 23-year mili tary officer, Bronze Star recipient, hero of our country, with two kids because people in defense intelligence are embarrassed at what is going to come out. I h ave met with at least 10 people who fully corroborate what Tony Shaffer says. Th is is not [about] Republicans or Democrats. It is about what is fundamental to t his country. I would ask our constituents across America [who] we represent to j oin us, to express their outrage, to e-mail, make phone calls, write letters to the Secretary of Defense, the President of the United States, to Members of Cong ress to...let the Able Danger story finally come out to the American people. Let them understand what really happened. Let Scott Philpott talk. Let Tony Shaffer talk. Let the others who have been silenced have a chance to tell their story t o Congress and openly to the American people. In the end, the country will be st ronger. Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information specifically on Able Danger : http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&b efore_9/11=ableDanger

Britain now faces its own blowback 2005-09-10, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1566919,00.html Omar Sheikh...at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI [Pakistan' s secret service], wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker, b efore the New York attacks, as confirmed by Dennis Lormel, director of FBI's fin ancial crimes unit. Yet neither Ahmed nor Omar appears to have been sought for q uestioning by the US about 9/11. Indeed, the official 9/11 Commission Report of July 2004 sought to downplay the role of Pakistan with the comment: "To date, th e US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance" a statement of breathtaking disingenuousness. All this highlights the resistanc e to getting at the truth about the 9/11 attacks and to an effective crackdown o n the forces fomenting terrorist bombings in the west.

9/11 Revealed: Challenging the Facts behind the War on Terror 2005-09-04, The Sunday Times (Book review in England's leading newspaper) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1757744,00.html By allowing the attacks to happen -- or in the case of the most extreme theories , by organising them under a false flag -- the military-industrial complex in Amer ica, headed by Dick Cheney and his neocon supporters in the Project for a New Am erican Century, guaranteed that America would stay at war and that profits would stay high. The authors of Revealed, both radical journalists, have subjected th e official version of what happened to intense scrutiny and found huge gaps. Rec alling that most of what we know about what happened on the planes comes from al leged calls made by passengers on mobile phones, they point out that most expert s say that, for technical reasons, this contact would have been impossible to ma ke. They highlight the absence of Mayday distress signals, the failure to find t he black-box flight recorders for the WTC aircraft...the failure to carry out a full engineering investigation into why the towers collapsed so fast and the fai lure to scramble military aircraft to intercept the hijacked aircraft. Even more intriguing is the role of Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77 that hit the Pen tagon. Anyone who examines the route taken by Hanjour will see that it required a complex maneuver by an experienced pilot. Yet in 2001, when Hanjour tried to f ly down the Hudson air corridor in a light aircraft, his trainer was so unnerved that he denied him a second run. You don t have to be a conspiracy nut to see tha t the official account published by the 9/11 Commission is full of gaps. Note: England's popular Daily Mail also had a long, detailed article on 9/11 Rev ealed, which you can read here. The US State Department decided that this book w as dangerous enough to post a webpage dedicated to disproving its theories: read here. The authors' rebuttal to the State Department's claims is available here.

UPI Hears... 2005-06-13, Washington Times/United Press International http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050613-102755-6408r.htm A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief econo mist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Mo rgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Tw in Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, "If demolition dest royed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case f

or an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reyn olds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importan ce of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is , then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be c orrect either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of fac ts associated with the collapse of the three buildings." Note: If the above link fails, click here. Why wasn't this widely reported? For 50 other senior government officials who have seriously questioned the 9/11 Comm ission Report, click here.

Controllers' tale of Flight 11 2005-05-11, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0913/p1s2-usju.html Flight 11's transponder had stopped working. It was no longer sending a radar pu lse. The plane's altitude also became a matter of guesswork for controllers, tho ugh the Boeing 767 was still visible on radar. Two F-15 jets were reportedly dis patched from Otis Air Force Base. Just before or after the military planes got o ff the ground, however, the controllers report they lost site of Flight 11's rad ar signal over Manhattan. The controller who had handled the plane from the begi nning of the ordeal was stunned. A few minutes later, the Nashua controllers hea rd reports that a plane had crashed into a building. Note: According to the official story, once the transponders were turned off in the four 9/11 airplanes, they could no longer be tracked. As the above article a nd air traffic controllers will tell you, though the altitude is no longer repor ted, planes are still visible on radar once the transponder is off. The plane th at flew into the Pentagon was known to be hijacked for over half an hour before it struck. Military radar also can rapidly track incoming missiles that obviousl y don't send out transponder signals. So how is it possible that the military he adquarters of the entire United States was hit, when radar must have tracked thi s plane on it's way there?

Congressional Testimony Reveals Four Wargames on 9/11 2005-03-11, WantToKnow.info/C-SPAN http://www.wanttoknow.info/050317wargames911 CMK [Congresswoman Cythia McKinney]: Mr. Secretary, after the last Hearing, I th ought that my office was promised a written response to my question regarding th e four wargames on September 11th. I have not yet received that response. The qu estion was ... whether or not the activities of the four wargames going on on Se ptember 11th actually impaired our ability to respond to the attacks. RM [Top Pe ntagon Chief, General Richard Myers]: The answer to the question is no, it did n ot impair our response, in fact General Eberhart who was in the command of the N orth American Aerospace Defense Command as he testified in front of the 9/11 Com mission I believe - I believe he told them that it enhanced our ability to respo nd, given that NORAD didn't have the overall responsibility for responding to th e attacks that day. That was an FAA responsibility. But they were two CPXs; ther e was one Department of Justice exercise that didn't have anything to do with th e other three; and there was an actual operation ongoing because there was some Russian bomber activity up near Alaska. CMK: Who was in charge of managing those wargames? RM: The important thing to realize is that North American Aerospace D efense Command was responsible. These are command post exercises; what that mean

s is that all the battle positions that are normally not filled are indeed fille d; so it was an easy transition from an exercise into a real world situation. It actually enhanced the response; otherwise, it would take somewhere between 30 m inutes and a couple of hours to fill those positions, those battle stations, wit h the right staff officers. Note: For the full transcript of this testimony and more, click here. Why to thi s day have all media (other than C-SPAN) and the 9/11 Commission Report failed t o inform the public that there were four wargames happening at the time of the 9 /11 attacks? For possible answers, click here.

Dayton: FAA, NORAD hid 9/11 failures 2004-07-31, Minneapolis Star Tribune (leading newspaper of Minneapolis) http://www.startribune.com/stories/1576/4904237.html Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., charged Friday that the Federal Aviation Administrati on (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) have covered u p "catastrophic failures" that left the nation vulnerable during the Sept. 11 hi jackings. "For almost three years now, NORAD officials and FAA officials have be en able to hide their critical failures that left this country defenseless durin g two of the worst hours in our history," Dayton declared during a Senate Govern mental Affairs Committee hearing. Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 commission , that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology ... said the FAA no tified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while tho se jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed. D ayton said NORAD officials "lied to the American people, they lied to Congress a nd they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people." He [said] if the commissi on's report is correct, President Bush "should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth." Dayton argued that if the FAA had promptly sent a systemwide message about the hijackings, the pilot of the fourth plane seized, United Airlines Flight 93, might have been able to s ecure the cockpit doors and land the plane. Dayton said NORAD also falsely claim ed that during the hijackings, it had F-16 Combat Air Patrol planes in place at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and an AWAC command ship in the air to protec t the nation's capital. Note: Click here to visit the Internet archive, where you will see this article was removed not long after it was published. No other major media reported this vital news. To see the original, click here or here.

Ex-minister attacks US over war 2003-09-06, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3085656.stm Former minister Michael Meacher has blamed the Iraq war on the US desire for wor ld domination. Mr Meacher also suggested the Americans might have failed to prev ent 11 September as it gave a pretext for military action. Mr Meacher was enviro nment minister until three months ago and has already spoken out in opposition t o the war. Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Mr Meacher said the 11 September a ttacks gave an invaluable excuse for attacking Afghanistan. And he said the US G overnment intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Sa ddam Hussein was in power because of its need for further secure oil supplies. I n his piece Mr Meacher wrote: "It seems that the so-called war on terrorism is b eing used largely as a bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical

objectives. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action ag ainst Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 11 September. The global war on terrorism has all the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the w ay for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around s ecuring by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole proje ct." Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said this agenda had been out lined by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) - a thinktank associate d with leading neoconservative hawks within the US administration. In his articl e, Mr Meacher also said the US had passed up opportunities to catch Osama Bin La den and other senior al-Qaeda figures. Note: Mr. Meacher's comments were actually much stronger than the BBC reports. H e stated publicy on the front page of the Guardian his belief that the U.S. gove rnment was very possibly behind the 9/11 attacks. To verify this, see the Guardi an article mentioned in the BBC article above available here.

Unanswered questions: The mystery of Flight 93 2002-08-13, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article173206.ece The shortage of available facts [about the crash of Flight 93 on September 11, 2 001] did not prevent the creation of an instant legend ... that the US governmen t and the US media were pleased to propagate, and that the American public have been eager, for the most part, to accept as fact. The absence of official inform ation has led to lively and often well-informed debate [on] the internet (see ww w.flight93crash.com.) There are ... a number of important unanswered questions . .. based on evidence, as well as on a manifest absence of candour on the part of the authorities which the national US media, typically so sceptical and inquisi tive, have shown a curious reluctance to ask. The alternative theories, both of which have been denied by the US military and the FBI, are a) that Flight 93 was brought down by a US government plane; and b) that a bomb went off aboard. If d oubts remain despite the denials, if conspiracy theories flourish, it is in larg e part because of the authorities' failure to address head-on questions, [includ ing:] 1. The wide displacement of the plane's debris, one explanation for which might be an explosion of some sort aboard prior to the crash. Letters ... and ot her papers from the plane were found eight miles (13km) away from the scene of t he crash. A sector of one engine weighing one ton was found [more than a mile] a way . Other remains of the plane were found two miles away near a town called In dian Lake. 2. A federal flight controller [was quoted] a few days later in a new spaper [stating] that an F-16 had been "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United j et and "must have seen the whole thing". Everything is speculation that is the p roblem with the story of Flight 93. Note: For a treasure trove of revealing articles from major media sources that r aise numerous questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Jesse Ventura searches for coverups 2009-11-29, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-conversation29-2009nov29,0,17... Jesse Ventura is back. The former pro wrestler, who served as Minnesota governor from 1999 to 2003, is the host of "Conspiracy Theory," an investigative series ... on truTV. [Q:] On "Conspiracy Theory," you investigate secret societies and supposed government coverups. Such theories are everywhere, but really, what big conspiracy has ever been proven? [Ventura:] How can you prove it? That's the po int. The better part would be to ask, "How many of the government's points have

ever been proven?" I find what's most interesting about doing this show is how t he government will not participate or allow you in or answer any questions. We'r e not allowed to question our government. [Q:] One of the alleged coverups you i nvestigate involves 9/11. Do you believe the terrorist attacks were an inside jo b? [Ventura:] I believe that the government has not been truthful with us about it. Yes, absolutely. That there's massive holes in the story they've told. That none of these questions have ever been adequately addressed. All evidence has be en destroyed, pretty much. [Q:] Why would the government want to do such things? {Ventura:} Well, what changed after 9/11? We're in two wars, passage of Patriot Act and all that. Our entire society changed that day. We've become paranoid. W e think there's a terrorist behind every tree. I live in Mexico half the year. A nd when I'm down there, for six months, I never hear the word "terrorism." When I'm up here, I can't go a day without hearing it. Note: Many government officials, like Jesse Ventura, have questioned the officia l explanation of the 9/11 attacks. To read their questions, click here.

Website Wikileaks publishes '9/11 messages' 2009-11-26, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8379960.stm A website has published what it says are 573,000 intercepted pager messages sent during the 9/11 attacks in the United States. WikiLeaks says it will not reveal who gave it the messages - some of which are from federal agencies as well as o rdinary citizens. Internet analysts say they believe the messages are genuine bu t federal authorities have refused to comment. The messages are not all about th e attacks. Some are mundane questions about what people are having for lunch. Ho wever, many are about the deadly plane attacks and range from people trying to f ind out if their loved ones are safe to government messages. They include messag es such as * This is Myrna, I will not rest until you get home, the second tower is down, I don't want to have to keep calling you after every event. Pls just g o home * Bomb detonated in World Trade Ctr. Pls get back to Mike Brady w/ a quic k assessment of your areas and contact us if anything is needed. New York's fire and police departments said they could not comment on whether messages purporte dly sent from them were genuine while the US Secret Service refused to comment. WikiLeaks allows people to anonymously post documents on the web, saying its aim is to promote transparency. It was created in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and Sout h Africa. Note: For questions raised by hundreds of highly respected and credible official s, academics and professionals about what really happened on 9/11, click here an d here.

9/11's delayed legacy: cancer for many of the rescue workers 2009-11-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/11/cancer-new-york-rescuers A spate of recent deaths of New York police and fire officers who took part in t he emergency operation at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks has heightened fear s that it could be the start of a delayed epidemic of cancer-related illness. Fi ve firefighters and police officers, all of whom were involved in the rescue and clear-up at the site of the collapsed Twin Towers, have died of cancer in the p ast three months, the oldest being 44. Three died last month within a four-day p eriod. Up to 70,000 people took part in the massive operation at Ground Zero, in cluding police, firefighters and construction workers who came to New York volun

tarily from all over the US. Many worked for months amid a toxic soup of dust an d chemicals. Amid the pollutants within the giant pile of 1.8m tons of debris an d the surrounding air were ... about 1,000 tons of asbestos that was used in the construction of the Twin Towers, pulverised lead from computers, mercury and hi ghly carcinogenic by-products from the burning of plastics and chlorinated chemi cals. No official tally is available for the number of those who have died as a result of the 9/11 clear-up. The New York state health department has recorded 8 17 deaths of emergency workers. Claire Calladine, a campaigner who runs the orga nisation 9/11 Health Now, said the fear was that the recent rise in cancer cases was just the start. "We have only seen the tip of the iceberg. How bad will it get that is the big question." Note: To read important questions raised by hundreds of government officials, ac ademics and professionals about what really happened on 9/11, click here and her e.

A Window Into C.I.A.'s Embrace of Secret Jails 2009-08-13, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/13foggo.html In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of t he agency's main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world's most threatening terror ists. Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, ... agreed to the assignment. With that, Mr. F oggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to h ouse about a half-dozen detainees. The existence of the network of prisons to de tain and interrogate [captives] has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former int elligence officials have provided a fuller account. Mr. Foggo acknowledged a rol e, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fr aud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided ot her supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Ken tucky prison. Eventually, the agency's network would encompass at least eight de tention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanis tan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. ha s never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100. Mr. Foggo's success in Frankfu rt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. I n November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.'s executive director, in effect its day -to-day administrative chief. "It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him h e now runs the regiment," said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.'s executive director f rom 2001 to 2004. "It popped people's eyes." Note: Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's case is highly unusual. Very few high-level CIA offic ers have ever been imprisoned for corruption. His predecessor as Executive Direc tor of the CIA, quoted in the article above, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who held the office on 9/11, had been the chief executive of a branch of the investment comp any which placed the still unexplained "put options" on American and United Airl ines stocks the week before the attacks, resulting in hundreds of millions of do llars of profits to "unknown" parties.

The Alarming Record of the F.B.I.'s Informant in the Bronx Bomb Plot 2009-07-07, Village Voice (A progressive New York City street newspaper) http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-07-08/news/the-alarming-record-of-the-f-b-i-... Last month, police and the FBI arrested four Newburgh men on charges that they h

ad plotted to bomb synagogues in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx and fir e a missile at a military jet. As more details emerged, however, the less the fo ur defendants sounded like men with the skills to plan a sophisticated terror pl ot. They were small-time crooks, felons with long criminal records. What the ind ictment didn't say, and what the initial news reports didn't fill in, was the ex tent to which the fifth man in the plot, an unnamed FBI informant, had provided the glue to hold the Newburgh 4 together. That informant was a Pakistani man nam ed Shahed Hussain, code-named "Malik," who agreed to work for the FBI to obtain leniency after he was arrested in 2002 for fraud. Over a period of about a year, Malik met with [the] defendants ... while under FBI surveillance. The Newburgh bomb plot isn't the first of Malik's operations for the government. He played a similar role four years ago in an Albany case, in which he helped the FBI arrest a man named Mohammed Hossain, a cash-poor pizzeria owner, and his imam, Yassin Aref, after persuading them to launder $50,000 in a made-up plot to bring a miss ile to the U.S. and assassinate the Pakistani prime minister. In both cases, Mal ik did not stumble upon active terror cells plotting to bring destruction on Ame rican soil. Instead, in both Newburgh and Albany, he needed long periods of time to recruit his Muslim contacts, spin elaborate tales about his terror contacts, and develop solid plans of action, all the while providing the defendants with large amounts of resources and cash incentives. In each case, the question remai ns: Would either set of defendants have done anything remotely like plant bombs or launder money for terrorists if not for the prodding and plotting and encoura gement of Malik and the FBI? Note: For lots more from major media sources on the hidden realities behind the never-ending "war on terror", click here.

Architects and Engineers Seek 9/11 Truth 2009-06-03, KGO Radio (San Francisco's top talk-radio station) http://www.kgoam810.com/Article.asp?id=1353865&spid=20399 "Architects know that you can't have 400 structural steel connections failing pe r second in a fire-induced gravitational collapse," says architect Richard Gage about the collapse of World Trade Center 7, a building not struck by a plane, on September 11, 2001. Richard is with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a group of professionals who have factual reservations about conclusions reached i n the 9/11 Report. Note: To listen to this path-breaking 7-minute broadcast, click on the link abov e. For lots more reliable information showing the official story of 9/11 cannot be true, see our 9/11 Information Center.

Fire, Not Explosives, Felled 3rd Tower on 9/11, Report Says 2008-08-21, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/nyregion/22wtccnd.html?partner=rssuserland&... Fires in the 47-story office tower at the edge of the World Trade Center site un dermined floor beams and a critical structural column, federal investigators [fr om the National Institute of Standards and Technology] concluded on Thursday, as they attempted to curb still-rampant speculation that explosives caused the bui lding s collapse on Sept. 11, 2001. The collapse of 7 World Trade Center ... is ci ted in hundreds of Web sites and books as perhaps the most compelling evidence t hat an insider secretly planted explosives, intentionally destroying the tower. [Critics] have pointed to the fact that the building fell straight down, instead of tumbling, as proof that explosives were used to topple it, as well as to bri ng down the twin towers. Sixteen percent of the respondents in a Scripps Howard/

Ohio University poll said it was very likely or somewhat likely that explosives were planted. Other towers in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles have remain ed standing through catastrophic blazes that burned out of control for hours bec ause of malfunctioning or nonexistent sprinkler systems. But 7 World Trade Cente r, which was not struck by a plane, is the first skyscraper in modern times to c ollapse primarily as a result of a fire. Adding to the suspicion is the fact tha t in the rush to clean up the site, almost all of the steel remains of the tower were disposed of, leaving investigators in later years with little forensic evi dence. Skeptics ... have long argued that an incendiary material called thermite , made of aluminum powder and a metal oxide, was used to take down the trade cen ter towers. They also have argued that a sulfur residue found at the World Trade Center site is evidence of an inside job.

Gov't says FBI agents can't testify about 9/11 2008-06-19, International Herald Tribune/Associated Press http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/06/19/america/Sept-11-Lawsuits.php Government lawyers say the ongoing investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks could be compromised if the airline industry is allowed to seek more information from the FBI to defend itself against lawsuits brought by terrorism victims. The gov ernment urged a judge to block aviation companies from interviewing five FBI emp loyees who the companies say will help them prove the government withheld key in formation before the 2001 attacks. The lawyers said it would be impossible to in terview the employees without disclosing classified or privileged material that could "cause serious damage to national security and interfere with pending law enforcement proceedings." The largest investigation in FBI history has resulted in 167,000 interviews and more than 155,000 pieces of evidence and involved the pursuit of 500,000 investigative leads, the lawyers wrote. The airlines and avia tion companies are defending themselves against lawsuits seeking billions of dol lars in damages for injuries, fatalities, property damage and business losses re lated to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The companies filed separate lawsuits again st the CIA and the FBI last August to force terrorism investigators to tell whet her the aviation industry was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. Meanwhile, lawy ers for the victims of the attacks ... recounted in court papers numerous hijack ings and attacks aboard planes before Sept. 11 that they said should have put th e airline industry on notice that a disastrous attack could occur. Note: For a two-page overview of many unanswered questions about what really hap pened on 9/11, click here.

Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks 2008-04-11, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4635175 President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and app roved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interroga ted by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News. "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the America n people," Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes , I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved." As fi rst reported by ABC News, the most senior Bush administration officials repeated ly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda su spects would be interrogated by the CIA. The president had earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the CIA in a speech in 2006. But before [ABC's original] report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the mo st senior advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans -- down

to the number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda prisoner -- had never been disclosed. Critics at home and abroad have harshly c riticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international la w and, they say, condoned torture. In the interview with ABC News, Bush defended the waterboarding technique used against KSM. "We had legal opinions that enabl ed us to do it," Bush said. "And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew." The president said, "I think it's ve ry important for the American people to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wa s. He was the person who ordered the suicide attack -- I mean, the 9/11 attacks. " Note: For a transcript of the interview with President Bush on the Washington Po st website, click here. For a powerful two-page summary of many unanswered quest ions about who really ordered the 9/11 attacks, click here.

O Brother, Who Art Thou? 2007-11-15, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/14/AR20071114021... "I am not my brother's keeper," Howard "Cookie" Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Commi ttee yesterday. As Cookie surely must know, that excuse hasn't worked since Gene sis. In this case, the players weren't Cain and Abel, but Cookie and his brother Buzzy. Cookie, under fire for allegedly quashing probes of the infamous Blackwa ter security contractor, began his testimony by angrily denying the "ugly rumors " that his brother, former CIA official Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard, is on Blackwater 's advisory board. But during a recess, Cookie called Buzzy and learned that -gulp -- the ugly rumors are true: His brother is on the board. When the lawmaker s returned, Cookie revised and extended his testimony. "I had not been aware of that," Cookie told the congressmen. "I hereby recuse myself from any matters hav ing to do with Blackwater." The lawmakers reacted with Old Testament fury. The s waggering Cookie -- he alternately addressed the lawmakers with his thumb in his waistband, slouching in his chair, rolling his eyes and making baffled glances -- had spent the morning aggressively denying the allegations lodged against him : that he had impeded investigations into contracting fraud, including weapons s muggling by Blackwater, and that he had abused his underlings. But then came Buz zy's bombshell -- and Cookie's credibility crumbled. Either he had lied to Congr ess, or his own brother had lied to him. It was only the latest bit of strangene ss for the powerful but eccentric Brothers Krongard. Buzzy [is] known for his ci gar chomping, martial arts and recreational workouts with SWAT teams. "Krongard once punched a great white shark in the jaw," his hometown Baltimore Sun reporte d when he took the No. 3 job at the CIA a decade ago. More recently, Buzzy joine d the advisory board of Blackwater, the firm known for its ready trigger fingers in Iraq. Note: Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard was the Executive Director (the third-highest posit ion) at the CIA on 9/11, and had until 1998 been the head of the firm used to bu y many of the "put" options on United Airlines stock made just prior to 9/11 tha t were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.

Was Bin Laden's last video faked? 2007-10-29, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21530470 When [the] first Osama Bin Laden video in nearly three years [appeared], most of the media attention was focused on Bin Laden's beard. It appeared either dyed o

r perhaps even pasted on. He was ridiculed and a variety of theories were offere d to explain it. But now, there is a running debate among video analysts about w hether, rather than being new, the September 7 [video] may have been something r ecorded at the same time as [the] last video in October 2004 (and then released with new audio). Of the 25 minutes of video tape, only three and a half minutes, were moving video. The rest was covered by a still image or a frozen still. Mor eover, the still covered the only time references on the 25 minutes of tape refer ences to political developments in Iraq, Britain and France. This led to the sus picion that the video is not new, but disguised to appear as new. The leading pr oponent of the theory is computer scientist ... Dr. Neal Krawetz of Colorado ... who [says] that the similarities between the October 29, 2004 tape and the Sept ember 7, 2007 tape are too great to be coincidental. Here is Bin Laden in the sam e clothing, same studio, same studio setup, and same desk three years later, [sai d] Krawetz ... in an interview with NBC News. In fact, [the] papers that he reads are moved between the exact same stacks. What are the chances of nothing changi ng (except his beard) in three years? Virtually zero. The clips appear to have b een recorded three years ago. I am saying the two videos were likely made either on the same day or within days of each other. The CIA will not say what it think s about the possibility, but a senior U.S. intelligence official tells NBC News the U.S. believes the tape is new. He would not discuss the reasons why intellig ence analysts feel that way. Note: For a succinct summary of many reports from major media sources that sugge st the US government's explanation of what happened on 9/11 cannot be true, clic k here.

Telecom Firms Helped With Government's Warrantless Wiretaps 2007-08-24, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR20070823020... The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that telecommunications companies assisted the government's warrantless surveillance program and were be ing sued as a result, an admission some legal experts say could complicate the g overnment's bid to halt numerous lawsuits challenging the program's legality. "[ U]nder the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said i n an interview with the El Paso Times. His statement could help plaintiffs in do zens of lawsuits against the telecom companies, which allege that the companies participated in a wiretapping program that violated Americans' privacy rights. D avid Kris, a former Justice Department official, ... said McConnell's admission makes it difficult to argue that the phone companies' cooperation with the gover nment is a state secret. "It's going to be tough to continue to call it 'alleged ' when he's just admitted it," Kris said. McConnell has just added to "the list of publicly available facts that are no longer state secrets," increasing the pl aintiffs' chances that their cases can proceed, Kris said. McConnell's statement "does serious damage to the government's state secrets claims that are at the h eart of its defenses," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democr acy and Technology. Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general in the Reag an administration, said that McConnell's disclosure shows that "an important ele ment of a program can be discussed publicly and openly without endangering the n ation. These Cassandran cries that the earth is going to fall every time you hav e a discussion simply are not borne out by the facts," he said.

The American Empire and 9/11 by Prof. David Ray Griffin 2007-03-00, Tikkun Magazine - March/April 2007 Issue http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0703/frontpage/empire911

Literally dozens of people including journalists, police officers, WTC employees , emergency medical workers, and firefighters reported hearing explosions in the Twin Towers, with some of them explicitly saying that the collapses appeared to be instances of controlled demolition. One fire captain said: "I hear an explos ion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floo r down, one after another, boom, boom, boom." [A] paramedic said: "It was [like a] professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors." One fi refighter said: "It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these building s." Given all the features that indicate controlled demolition, it is not surpri sing that when a controlled demolition expert in Holland was shown videos of the collapse of WTC 7, without being told what the building was ... he said: "They have simply blown away columns. A team of experts did this. This is controlled d emolition." Two emeritus professors of structural analysis and construction at Z urich's prestigious ETH Institute of Technology say that WTC 7 was "with the hig hest probability brought down by explosives." FEMA, the first agency given the t ask of explaining the collapse of the WTC, said that its best explanation for th e collapse of WTC 7 had "only a low probability of occurrence." The 9/11 Commiss ion avoided the problem by simply not finding room to mention this collapse in i ts 571-page report. This behavior is no surprise given the fact that the Commiss ion was run by its executive director, Philip Zelikow, who was virtually a membe r of the Bush-Cheney administration. Note: This article in Tikkun by renowned theologian David Ray Griffin is the fi rst in any major U.S. national magazine to contain a detailed argument that the attacks of 9/11 were planned and carried out by rogue elements within the U.S. g overnment. For additional reliable information on the 9/11 coverup, click here.

Ex-employee says FAA warned before 9/11 2006-11-24, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-23-whistle-blower-faa_x.htm From 1995 to 2001, Bogdan Dzakovic served as a team leader on the Federal Aviati on Administration's Red Team. Set up by Congress to help the FAA ... the elite s quad tested airport security systems. In the years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2 001, terrorist attacks, Dzakovic says, the team was able to breach security abou t 90% of the time, sneaking bombs and submachine guns past airport screeners. Ex pensive new bomb detection machines consistently failed. The team repeatedly war ned the FAA of the potential for security breaches and hijackings but was told t o cover up its findings. Eventually, the FAA began notifying airports in advance when the Red Team would be doing its undercover testing. He and other Red Team members approached the Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector Ge neral, the General Accounting Office and members of Congress about the FAA's all eged misconduct. No one did anything. "Immediately (after 9/11), numerous govern ment officials from FAA as well as other government agencies made defensive stat ements such as, 'How could we have known this was going to happen?' " Dzakovic t estified later before the 9/11 Commission. After filing [a] complaint, Dzakovic was removed from his Red Team leadership position. He now works for the Transpor tation Security Administration. His primary assignments include tasks such as ho le-punching, updating agency phonebooks and "thumb-twiddling." At least he hasn' t received a pay cut, he says. He makes about $110,000 a year for what he descri bes as "entry-level idiot work."

Indications add up to government conspiracy 2006-09-08, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/284273_conspire08.html

An Aug. 8 Seattle P-I editorial asked, "Where is the evidence?" about government complicity in the 9/11 attacks. In a 2000 paper titled "Rebuilding America's De fenses," Project for a New American Century, whose founding members were Dick Ch eney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, argued for vast increases in military spending to assure American global dominance. Such a process, PNAC said, would t ake time absent "a catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor. " The picture becomes clearer through considering the following: The head of the Pakistani intelligence service was in Washington when the attacks occurred conf erring with government officials. The Indian press subsequently implicated him i n wiring $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker. When the story broke, he w as pressured into retirement at U.S. insistence. Two FBI agents approached attor ney David Schippers with specific foreknowledge about the attacks. They claimed that knowledge of the plot was widespread within the FBI for months before 9/11. His repeated calls to Attorney General John Ashcroft were never returned. An ar ticle in New American on March 11, 2002, corroborated the agents' story. From th e beginning, the Bush administration delayed and otherwise impeded the investiga tion. Those are but some of many indications that together add up to government complicity. For the sake of the common welfare, the truth behind 9/11 must be ex posed.

Sept. 11 Panel Doubted Officials 2006-08-05, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14191255/ The Sept. 11 commission was so frustrated with repeated misstatements by the Pen tagon and FAA about their response to the 2001 terror attacks that it considered an investigation into possible deception, the panel's chairmen say in a new boo k. Republican Thomas Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton also say in "Without Precede nt" that their panel was too soft in questioning former New York Mayor Rudolph G iuliani, and that the 20-month investigation may have suffered for it. The book. ..recounts obstacles the authors say were thrown up by the Bush administration, internal disputes over President Bush's use of the attacks as a reason for invad ing Iraq, and the way the final report avoided questioning whether U.S. policy i n the Middle East may have contributed to the attacks. "Fog of war...could not e xplain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations and public t estimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue, " the book states. The questioning of Giuliani was considered by Kean and Hamilt on "a low point" in the commission's examination of witnesses during public hear ings. "We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record." In their book, which goes on sale Aug. 15, Kean and Hamilton recap obstacles they say the panel faced in putting out a cred ible report in a presidential election year, including fights for access to gove rnment documents and an effort to reach unanimity.

Click Here for Conspiracy 2006-08-00, Vanity Fair August 2006 Issue http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060717roco02 Nine-eleven conspiracy theories have been circulating for years, producing milli ons of Web links, scores of books, and a nationwide collection of doubters known as the "9/11 Truth" movement. For those who can't find information about the al leged cover-up on the nightly news, there is Loose Change, a documentary about 9 /11. Since it appeared on the Web in April 2005, the 80-minute film has been cli mbing up and down Google Video's "Top 100," rising to No. 1 this May, with at le ast 10 million viewings. It's safe to say that, if it were a theatrical release,

Loose Change would be one of the most popular and incendiary movies in the country right now. Most of what we see on-screen during Loose Change are actually news r eports from mainstream-media outlets like CBS News, Newsweek, CNN, the Associate d Press, even Fox News. Loose Change is an investigation into the official story of 9/11 as told by The 9/11 Commission Report. Why were the black boxes from Am erican Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 never found, when the p assport of one of Flight 11's alleged hijackers, Satam Al Suqami, turned up unsc athed a few blocks from the World Trade Center? Hani Hanjour, one of the alleged hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, had trouble controlling and landing a single-engine Cessna 172 when he did test runs. Yet according to the official v ersion of events, if Hani Hanjour had been the pilot he would have had to execut e a perfect 330-degree turn at 530 miles per hour, descending 7,000 feet in two and a half minutes, in order to crash Flight 77, a Boeing 757, into the Pentagon . Note: To watch this incredibly revealing documentary free online, click here.

The search for reconciliation 2006-06-25, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/06/25/... South Africa's acclaimed Truth and Reconciliation Commission...was an ambitious effort to provide a forum to uncover the truth about apartheid-era abuses -- as well as to promote reconciliation between opposing factions in the fight to end racial rule. Its terms were simple: Tell the truth about political acts of viole nce you committed -- on either side of the struggle -- and you would receive amn esty. Tell only part of the truth -- or fail to testify altogether -- and you wo uld be liable for criminal prosecution. The commission heard from 10,000 victims of apartheid rule, as well as victims of abuses by anti-apartheid forces. The T ruth Commission, now widely viewed as a model for other countries attempting to transcend their divided pasts, granted amnesty to about 1,000 of the more than 7 ,000 perpetrators who applied for it. It recommended that 300 people face prosec ution for failing to tell the complete truth, or failing to testify at all. Test imony at multiple, often searing, hearings provided an incontrovertible, althoug h not necessarily complete, record of abuses committed in the name of apartheid. As a result, it will be difficult for anyone, both now and in future generation s, to deny apartheid's brutality and the lengths agents of the white minority go vernment went to perpetuate it. The commission...can certainly claim to have pla yed a part in keeping the peace. Note: This article is included as a growing number of people in the 9/11 movemen t feel that a truth and reconciliation commission is what is needed to bring out the truth of what happened on that fateful day.

Dick Cheney's Song of America 2005-10-26, Harpers Magazine http://www.harpers.org/DickCheneysSongOfAmerica.html Drafting a plan for global dominance. Few writers are more ambitious than the wr iters of government policy papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney's masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and i s in fact the product of several ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the do cuments that bear his name, and he has maintained a close association with the i deologues behind them. Let us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this serie s of documents the Plan. The Plan was published in unclassified form most recent

ly under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990s, as Cheney ended his term a s secretary of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993. The Plan is fo r the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to c hallenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies a like. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful , but that it must be absolutely powerful. The Plan is disturbing in many ways, and ultimately unworkable. Yet it is being sold now as an answer to the 'new rea lities' of the post-September 11 world, even as it was sold previously as the an swer to the new realities of the post-Cold War world. For Cheney, the Plan has a lways been the right answer, no matter how different the questions.

Atta known to Pentagon before 9/11 2005-09-28, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509280150sep28,1,3686073.... Four years after the nation's deadliest terror attack, evidence is accumulating that a super-secret Pentagon intelligence unit identified the organizer of the S ept. 11 hijackings, Mohamed Atta, as an Al Qaeda operative months before he ente red the U.S. Had the FBI been alerted to what the Pentagon purportedly knew in e arly 2000, Atta's name could have been put on a list that would have tagged him as someone to be watched the moment he stepped off a plane in Newark, N.J., in J une of that year. Physical and electronic surveillance of Atta, who lived openly in Florida for more than a year, and who acquired a driver's license and even a n FAA pilot's license in his true name, might well have made it possible for the FBI to expose the Sept. 11 plot before the fact. Anthony Shaffer, a civilian Pe ntagon employee, says he was asked in the summer of 2000 by a Navy captain, Scot t Phillpott, to arrange a meeting between the FBI and representatives of the Pen tagon intelligence program, code-named Able/Danger. But he said the meeting was canceled after Pentagon lawyers concluded that information on suspected Al Qaeda operatives with ties to the U.S. might violate Pentagon prohibitions on retaini ng information on "U.S. persons," a term that includes U.S. citizens and permane nt resident aliens. Asked by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, at a hearing last week whether Atta...was a "U.S. person," a senior Pentagon official answered, "No, he was not." Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Judge in Moussaoui Case Blocks Release of Sept. 11 Report 2005-04-30, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/29/AR20050429014... The federal judge overseeing the prosecution of admitted al Qaeda operative Zaca rias Moussaoui has blocked an attempt by the Justice Department's inspector gene ral to release a report on FBI missteps prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, ac cording to a ruling unsealed yesterday. Without explanation, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema denied the request by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, who c ompleted the report last July but since has been unable to get permission to pro vide an unclassified version of the document to the public. The report, titled " A Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence Information Related to the Septem ber 11 Attacks," provides an in-depth examination of three episodes considered p otential missed opportunities to detect the Sept. 11 plot, including Moussaoui's arrest in August 2001. Note: Moussaoui is one of only two people ever to be charged with direct involve

ment in 9/11. For more key info on Moussaoui, click here. According to the Senat e Intelligence Committee, on Aug. 27, 2001, an FBI agent was trying to make sure that Moussaoui did "not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center." Why have we not heard more about all this?

Web Pick of the Week: The New Pearl Harbor Revisited 2008-11-24, Publishers Weekly http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6617001.html?industryid=47159 Author and professor [David Ray] Griffin ... knows his work is referred to by of ficials and the media as conspiracy theory, and he has a rebuttal: the official t heory is itself a conspiracy theory. In [The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, th e Cover-Up, and the Expos, a] companion volume to 2004's The New Pearl Harbor: Di sturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, Griffin provides corr ections, raises new issues and discusses the two most important official reports about 9/11, the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Institute of Standards an d Technology report on the Twin Towers, both prepared by people highly responsive to the wishes of the White House and riddled with omission and distortion from be ginning to end. Griffin addresses many points in exhaustive detail, from the phys ical impossibility of the official explanation of the towers collapse to the Comm ission's failure to scrutinize the administration to the NIST s contradiction of i ts own scientists to the scads of eyewitness and scientific testimony in direct opposition to official claims. Citing hundreds, if not thousands, of sources, Gr iffin's detailed analysis is far from reactionary or delusional, building a case that, though not conclusive, raises enough valid and disturbing questions to ma ke his call for a new investigation more convincing than ever. Note: Publishers Weekly reviews have guided the book trade, including bookseller s, publishers, librarians, and literary agents, for 136 years. "Pick of the Week " sets the standard for the best of the best new books. This recognition by such a prestigious journal shows the remarkable quality of the 9/11-truth work of Wa ntToKnow.info team member David Ray Griffin. To read about all his 9/11 books, c lick here.

9/11 theorist not curtailing his research 2008-05-03, Deseret News (One of Utah's leading newspapers) http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695275973,00.html Sixteen months ago, Brigham Young University and Steven Jones parted ways, but h e said this week he isn't bitter about the academic divorce. He certainly hasn't curtailed his volatile research on the collapse of the three World Trade Center towers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, Jones is the lea d author of a paper on the collapses published April 18 in a civil engineering j ournal. Most importantly, he is preparing several more papers that, if they pass peer review and are published, will give him the peace of mind that his case re ached the public. Jones was energized in November when he ... received a respons e from the national lab charged by Congress to determine why and how the towers collapsed. The letter contained the following phrase: "We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse." "That," Jones said, "really was progr ess. It made me believe we could talk with them." It is striking. After producin g a 10,000-page report, the National Institute of Standards and Technology can't explain the collapse. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has sa id that its best hypothesis for the fall of the third tower, WTC 7 diesel fuel s tored in the building caused fires that collapsed the building has a "low probab ility" of being correct. [Jones'] new peer-reviewed paper in the Open Civil Engi neering Journal ... lays out 14 points of agreement Jones and his colleagues hav

e with the official government reports. "We're getting to a higher level of disc ussion with this paper," Jones said. The open paper can be found for free on the Web at www.bentham.org. Note: For many revealing reports on the path-breaking work of renowned physicist Steven Jones to shed light on what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Willie Nelson doubts official explanation for 9/11 2008-02-05, Houston Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5516149.html Texas icon Willie Nelson said on a nationally syndicated radio show that he ques tions the official story of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. "I certainly do," Nelson said ... when asked by talk-show host Alex Jones. "I saw t hose towers fall and I've seen an implosion in Las Vegas, there's too much simil arities between the two. And I saw the building fall that didn't get hit by noth ing," the singer-songwriter said. "So, how naive are we, you know, what do they think we'll go for?" Nelson, 74, said that if he were president, he would "stop the damn war, it's just that simple." He said he doesn't [understand] why if Sau di Arabians "hit us in New York ... we go jump on Afghanistan." Nelson's publici st would not comment on the remarks. Note: For an ABC video clip of this news, click here.

Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm 2007-10-13, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12/AR20071012024... A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction fo r insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for co ntracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought mi ght be illegal. Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ... about participating in a warrantless sur veillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records. In the c ourt filings disclosed this week, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's refusal to take part in that program led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution. He is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper. He has claimed in court pap ers that he had been optimistic that Qwest would overcome weak sales because of the expected top-secret contract with the government. Nacchio's account, which p laces the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush adm inistration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without c ourt oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Se pt. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its war rantless surveillance efforts. In May 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone-call records of tens of millions of Americans , using data provided by major telecom firms. Qwest, it reported, declined to pa rticipate because of fears that the program lacked legal standing. Note: The Bush Administration has claimed that the NSA surveillance of the Ameri can public was a necessary response to the attacks of 9/11. But this story revea ls that the surveillance began before 9/11, shortly after Bush took office. The obvious question is, why? For many other reliable, verifiable reports that sugge st the official explanation of the events of 9/11 is false, click here.

DeFazio asks, but he's denied access 2007-07-20, The Oregonian (Oregon's leading newspaper) http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/118489654058910... Oregonians called Peter DeFazio's office, worried there was a conspiracy buried in the classified portion of a White House plan for operating the government aft er a terrorist attack. As a member of the U.S. House on the Homeland Security Co mmittee, DeFazio, D-Ore., is permitted to enter a secure "bubbleroom" in the Cap itol and examine classified material. So he asked the White House to see the sec ret documents. On Wednesday, DeFazio got his answer: DENIED. "I just can't belie ve they're going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they pl an to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack," DeFazio says. Homeland Security Committee staffers told his office that the White House initially approved his request, but it was later quashed. DeFaz io doesn't know who did it or why. "We're talking about the continuity of the go vernment of the United States of America," DeFazio says. "I would think that wou ld be relevant to any member of Congress, let alone a member of the Homeland Sec urity Committee." Bush administration spokesman Trey Bohn declined to say why De Fazio was denied access: "We do not comment through the press on the process tha t this access entails. It is important to keep in mind that much of the informat ion related to the continuity of government is highly sensitive." Norm Ornstein, a legal scholar who studies government continuity at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he "cannot think of one good reason" to deny access t o a member of Congress who serves on the Homeland Security Committee. This is th e first time DeFazio has been denied access to documents. "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right," DeFazio said.

Bush Changes Continuity Plan 2007-05-10, The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR20070509027... President Bush issued a formal national security directive yesterday ordering ag encies to prepare contingency plans for a surprise, "decapitating" attack on the federal government, and assigned responsibility for coordinating such plans to the White House. The prospect of a nuclear bomb being detonated in Washington wi thout warning ... has been cited by many security analysts as a rising concern s ince the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The order makes explicit that the focus of fed eral worst-case planning involves a covert nuclear attack against the nation's c apital. "Adequate warning of potential emergencies that could pose a significant risk to the homeland might not be available, and therefore all continuity plann ing shall be based on the assumption that no such warning will be received," sta tes the 72-paragraph order. The statement added, "Emphasis will be placed upon g eographic dispersion of leadership, staff, and infrastructure in order to increa se survivability and maintain uninterrupted Government Functions." After the 200 1 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly t o locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time [forming] a shad ow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plan s." Since then, other agencies including the Pentagon, the Office of the Directo r of National Intelligence and the CIA have taken steps to relocate facilities o r key functions outside of Washington for their own reasons, citing factors such as economics or the importance of avoiding Beltway "group-think." Note: Why isn't Congress making these absolutely vital decisions? What gives the se organizations authority to determine what will happen in the case of a major attack?

Mission Accomplished 2006-06-12, Washington Post (second article on webpage) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR20060611007... The doors may be closing shortly on the nine-year-old Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative think tank headed by William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. The PNAC was short on staff -- having pe rhaps a half-dozen employees -- but very long on heavy hitters. The founders inc luded Richard B. Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, I. Lew is "Scooter" Libby, William J. Bennett, Zalmay Khalilzad and Quayle. PNAC and it s supporters dominated the Bush administration's foreign policy apparatus and ch ampioned a policy to get rid of Saddam Hussein long before Sept. 11, 2001. In it s famous 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, PNAC said "removing Saddam Husse in and his regime . . . now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy. The signatories wrote that "we are fully aware of the dangers of implementing th is policy." Note: Though the PNAC was staffed by some of the most powerful people in the U.S . government who clearly wanted Hussein out of power long before 9/11, no major papers were willing to report these crucial facts. Had Americans known of this, many likely would not have initially supported the war on Iraq. For more on this important information: http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up10pg#pnac

Pentagon Revokes 9/11 Officer's Clearance 2005-09-30, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1173334 An officer who has claimed that a classified military unit identified four Sept. 11 hijackers before the 2001 attacks is facing Pentagon accusations of breaking numerous rules, charges his lawyer suggests are aimed at undermining his credib ility. The alleged infractions by Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, 42, include obt aining a service medal under false pretenses, improperly flashing military ident ification while drunk and stealing pens, according to military paperwork shown b y his attorney to The Associated Press. Shaffer was one of the first to publicly link Sept. 11 leader Mohamed Atta to the unit code-named Able Danger. Shaffer w as one of five witnesses the Pentagon ordered not to appear Sept. 21 before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss the unit's findings. The military revoked Shaffer's top security clearance this month, a day before he was supposed to tes tify to a congressional committee.

Panel rejects assertion US knew of Atta before Sept. 11 2005-09-15, Boston Globe/Associated Press http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/09/15/panel_reject... Former members of the Sept. 11 commission on Wednesday dismissed assertions that a Pentagon intelligence unit identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as an member of al-Qaida long before the 2001 attacks. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., had accused the commission of ignoring intelligence about Atta while it investigated the att acks. The commission's former chairman, Thomas Kean, said there was no evidence anyone in the government knew about Atta before Sept. 11, 2001. Two military off icers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, claimed a c lassified military intelligence unit, known as 'Able Danger,' identified Atta be fore the attacks. Shaffer has said three other hijackers were identified, too. K

ean said the recollections of the intelligence officers cannot be verified by an y document. 'Bluntly, it just didn't happen and that's the conclusion of all 10 of us,' said a former commissioner, ex-Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. Weldon's spoke sman, John Tomaszewski, said no commissioners have met with anyone from Able Dan ger 'yet they choose to speak with some form of certainty without firsthand know ledge.' Note: If you read the New York Times article from Aug. 11th, commission official s clearly stated that they were warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days b efore issuing the commission's final report that the account would be incomplete without reference Able Danger and Atta, as confirmed by the commission's own ch ief spokesperson. Is this more recent article a rewriting of the facts?

9/11 on Trial 2005-08-06, Daily Mail (Second largest circulation English-language newspaper in the world) http://www.WantToKnow.info/911dailymailarticle Towers that fell like a controlled demolition . Planes that vanished then mysteriou sly reappeared, And crucial evidence that has been lost for ever. A new book rai ses bizarre yet deeply unsettling questions about the world s worst terror atrocit y. Henshall and Morgan say the...call for transparency is the thrust of their wh ole argument. It is time, they say, for a full and truly independent inquiry int o 9/11 that will reveal all the facts and silence the rumours. With public trust one of the major casualties of the war, can any of us be absolutely sure we hav e not been caught up in a lie and perhaps a bigger one even than we ever though possible? Note: This is one of the longest, most thorough articles on 9/11 cover-ups in th e mainstream media yet to be published. Click on the link above to read the full article. To give an idea of the contents, here are the section titles of this e ye-opening article: * * * * * * * Did the CIA actively help the hijackers? The fire wasn t hot enough to cause a collapse' One expert said there were bombs inside the towers Why didn't fighter planes intercept the hijackers? The hole in the Pentagon was too small for a Boeing The air force scrambled from the wrong base So how did the passengers make those phone calls?

Suit claims CIA hindering bin Laden book 2005-07-28, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/07/28/cia.book.ap/ The CIA is squelching publication of a new book detailing events leading up to O sama bin Laden's escape from his Tora Bora mountain stronghold during the U.S.-l ed invasion of Afghanistan, says a former CIA officer who led much of the fighti ng. In a story he says he resigned from the agency to tell, Gary Berntsen recoun ts the attacks he coordinated at the peak of the fighting in eastern Afghanistan in late 2001, including how U.S. commanders knew bin Laden was in the rugged mo untains near the Pakistani border and the al Qaeda leader's much-discussed getaw ay. During the 2004 election, President Bush and other senior administration off icials repeatedly said that commanders did not know whether bin Laden was at Tor a Bora when U.S. and allied Afghan forces attacked there in 2001. A Republican a nd avid Bush supporter, Berntsen, 48, retired in June and hasn't spoken publicly

before. Berntsen's book is one of a handful written recently by former CIA offi cers who have wrestled with the agency over what could be published.

Report Details F.B.I.'s Failure on 2 Hijackers 2005-06-10, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/politics/10fbi.html?ex=1276056000&en=5c9425... The F.B.I. missed at least five chances in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, to find two hijackers as they prepared for the attacks and settled in San Diego, th e Justice Department inspector general said in a report made public on Thursday after being kept secret for a year. Investigators were stymied by bureaucratic o bstacles, communication breakdowns and a lack of urgency, the report said. In th e case of the San Diego hijackers, for instance, the report disclosed that an F. B.I. agent assigned to the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to pass on informa tion to the F.B.I. about the two men in early 2000 - 19 months before the attack s - but was blocked by a C.I.A. supervisor and did not aggressively follow up. T hat set the stage for a series of bungled opportunities in an episode that many officials now regard as their best chance to have detected or disrupted the Sept . 11 plot. Many passages in the public version of the report were blacked out to shield information still considered sensitive by the government; an entire 115page section on one terror suspect was withheld.

Justice Dept. Opposes Bid to Revive Case Against F.B.I. 2005-02-26, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/politics/26whistle.html The government has told a federal appeals court that a suit by an F.B.I. transla tor who was fired after accusing the bureau of ineptitude should not be allowed to proceed because it would cause "significant damage to the national security a nd foreign policy of the United States." The case has become a lightning rod for critics who contend that the bureau retaliated against Ms. Edmonds and other wh istle-blowers who have sought to expose management problems related to the antit errorism campaign. The suit was dismissed in July after Attorney General John As hcroft invoked a rarely used power and declared the case as falling under "state secret" privilege. The Justice Department retroactively classified a 2002 Congr essional briefing about the case and some related letters from lawmakers, but th is week it decided to permit the information to be released. The inspector gener al of the department concluded last month that the F.B.I. had failed to aggressi vely investigate Ms. Edmonds's accusations of espionage and fired her in large p art for raising them. In a report that the department sought for months to keep classified, the inspector general issued a sharp rebuke to the bureau over its h andling of Ms. Edmonds's accusations. Note: If the above link fails, click here. This article fails to mention Ms. Edm onds claims that top individuals in government concealed critical information ab out 9/11 suggesting complicity by compromised politicians. For more, click here.

'Global War On Terror' Is Given New Name 2009-03-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR20090324028... The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase "global war on terror," a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor. In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of securit

y review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long W ar' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation .' " Senior administration officials had been publicly using the phrase "oversea s contingency operations" in a war context for roughly a month before the e-mail was sent. The Bush administration adopted the phrase ["Global War on Terror"] s oon after the Sept. 11, 2001. But critics abroad and at home, including some wit hin the U.S. military, said the terminology mischaracterized the nature of the e nemy and its abilities. Some military officers said, for example, that classifyi ng al-Qaeda and other anti-American militant groups as part of a single movement overstated their strength. Last month, the International Commission of Jurists urged the Obama administration to drop the phrase "war on terror." The commissio n said the term had given the Bush administration "spurious justification to a r ange of human rights and humanitarian law violations," including detention pract ices and interrogation methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as torture.

Colorado Proposes Tough Law on Executive Accountability 2008-04-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/business/01fraud.html?ex=1364702400&en=6a78... For 30 years, Lew Ellingson loved being a telephone man. His job splicing phone cables was one that he says gave him a true sense of accomplishment, first for Nor thwestern Bell, then US West and finally Qwest Communications International. But by the time Mr. Ellingson retired from Qwest last year at 52, he had grown angr y. An insider trading scandal had damaged the company s reputation, and the life s avings of former colleagues had evaporated in the face of Qwest s stock troubles. I t was a good place, he said wistfully. And then something like this happened. Now, Mr. Ellingson is the public face of a proposed ballot measure in Colorado that s eeks to create what supporters hope will be the nation s toughest corporate fraud law. Buttressed by local advocacy groups and criticized by a Colorado business o rganization, the measure would make business executives criminally responsible i f their companies run afoul of the law. It would also permit any Colorado reside nt to sue the executives under such circumstances. Proceeds from successful suit s would go to the state. If passed by voters in November, the proposal would lea ve top business officers [with] unprecedented individual accountability, said Mr . Ellingson. If nothing else, these folks in charge of the corporations and compa nies will think twice about cutting corners to make themselves look more profita ble than they really are, he said. The plight of Mr. Ellingson s former employer, Q west, based in Denver, was a motivation for the proposal. Last April, a jury in Denver convicted Qwest s former chief executive, Joseph P. Nacchio, of 19 of 42 co unts of insider trading. Mr. Nacchio was sentenced to six years in prison and or dered to pay a fine of $19 million and forfeit $52 million in money he earned fr om stock sales in 2001. Note: As reported in the Washington Post, Joseph P. Nacchio, the former Qwest CE O, has claimed that he was singled out for prosecution because he refused to coo perate with the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance of American c itizens, which began before 9/11.

Engineer Society Accused of Cover-Ups 2008-03-25, Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Associated Press http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/shared-gen/ap/National/Embattled_Engineers.html After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the levee failures caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the federal government paid the American Society of Civil Engineers to investigate what went wrong. Critics now accuse [ASCE] of cov

ering up engineering mistakes ... and using the investigations to protect engine ers and government agencies from lawsuits. In the World Trade Center case, criti cs contend the engineering society wrongly concluded skyscrapers cannot withstan d getting hit by airplanes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency paid the gro up about $257,000 to investigate the World Trade Center collapse. In 2002, the s ociety's report on the World Trade Center praised the buildings for remaining st anding long enough to allow tens thousands of people to flee. But, the report sa id, skyscrapers are not typically designed to withstand airplane impacts. Abolha ssan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineer and forensics expert, contends his compu ter simulations disprove the society's findings that skyscrapers could not be de signed to withstand the impact of a jetliner. Astaneh-Asl, who received money fr om the National Science Foundation to investigate the collapse, insisted most Ne w York skyscrapers built with traditional designs would survive such an impact. He also questioned the makeup of the society's investigation team. On the team w ere the wife of the trade center's structural engineer and a representative of t he buildings' original design team. "I call this moral corruption," said Astaneh -Asl, who is on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Note: For a revealing two-page summary of many unanswered questions about 9/11 r aised by major media sources, click here.

State Department Use of Contractors Leaps in 4 Years 2007-10-19, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24contractor.html?ex=1350878400&... Over the past four years, the amount of money the State Department pays to priva te security and law enforcement contractors has soared to nearly $4 billion a ye ar from $1 billion, ... but ... the department had added few new officials to ov ersee the contracts. Auditors and outside exerts say the results have been vast cost overruns, poor contract performance and, in some cases, violence that has s o far gone unpunished. A vast majority of the money goes to companies like DynCo rp International and Blackwater [Worldwide] to protect diplomats overseas, train foreign police forces and assist in drug eradication programs. There are only 1 7 contract compliance officers at the State Department s management bureau oversee ing spending of the billions of dollars on these programs, officials said. Two n ew reports have delivered harsh judgments about the State Department s handling of the contracts, including the protective services contract that employs Blackwat er guards whose involvement in a Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad has raised questio ns about their role in guarding American diplomats in Iraq. The ballooning budge t for outside contracts at the State Department is emblematic of a broader trend , contracting experts say. The Bush administration has doubled the amount of gov ernment money going to all types of contractors to $400 billion, creating a new and thriving class of post-9/11 corporations carrying out delicate work for the government. But the number of government employees issuing, managing and auditin g contracts has barely grown. That s a criticism that s true of not just State but of almost every agency, said Jody Freeman, an expert on administrative law at Harva rd Law School.

Bush administration defends spy law 2007-08-07, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-intel7aug07,0,1631228.story The Bush administration rushed to defend new espionage legislation Monday amid g rowing concern that the changes could lead to increased spying by U.S. intellige nce agencies on American citizens. But officials declined to provide details abo ut how the new capabilities might be used by the National Security Agency and ot

her spy services. And in many cases, they could point only to internal monitorin g mechanisms to prevent abuse of the new rules that appear to give the governmen t greater authority to tap into the traffic flowing across U.S. telecommunicatio ns networks. Officials rejected assertions that the new capabilities would enabl e the government to cast electronic "drift nets" that might ensnare U.S. citizen s [and] that the new legislation would amount to the expansion of a controversia l and critics contend unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program that Pres ident Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks. Intelligence experts said there we re an array of provisions in the new legislation that appeared to make it possib le for the government to engage in intelligence-collection activities that the B ush administration officials were discounting. "They are trying to shift the ter ms of the debate to their intentions and away from the meaning of the new law," said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of Ameri can Scientists. "The new law gives them authority to do far more than simply sur veil foreign communications abroad," he said. "It expands the surveillance progr am beyond terrorism to encompass foreign intelligence. It permits the monitoring of communications of a U.S. person as long as he or she is not the primary targ et. And it effectively removes judicial supervision of the surveillance process. "

Trust Busters 2007-04-15, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-neil15apr15,1,434... [ABC's talk show] "The View," by accident or design, has an almost eerie calibra tion to the public at large. For example, only one of the four co-hosts ... is a supporter of President Bush. In other words, 25% of the cast has a favorable op inion of Bush, pretty much in line with Bush's approval ratings nationally. Like wise, last year a Scripps Howard poll found that 36% of the U.S. public believes the government was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks. I estimate Rosie [O'D onnell] constitutes 36% of the cast. Why does pop culture matter? Because it rev eals ... what is really on our minds. And what's on our minds lately is reasonab le doubt. Actor Charlie Sheen [is] onboard to narrate a new version of the onlin e 9/11 conspiracy documentary "Loose Change," with distribution by billionaire M ark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures. We're not talking about a couple of flaky moonbat s in an Oakland basement. Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks. And just about everyw here you look, official narratives are coming unglued: Pat Tillman, for example, or the firing of eight federal prosecutors. The abduction of British sailors in what Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed was indisputably Iraqi territorial water s has proved to be quite disputable. [An] ex-British ambassador claims the map u sed by the Ministry of Defence to support its case is a fake. I am not a 9/11 co nspiracy theorist. At the same time, I'm certain we don't know all there is to k now about those events. The data stream has been so thoroughly corrupted. Weapon s of mass destruction. Abu Ghraib. The silencing of climate scientists. It's har d for the ministries of Washington to make an appeal to authority when they have been proven so unreliable. Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cov er-up, click here.

Pentagon Finds More Who Recall Atta Intel 2005-09-02, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/02/AR20050902005... Pentagon officials said Thursday they have found three more people who recall an intelligence chart that identified Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta as a terror

ist one year before the attacks on New York and Washington. But they have been u nable to find the chart or other evidence that it existed. On Thursday, four int elligence officials provided the first extensive briefing for reporters on the o utcome of their interviews with people associated with Able Danger and their rev iew of documents. They said they interviewed at least 80 people over a three-wee k period and found three, besides Philpott and Shaffer, who said they remember s eeing a chart that either mentioned Atta by name as an al-Qaida operative or sho wed his photograph. Four of the five recalled a chart with a pre-9/11 photo of A tta; the other person recalled only a reference to his name. The intelligence of ficials said they consider the five people to be credible but their recollection s are still unverified. Navy Cmdr. Christopher Chope, of the Center for Special Operations at U.S. Special Operations Command, said there were "negative indicat ions" that anyone ever ordered the destruction of Able Danger documents, other t han the materials that were routinely required to be destroyed under existing re gulations.

An Inconvenient Patriot 2005-09-00, Vanity Fair September 2005 Issue http://www.WantToKnow.info/sibeledmondsvanityfair Love of country led Sibel Edmonds to become a translator for the F.B.I. followin g 9/11. But everything changed when she accused a colleague of covering up illic it activity involving Turkish nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she's n ow fighting for the ideals that made her an American, and threatening some very powerful people. Edmonds has given confidential testimony inside a secure Sensit ive Compartmented Information facility on several occasions: to congressional st affers, to investigators from the O.I.G., and to the staff from the 9/11 commiss ion. Sources familiar with this testimony say that, in addition to her allegatio ns about the Dickersons, she reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with a very senior politician indeed Dennis Hast ert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. T he targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in s urreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information. "The Dic kersons," says one official familiar with the case, "are only the tip of the ice berg." Note: Sibel Edmonds is a courageous FBI whistleblower who is one of the great he roes of the 9/11 movement. For more mainstream media reports on her case with li nks to original sources provided, click here and here. For a nationally broadcas t August 10th radio interview (written transcript provided) of Ms. Edmonds descr ibing her case, click here. For an article on her own website describing how the FBI had clear foreknowledge of 9/11, see http://justacitizen.com/articles_docum ents/FBI%20&%20911.htm

McKinney reopens 9/11 2005-07-23, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Atlanta's leading newspaper) http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/0705/23natmckinney.html Rep. Cynthia McKinney led a Capitol Hill hearing Friday on whether the Bush admi nistration was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "What we are doing is asking the unanswered questions of the 9/11 families," McKinney, a DeK alb County Democrat...said during the proceedings. The eight-hour hearing, timed to mark the first anniversary of the release of the Sept. 11 commission's repor t on the attacks, drew dozens of contrarians and conspiracy theorists who sugges t President Bush purposely ignored warnings or may even have had a hand in the a ttack claims participants said the commission ignored. "Congresswoman McKinney i

s viewed as a contrarian," panelist Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official, said. "And I hope someday her views will be considered conventional wisdom." Note: Other than this article and C-SPAN (see below), no major media covered thi s important event. C-SPAN 2 eventually aired the hearing on August 31, 2005 at 8 PM. Many thanks to C-SPAN for being the only media outlet that consistently rep orts on 9/11 information that should be making headlines in all major media.

Local officials rethink recently made plans to deal with terrorism 2002-04-16, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Leading Newspaper of Pittsburgh, PA) http://www.post-gazette.com/neigh_city/20010923city0923p5.asp Emergency operations officials in Allegheny County and Pittsburgh hadn't trained for what happened Sept. 11. "Never in our wildest dreams did it ever come to th e table that they would be using passenger aircraft as missiles," said Bob Full, chief of emergency operations for Allegheny County. It is clear from 911 tapes that local officials had less than 15 minutes' warning that the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 was in Pittsburgh airspace before the plane crashed at 10:06 a.m. in Somerset County, killing all 44 people aboard. Full learned about the er rant plane at 9:53 a.m. That's when he got a call alerting him that the control tower at Pittsburgh International Airport had been evacuated. Thirteen minutes e arlier, he had talked to an airport official who had no indication of any threat . Between those two conversations, the Pittsburgh tower had received a call from the Cleveland air traffic control tower, saying a plane was heading toward Pitt sburgh and refusing to communicate with controllers. The FAA ordered the Pittsbu rgh control tower evacuated at 9:49 a.m. Note: Why on Earth would they have evacuated the control tower from which they c ould best monitor what was going on with errant Flight 93? Could it be someone d idn't want traffic control to see what was really going on? For lots more, click here and here.

Judge: CIA interrogations not relevant to 9/11 accused's sanity 2009-08-10, Miami Herald http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/story/1179756.html U.S. military defense lawyers for accused 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al Shibh ca nnot learn what interrogation techniques CIA agents used on the Yemeni before he was moved to Guantnamo to be tried as a terrorist, an Army judge has ruled. Bin a l Shibh, 37, is one of five men charged in a complex death penalty prosecution b y military commission currently under review by the Obama administration. But hi s lawyers say he suffers a "delusional disorder," and hallucinations in his cell at Guantnamo may leave him neither sane enough to act as his own attorney nor to stand trial. Prison camp doctors treat him with psychotropic drugs. Army Col. St ephen Henley, the military judge on the case, has scheduled a competency hearing for mid-September. Meantime, the judge ruled on Aug. 6 that "evidence of specif ic techniques employed by various governmental agencies to interrogate the accus ed is . . . not essential to a fair resolution of the incompetence determination hearing in this case." Prosecutors had invoked a national security privilege in seeking to shield the details from defense lawyers. Many of the techniques used on the men have already been made public. They included waterboarding, sleep de privation and sexual humiliation methods meant to break a captive's will. But Na vy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, the Yemeni's Pentagon appointed defense attorney, sa id court-approved mental health experts -- as well as the judge -- need to know the specifics to assess her client's mental illness. If he suffers post-traumati c stress disorder as a result of his CIA interrogations, there may be PTSD treat

ments that could make him competent. Note: For many reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of "the war on terror," click here.

Fifth Alarm for That Haunted Fireman 2009-04-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/arts/television/05harr.html?partner=rss&emc... In Season 5 of Rescue Me, which begins Tuesday on FX, the specter of 9/11 becomes a major character once again, when a French journalist starts interviewing firef ighters about their experiences for a commemorative book. This season one major character will become seriously ill with cancer apparently caused by his work at ground zero. Another, Franco Rivera (Daniel Sunjata), will articulate his ... b elief that 9/11 was an inside job, the result of a massive neoconservative governme nt conspiracy that was designed to increase American power by creating a pretext for seizing control of the world s oil supplies a view Mr. Sunjata himself happens to share. The reason we wrote it, Mr. Tolan said, is that Danny was spouting this stuff and even some of the guys, the firefighters on the set, were saying What is this? We saw how divisive this was and thought: We have to do this. Mr. Sunjata a dmits to some trepidation about how the show s audience will react to the story li ne. I won t say that my opinions were warmly received on the set, he said. At one poi nt I thought, Maybe I ll get fired if I keep opening my mouth. But even though Peter and Denis didn t sign on to this conspiracy, they were brave enough to include it in the show. I give them and FX and Fox I never thought I d say this a big round of applause. Mr. Sunjata certainly had reason to fear losing his job, since Rescue Me has never been timid about dispatching major characters. Note: To read why hundreds of professors and professionals agree with Daniel Sun jata, click here and here.

Civil liberties: Outrage at New York police plan to track vehicles 2008-08-14, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/14/usa.humanrights The Big Apple is turning into Big Brother, civil liberties groups have warned in response to a new plan from New York city's police chiefs to photograph every v ehicle entering Manhattan and hold the details on a massive database. As well as placing cameras at all tunnels and bridges into Manhattan, the 36-page plan, ca lled Operation Sentinel, calls for a security ring to be erected at Ground Zero and for a 50-mile buffer zone around the city within which mobile units would se arch for nuclear or "dirty" bombs. [The] 3,000 cameras that could be mounted as a result of the plans of the New York police ... have provoked outrage in the Un ited States. Donna Lieberman, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, sa id the idea of tracking the movements of millions of people was "an assault on t he country's historical respect for the right to privacy and the freedom to be l eft alone". The NYCLU is pressing the New York police to release further details of its intentions under freedom of information laws. The toughest element of th e scheme relates to preparations to secure Ground Zero once the six-hectare site is rebuilt and open to the public again. Those measures include moveable roadbl ocks, security cameras across lower Manhattan and an underground bomb-screening centre through which all delivery vehicles would have to pass. The plan to video the number plates of every vehicle would be applied to all points of entry into Manhattan, including the main Brooklyn-Battery, Holland, Lincoln and Midtown tu nnels and Brooklyn, Manhattan and other bridges.

Note: For lots more on threats to privacy from major media sources, click here.

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts 2008-06-13, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/washington/13scotus.html?partner=rssuserlan... The Supreme Court ... delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush adminis tration s handling of the detainees at Guantnamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prison ers there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention. The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Mili tary Commissions Act of 2006 that ... stripped the federal courts of jurisdictio n to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Ke nnedy said the truncated review procedure provided by a previous law, the Detain ee Treatment Act of 2005, falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substi tute because it failed to offer the fundamental procedural protections of habeas c orpus. Justice Kennedy declared: The laws and Constitution are designed to survive , and remain in force, in extraordinary times. The decision, which was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer, was categorical in its rejection of the administration s basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration s strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House tha t domestic law would never reach. Note: For many disturbing reports on threats to civil liberties from major media sources, click here.

Detainees Now Have Access to Federal Court 2008-06-13, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR20080612042... Defense attorneys for the 270 detainees at Guantanamo Bay said the Supreme Court decision yesterday that granted detainees habeas corpus rights was a watershed moment that will allow the men, some held for as long as 6 1/2 years, to challen ge their detentions before a civilian judge. The court's ruling immediately give s the detainees access to a federal court in Washington, where lawyers will seek to have judges order the men released from indefinite detention. Legal experts said it is unclear how the hearings will proceed, but the government could be co mpelled to present highly classified evidence, and detainees could for the first time be able to publicly call witnesses, present evidence of abuse and rebut te rrorism allegations. The decision could force the U.S. government to show why in dividual detainees must be held, something U.S. officials have fought for years. As many as 130 detainees have been deemed dangerous but are unlikely to ever fa ce criminal charges, according to prosecutors, and now government officials coul d have to argue for indefinite detention even if the evidence is flimsy or nonex istent. "We're going to see a high number of people the government is going to h ave to release," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented Guantanamo Bay detainees since 2002. It is unclea r how the Boumediene v. Bush decision will affect military commissions trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 20 detainees, including ... Khalid Sheik Mohammed, have been charged with war crimes.

Jesse Ventura says he regrets not asking more questions 2008-04-03, WKBT TV/Associated Press http://wkbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=8115056 Jesse Ventura says he regrets not asking more questions about the 9/11 attacks w hen he was still governor of Minnesota. Ventura tells the nationally syndicated radio host Alex Jones that his skepticism about the official version of events w ould have then carried more weight. Among many other things, Ventura questions h ow the Twin Towers could have fallen so fast and in such a way as to turn so muc h of the wreckage into dust. He also says that after watching the Twin Towers co llapse in slow motion, it appears to him exactly like the controlled demolition of a Las Vegas hotel. Ventura spoke on Jones' program on Wednesday. Ventura was elected as an independent in 1998 and left office in 2003 after deciding not to seek re-election. Jones frequently questions the events surrounding 9/11 and oft en discusses conspiracies on his radio show and documentary films. Note: For a powerful two-page summary of unanswered questions about the official account of 9/11, click here.

Marion Cotillard's 9/11 conspiracy theory 2008-03-01, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/01/wcotillard101... Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard was facing embarrasment with her new American pub lic last night after it emerged that she doubted the official account of the Sep tember 11 attacks. The 32-year-old French star has swept this year s best actress awards, also receiving a Bafta, Golden Globe and a Csar for her performance as si nger Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. But the actress faces a potential backlash in the US over comments she made in an interview in France. Footage which surfaced on the internet showed her questioning the New York terrorist attacks of Septem ber 11, 2001. "I think we re lied to about a number of things," she said, singling out September 11. Referring to the two passenger jets flown into the World Trad e Centre, Miss Cotillard said: "We see other towers of the same kind being hit b y planes, are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which b urned for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And ther e [New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed." Miss Cotillard sugge sted that the towers, planned in the early 1960s, were an outdated "money sucker " which would have cost so much to modernise that it was easier to destroy them. Miss Cotillard, who was born and brought up in Paris, made the comments on Pari s Premire Paris Dernire (Paris First Paris Last), a programme first broadcast a ye ar ago. They were largely ignored at the time, but appeared yesterday on a Frenc h website. Miss Cotillard s film career began in Luc Besson s 1998 film Taxi. Note: For a revealing summary of many unanswered questions about what happened o n 9/11, click here.

Dan Ellsberg: Sibel Edmonds case "Far More Explosive Than Pentagon Papers 2007-11-19, OpEdNews.com http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_luke_ryl_071119_dan_ellsberg_3a_sibel... Bradblog has been chasing the story about former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds' o ffer to 'tell all.' [Daniel] Ellsberg says: "I'd say what she has is far more ex plosive than the Pentagon Papers. From what [Edmonds] has to tell, it has a majo r difference from the Pentagon Papers in that it deals directly with criminal ac tivity and may involve impeachable offenses. And I don't necessarily mean the Pr esident or the Vice-President, though I wouldn't be surprised if the information

reached up that high. But other members of the Executive Branch may be impeache d as well. There will be phone calls going out to the media saying 'don't even t hink of touching [Edmonds' case], you will be prosecuted for violating national security.'" [Edmonds] said: "The media called from Japan and France and Belgium and Germany and Canada and from all over the world. I'm getting contact from all over the world, but not from here." More Ellsberg: "I am confident that there i s conversation inside the Government as to 'How do we deal with Sibel?' The firs t line of defense is to ensure that she doesn't get into the media. I think any outlet that thought of using her materials would go to the government and they w ould be told 'don't touch this, it's communications intelligence.' As long as th ey hold a united front on this, they don't run the risk of being shamed." [Edmon ds:] "I will name the name of major publications who know the story, and have be en sitting on it --- almost a year and a half." "How do you know they have the s tory?," we asked. "I know they have it because people from the FBI have come in and given it to them. They've given them the documents and specific case-numbers on my case." Note: Though this is not from one of our normal reliable sources, Dan Ellsberg i s a highly respected whistleblower who has received an abundance of major media coverage over the years. As the mainstream media are clearly and consciously ign oring this story, we felt it deserved to be posted, even though we don't have a major media source to back it up. For lots more reliable information on this cou rageous woman, click here.

Source Disclosure Ordered in Anthrax Suit 2007-08-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/13/AR20070813009... Five reporters must reveal their government sources for stories they wrote about Steven J. Hatfill and investigators' suspicions that the former Army scientist was behind the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, a federal judge ruled. The ruling is a victory for Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert who has argued in a civil suit that the government violated his privacy rights and ruined his chances at a job by unfairly leaking information about the probe. He has not been charged in the attacks that killed five people and sickened 17 others, and he has denied wrongd oing. Hatfill's suit, filed in 2003, accuses the government of waging a "coordin ated smear campaign." To succeed, Hatfill and his attorneys have been seeking th e identities of FBI and Justice Department officials who disclosed disparaging i nformation about him to the media. In lengthy depositions in the case, reporters have identified 100 instances when Justice or FBI sources provided them with in formation about the investigation of Hatfill and the techniques used to probe hi s possible role in anthrax-laced mailings. But the reporters have refused to nam e the individuals. In 2002, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft called Hatfil l, who had formerly worked at the Army's infectious diseases lab in Fort Detrick in Frederick County, a "person of interest" in the anthrax case. Authorities ha ve not made any arrests in the investigation. Hatfill's search for government le akers is "strikingly similar" to the civil suit filed by Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear s cientist who became the subject of a flurry of media stories identifying him as a chief suspect in a nuclear-secrets spy case. Those stories also relied on anon ymous sources. Lee was never charged with espionage. Note: For more reliable information about the anthrax attacks that followed clos ely after 9/11 and the mysterious deaths of over a dozen renowned microbiologist s shortly thereafter, click here.

Airlines Sue FBI, CIA Over Sept. 11

2007-08-07, Associated Press http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/airlines-sue-fbi-cia-over-sept-11/n2007... Airlines and aviation-related companies sued the CIA and the FBI on Tuesday to f orce terrorism investigators to tell whether the aviation industry was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. The two lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Manhattan s ought court orders for depositions as the aviation entities build their defenses against lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages for injuries, fatalitie s, property damage and business losses related to Sept. 11, 2001. The aviation c ompanies said the agencies in a series of boilerplate letters had refused to let them depose two secret agents, including the 2001 head of the CIA's special Osa ma bin Laden unit, and six FBI agents with key information about al-Qaida and bi n Laden. The [plaintiffs] said they were entitled to present evidence to show th e terrorist attacks did not depend upon negligence by any aviation defendants an d that there were other causes of the attacks. In the CIA lawsuit, companies ... asked to interview the deputy chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit in 2001 and an FBI agent assigned to the unit at that time. The names of both are secret. In th e FBI lawsuit, the companies asked to interview five former and current FBI empl oyees who had participated in investigations of al-Qaida and al-Qaida operatives before and after Sept. 11. Those individuals included Coleen M. Rowley, the for mer top FBI lawyer in its Minneapolis office, who sent a scathing letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in May 2002 complaining that a supervisor in Washingt on interfered with the Minnesota investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui weeks befor e the Sept. 11 attacks. Requests to interview the agents were rejected as not su fficiently explained, burdensome or protected by investigative or attorney-clien t privilege, the lawsuits said. Note: For a concise summary of reliable, verifiable information on the 9/11 cove rup, click here.

Producer of 9/11 Conspiracy Film 'Loose Change' Arrested for Deserting the Army 2007-07-26, FOX News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290942,00.html One of the young filmmakers behind a controversial 9/11 conspiracy documentary w as arrested this week on charges that he deserted the Army, even though ... he r eceived an honorable discharge. Korey Rowe, 24, who served with the 101st Airbor ne in Afghanistan and Iraq, told FOXNews.com that he was honorably discharged fr om the military 18 months ago which he said he explained to sheriffs when they p ounded on his door late Monday night. When they came to my house, I showed them m y paperwork, Rowe said. The cops said, 'You re still in the system.' Rowe is one of t he producers of "Loose Change," a cult hit on the Internet espousing the theory that the U.S. government and specifically the Bush administration orchestrated t he Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The movie is set to be released in about 40 Briti sh theaters in late August, according to Rowe and fellow filmmakers Jason Bermas and Dylan Avery. Police arrested Rowe at his house in Oneonta, N.Y., about 10:4 5 p.m. on Monday and took him to the Otsego County jail, where he spent a day-an d-a-half before he was released, he said. Rowe was turned over to officials at F ort Drum the closest military base who then booked him on a flight to Fort Campb ell, Ky., where his unit is based, to try to straighten out why the military iss ued a warrant for his arrest. A warrant for my arrest came down and showed up on the sheriff s desk, Rowe said. Where it came from and why it showed up all of a sudd en is a mystery to me. There were at least five sheriffs on hand for his arrest, Rowe said. They pulled a whole operation. They cut my phone lines. They came from the woods. It was crazy it was ridiculous, he said.

FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data 2007-06-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR20070613024... An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone ca lls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was docum ented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressio nal criticism. The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national sec urity investigations since 2002. The vast majority of the new violations were in stances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone an d e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files. Two dozen of the newl y-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have. The results confirmed what ... critics feared, namel y that many agents did not ... follow the required legal procedures and paperwor k requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensiti ve and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the Nat ional Security Letter, or NSL. Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to n onnegotiable demands for personal information -- demands that are not reviewed i n advance by a judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially e ased the rules for issuing NSLs, [leading] to an explosive growth in the use of the letters. More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 seeking 47,000 pi eces of information, mostly from telecommunications companies.

O'Donnell, Sheen Back 9/11 Conspiracy Theories 2007-03-22, WCBS News - New York CBS Affiliate http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_081173332.html A controversial new film about 9/11 is raising eyebrows, not only for its conten t, but also for the people involved in the project: Rosie O'Donnell and Charlie Sheen. The sitcom actor and talk show hostess have both become spokespeople for the 9/11 conspiracy movement. The video "Loose Change" ... has been floating aro und the Internet for years, but now Sheen is in talks with Magnolia Pictures to narrate a new version of the video and redistribute it. Sheen believes the gover nment may have been behind the attacks. O'Donnell has been using her Web site to reprint excerpts from the 9/11 conspiracy site, Whatreallyhappened.com. Magnoli a Films founder Mark Cuban, who also owns the Dallas Mavericks, said they're als o looking for a film telling the other side of the story, saying "we like contro versial subjects." Note: To view this film which has awoken tens of millions to the 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice 2006-10-01, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR20060930002... On July 10, 2001...then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrori sm chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters. Black laid out the case...showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was...so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the Whit e House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice...and said he needed to see h er right away. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get R ice to kick-start the government into immediate action. Two weeks earlier, he ha d told Richard A. Clarke: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is go

ing to be the big one." But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other i ntelligence. Black emphasized that...the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Rice...was polite, but they felt the brush-off. P resident Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies. Tenet left the meeting f eeling frustrated. No immediate action meant great risk. The July 10 meeting...w ent unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attac ks. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Bla ck felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they d idn't want to know about. Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Bla ck later said, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we w ere holding to her head."

9/11 Commission report is a lie 2006-05-16, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/270284_connellyrebut16.html The [9/11] commission's conclusions and recommendations should be totally reject ed. Its story is full of lies, distortions and omissions of fact. Following are two of the more than 40 reasons why the official story about what happened on 9/ 11 is untrue. First, who were the hijackers? None of those named appear on any o f the passenger lists released by the airlines. Six of the men named by the gove rnment are still alive. We know that because European media have interviewed the m. In his book, "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," Dr. Dav id Ray Griffin documents all that and concludes the whole report is one long lie . Second, in the months after 9/11 all of the surviving New York City Fire Depar tment personnel who were on the scene were interviewed. Those oral histories wer e recorded and withheld from the public until Aug. 15, 2005. Only after losing i n court three times did the city of New York finally release them. All 503 are n ow posted on The New York Times Web site. Why did the city fight so hard to keep them from the public? It turns out those oral histories reveal details about wh at was happening in the World Trade Center buildings that are completely inconsi stent with the tale told by the commission. Dozens of firefighters and medics re ported hearing, seeing and feeling explosives going off in the buildings that co llapsed. Why were there explosives, very powerful explosives by all accounts, go ing off in the buildings? The report seems to be an obvious cover-up. The questi on that we all need to ask is: What is the commission covering up? Was 9/11, in fact, an inside job?

A case for conspiracy theorists 2006-05-12, Newsweek http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12759539/site/newsweek/ Is there a case for conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the Iraq war? About 10 mi nutes into the ultra-low-budget documentary 'Loose Change,' now making its way a round the Internet, that late, great genius of addled truth-telling, Hunter S. T hompson, is heard giving his gonzo opinion of the way the American press behaved after 9/11. "Well, let's see, 'shamefully' is the word that comes to mind," he says. The kernel of truth in all the conspiracy theories is that the Bush admini stration's biggest supporters and closest political allies have benefited mighti ly from its policy of open-ended war. Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company -- which is all about both oil and defense -- has seen its stock ris e from about $12 a share to about $80 a share under this administration. ExxonMo bil, which has contributed mightily to the Republican Party, has seen its stock

soar from about $32 to $64 since Bush took office. Share prices in both companie s, and in their industries, were plunging before the Bush administration came to office in early 2001. 'Loose Change' doesn't present a plausible case for consp iracy, only a collection of innuendoes. But the invasion of Iraq, well, that's a rather different matter. As a whole raft of books by former members of the admi nistration, Bush admirers and outside analysts have established over the last co uple of years, the president and vice president were hell-bent on toppling Sadda m Hussein even before September 2001. Note: Though the author belittles 'Loose Change,' he also makes some great point s and alerts people to the fact that this free documentary has gained wide popul arity.

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi 2006-04-10, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR20060409008... [April 10, 2006] The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnif y the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military doc uments. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligen ce officials believe may have...helped the Bush administration tie the war to... Sept. 11. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted d eadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," [s aid] Col. Derek Harvey, who...was one of the top officers handling Iraq intellig ence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature...made him more important than he really is." One b riefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army G en. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home aud ience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war. There were d irect military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One sli de in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqaw i was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter. Filkins's resulting art icle...ran on the Times front page. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million. "Villainize Zarqawi" one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed..."PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work. One internal br iefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said..."The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

Secret US plans for Iraq's oil 2005-03-17, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4354269.stm The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 at tacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil. Two years ago toda y - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would beg in to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered. In fact there were two conflicting plans, settin g off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side , versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmati sts". "Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan [was] drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants. Insiders told Newsnight that planning beg an "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the Septemb er 11th attack on the US. The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secre t plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives inten t on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel. Philip Carroll, the former CEO

of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Governmen t a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in Ma y 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facili ties while I was involved." Formerly US Secretary of State, [James] Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi Arabian government.

FBI faulted over linguist's complaints: Review deemed lacking 2005-01-15, Boston Globe/Associated Press http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/01/15/fbi_faulted_... The FBI never adequately investigated complaints by a fired contract linguist wh o alleged shoddy work and possible espionage inside the bureau's translator prog ram, although evidence and witnesses supported her, the Justice Department's sen ior oversight official said yesterday. The bureau's response to complaints by fo rmer translator Sibel Edmonds was "significantly flawed," Inspector General Glen n Fine said in a report that summarized a lengthy classified investigation into how the FBI handled the case. Fine said Edmonds's contentions "raised substantia l questions and were supported by various pieces of evidence." "The report subst antiated the most serious of Sibel's allegations and demonstrates that the FBI o wes Sibel an apology and compensation for its unlawful firing of her rather than hiding behind its false cloak of national security," said Mark Zaid, her lawyer . Note: Ms. Edmonds deeply revealing allegations are laid out clearly in an open l etter to 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean available at http://www.WantToKnow .info/sibeledmonds.

Berg's encounter with 'terrorist' revealed 2004-05-14, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Northeast/05/13/berg.encounter/ When Nicholas Berg took an Oklahoma bus to a remote college campus a few years a go, the American recently beheaded by terrorists allowed a man with terrorist co nnections to use his laptop computer, according to his father. Michael Berg said the FBI investigated the matter more than a year ago. He stressed that his son was in no way connected to the terrorists who captured and killed him. Governmen t sources told CNN that the encounter involved an acquaintance of Zacarias Mouss aoui -- the only person publicly charged in the United States in connection with the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. According to Berg, his son was taking a course a few years ago at a remote campus of the University of Oklahoma near an airport. He described how on one particular day, his son met "some terrorist pe ople -- who no one knew were terrorists at the time." At one point during the bu s ride, Berg said, the man sitting next to his son asked if he could use Nick's laptop computer. Government sources said Berg gave the man his password, which w as later used by Moussaoui, the sources said. The sources said the man who used Berg's e-mail knew Moussaoui. But the sources would not disclose details of how the men were connected. Note: Other major media articles have pointed out a number of other strange "coi ncidences" connecting the man allegedgly beheaded and those accused of involveme nt in 9/11. How can that be? For lots more, click here.

French buy into 9/11 conspiracy

2002-06-26, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/06/26/france.book Throughout the spring, and into this summer, a leading bestseller in France has not been some great work of French literature but a $17-dollar paperback called the "Horrifying Fraud." The book casts doubt on the official version of the even ts of September 11, substituting an elaborate conspiracy concocted by America's military-industrial complex in order to increase U.S. military budgets. It has s old more than 200,000 copies here. Thierry Meyssan, author of "The Horrifying Fr aud"...insists, among other things, that it was not a hijacked American Airlines 757 that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 but a missile fired by the military itself. Meyssan said: "The official version is incomplete and on certain points is wrong. In addition to selling hundreds of thousands of copies of his first bo ok, Meyssan's follow-up sold 15,000 copies two days after launch and is now numb er seven on one bestseller list. Note: Though this article is almost four years old, we only recently received th e above link to the article on the CNN website from a supporter. If you want to be educated on this extremely important topic, I cannot recommend highly enough the Google video "Loose Change," which is filled with verifiable information on 9/11 at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8260059923762628848. I urge to watch even just the first 10 or 15 minutes of this highly educational documentar y. By educating ourselves, we can work more effectively to build a build a bette r world.

The World's Most Wanted Man 2009-09-12, Daily Express (One of the UK's largest-circulation newspapers) http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/126787/The-world-s-most-wanted-man Thousands of troops from countries including Britain, America, Afghanistan and P akistan search relentlessly for him. Dozens of CIA agents have no other mission than working day after day on his capture. Yet eight years after the 9/11 outrag e on the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon in Washington, no one has come close to laying a finger on Osama Bin Laden. Ever since that day when nearly 3, 000 people were murdered, America has wanted the leader of al Qaeda dead or aliv e. But there is a compelling argument, put forward by a respected American acade mic, that Bin Laden was killed eight years ago. Professor David Ray Griffin, who has written authoritative books on the 9/11 attacks, believes the US has kept t he Bin Laden myth alive to bolster the war against terror in Afghanistan and Ira q. What is truly astonishing is that despite an army of investigators, a practic ally limitless budget and an immense 15million bounty on his head, so little is k nown about what has actually happened to Bin Laden. In his new book Osama Bin La den: Dead Or Alive?. There s much evidence which points to the conclusion that Osam a Bin Laden is no longer alive, Prof Griffin insists. We have had no credible inte lligence on Bin Laden since 2001. On Christmas Day 2001, Pakistan s Observer newspa per carried a report of Bin Laden s funeral, saying he died a natural and quiet de ath. The major pretext for the war in Afghanistan is the expressed need to preven t Osama Bin Laden and his followers attacking the West again. This pretext would be removed by convincing evidence that Bin Laden is dead. Such evidence exists, [said Prof. Griffin.]. Note: Esteemed scholar and WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's book, Osam a bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, can be purchased here.

The deep state does not respond to FOIA requests 2009-08-22, Chicago Sun-Times News Group/Rock Creek Free Press

http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/beaconnews/news/blogentries/index.html?bbP... In an attempt to get to the bottom of what really happened on 9/11, citizen inve stigator Aidan Monaghan has filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) re quests with federal agencies such as the FBI, SEC, [and] Department of the Navy. Agency after agency has refused to comply with his requests, instead claiming t hat the information cannot be found, does not exist, [or is "exempt from disclos ure."] The FBI has put an exemption on all of their 9/11 information and will re lease information only if compelled to do so by a lawsuit, of which Monaghan has filed two. The list of FOIAs that Monaghan has filed which have yielded no info rmation is long. He asked the Secret Service for documents that reveal what time former Vice President Dick Cheney entered the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), as well as documents pertaining to the names of persons admitted to PEOC. Reply: no records or documents pertaining to your request. He asked th e SEC for a bibliography of the investigation records that were located in the S EC s offices on floors 11-13 in World Trade Center 7. The reply: did not locate or identify any information responsive to your request. Monaghan asked the Naval S urface Warfare Center for records about the research and development of nano-siz ed aluminum powders or nano-sized iron oxide powders. Reply: have not found any records responsive to your request. I m beginning to wonder if the FOIA is just a l ot of theatre for public consumption to provide a perception that yes, governmen t is accessible, it s transparent, said Monaghan. For two years now I ve tried to pull as much 9/11 info from the federal government as I can, and the most noteworthy thing I ve found is the absence of information. Material that should be there jus t isn t. Note: For lots more on government secrecy from reliable, verifiable sources, cli ck here.

'If I didn't confess to 7/7 bombings MI5 officers would rape my wife,' claims to rture victim 2009-06-25, Daily Mail (a popular U.K. newspaper) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1195484/If-I-didnt-confess-7-7-bombin... A British man spoke publicly for the first time yesterday to accuse MI5 officers of forcing him to confess to masterminding the July 7 bombings. Jamil Rahman cl aims UK security officers were behind his arrest in 2005 in Bangladesh. He says he was beaten repeatedly by local officials who also threatened to rape him and his wife. Mr Rahman, who is suing the Home Office, said a pair of MI5 officers w ho attended his torture and interrogation would leave the room while he was beat en. He claims when he told the pair he had been tortured they merely answered: ' They haven't done a very good job on you.' Mr Rahman told the BBC: 'They threate ned my family. They go to me, "In the UK, gas leaks happen, if your family house had a gas leak and everyone got burnt, there's no problems, we can do that easi ly".' He says he eventually made a false confession of involvement in the July 7 bomb plots. The extraordinary allegations will add to pressure on UK ministers to come clean over the way Britain's intelligence agencies have been allowed to gather evidence around the world in the eight years since the September 11 attac ks. Jamil Rahman, a former civil servant from south Wales, is a British citizen who moved to Bangladesh in 2005 and married a woman he met there. He returned to the UK last year. He said: 'It was all to do with the British. Jamil Rahman is one of a number of former detainees who accuse the British Government colluded i n their torture abroad. His account echoes that of former Guantanamo Bay detaine e Binyam Mohamed, who said he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco with MI5's kn owledge. The 30-year-old Ethiopian says he was beaten and deprived of sleep to t ry to make him confess to an Al Qaeda 'dirty bomb' plot, and his treatment is no w the subject of an unprecedented police investigation into MI5's conduct.

Note: For lots more on the hidden strategies used to maintain the "war on terror ", click here.

D.C. Crash Kills General Who Scrambled Jets on 9/11 2009-06-24, Bloomberg News http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aGu5lX16VTk8 David F. Wherley Jr., the head of the Washington National Guard who scrambled je ts over the city during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was among those killed in th e worst commuter train crash in the city s history, officials said. Wherley s wife, Ann, was also among the nine people killed when a train plowed into the rear of a stopped train during rush hour on June 22, Quintin Peterson, a spokesman for t he Metropolitan Police Department, said in a telephone interview. Both were 62 a nd lived in southeast Washington. Wherley was commander of the 113th Fighter Win g at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland during the September 2001 terrorist atta cks and sent up aircraft with orders to protect the White House and the Capitol, according to the 9/11 Commission report. He commanded the District of Columbia National Guard from 2003 to 2008, the unit said in a statement. Wherley flew T-3 8 training jets and F-105 Thunderchief and F-4 Phantom combat jets during a mili tary career that began in 1969, according to the guard s statement. It said he ear ned a bachelor s degree in economics from Fordham University in New York City in 1 969, and a master s in business administration from the University of Maryland in 1977. Note: Could there be something more than a mere accident behind the death of the commander of the air defense forces over Washington DC on 9/11? Many questions continue to swirl concerning what was in the air over the city that morning, wha t was launched by Gen. Wherley and when, and why no interception of an attack ai rcraft approaching the Pentagon occurred. He knew more than the public does abou t what really took place in those crucial hours, but he will now not be availabl e for questioning should a real investigation into the 9/11 attacks take place. For lots more on the suspicions that surround the official explanation and calls by highly respected citizens for just such an investigation, click here and her e.

Review: 'New World Order' on Independent Film Channel 2009-05-26, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-new-world-order26-2009may26,0... "New World Order," which premieres today on the Independent Film Channel, is a f ilm about ... volunteers in an "information war" who see ... that 9/11 was an "i nside job," that the military-industrial complex killed Kennedy, and that an int ernational "power elite" is plotting to enslave us all, excepting for those it w ill kill outright. They are hard to pigeonhole politically, these conspiracy ade pts, trusting neither the "socialist Democrats" nor the "fascist Republicans" -Ron Paul seems to be their man, if anyone is -- yet sounding as often like '60s leftist radicals as right-wing militiamen. They take the 1st Amendment as serio usly as any card-carrying member of the ACLU, styling themselves muckrakers and speakers of truth to power, often through a bullhorn. The man with the biggest b ullhorn is Alex Jones, an Austin, Texas-based syndicated radio host ... and the point through which all the strands connect in this unexpectedly affecting, nonj udgmental documentary by Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel. Much of what Jones and his fellows and followers believe is, in a general way, hardly controversial. But wh ether 9/11 was a plot to bring on world government, or whether the government yo u already have has painted a red or blue dot on your mailbox to indicate whether you will be shot immediately or merely be sent to the "FEMA camps" when the Ame

rican Armageddon arrives, well, that's a pale horse of a different color. (Still , you'll want to check your mailbox now.) "This is more important than how much Britney Spears' hair sold for on EBay, 'Dancing With the Stars' or who's gonna b e America's next idol," says one believer. "People think this is a joke. We're n ot a joke." Note: The disparaging tone of this review of the documentary is typical of mains tream media treatment of 9/11 truth activity, but it makes clear that the film i tself does not share this attitude.

9/11 widow among victims of crash near Buffalo 2009-02-13, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29176877/ One of the victims of Continental Flight 3407, Beverly Eckert, was a Sept. 11 wi dow who put her never-ending grief to good use to make the country safer. Just l ast week, Eckert was at the White House with Barack Obama, part of a meeting the president had with relatives of those killed in the 2001 attacks and the bombin g of the USS Cole to discuss how the new administration would handle terror susp ects. Obama, addressing business leaders on Friday, referred to her "passionate commitment" to the 9/11 families. "She was an inspiration to me and to so many o thers, and I pray that her family finds peace and comfort in the hard days ahead ," the president said during remarks about the crash at the East Room event. "Sh e was such an important part of all of our work," said Mary Fetchet, another 9/1 1 family activist. Note: Mrs. Eckert rejected the $1.8 million payment for 9/11 survivors, as she w ould have forfeited the right to sue the government for its role in the event. A BC News quotes her on how she had "chosen to go to court rather than accept a pa yoff from the 9/11 victims compensation fund. I want to know why two 110-story s kyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options we re so limited. I am suing because unlike ... congressional hearings and the 9/11 commission, my lawsuit requires all testimony be given under oath and fully use s powers to compel evidence." For why Mrs. Eckert and hundreds of other highly r espected politicians and professors are calling for a new investigation on 9/11, click here.

The Political Suspicions of 9/11 2009-02-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/business/media/02fx.html?partner=rss&emc=rs... A coming episode of the acclaimed FX drama Rescue Me will tackle what may sound li ke a far-fetched plot line: that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an inside job. The a ctor who espouses the theories on camera, it turns out, also subscribes to them in real life. The second episode of Rescue Me s fifth season, starting in April, may represent the first fictional presentation of 9/11 conspiracy theories by a mai nstream media company (FX is operated by the News Corporation). They re not discuss ed a lot in the press, Daniel Sunjata, the actor who plays Franco Rivera on Rescue Me, told reporters at a television press tour last month. In the episode, Mr. Su njata s character [describes] a neoconservative government effort to control the wor ld s oil, drastically increase military spending and change the definition of pre-e mptive attack. To put it into action, he continues, what you need is a new Pearl H arbor. That s what they said they needed. Mr. Sunjata surprised some of the TV repo rters when he said that he absolutely, 100 percent supports the assertion that 9/11 was an inside job. The alternative theories seem to me to make a lot more sense t han the ones that are popularly espoused, he said, calling it admirable that the

conversation was allowed within Rescue Me. Peter Tolan, an executive producer, sai d Mr. Sunjata is well read and has done a lot of research. Look, obviously not all of us buy in, he told reporters. But we went: Wow, that s interesting, and he s passionat e about it. Let s use that. Note: For a powerful two-page summary of key unanswered questions from major med ia sources about what really happened on 9/11, click here. To read charges by hu ndreds of professors and top politicians claiming that the U.S. government is ly ing about 9/11, click here.

Bush Doctrine enters American vocabulary 2008-09-26, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/26/EDGR135ERL.DTL Thanks to the Sept. 11 interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson of ABC News, t he Bush Doctrine has become part of the American vocabulary. Although it has bee n a fateful doctrine - it was used to justify the attack on Iraq - many American s reported that they were as clueless about it as Gov. Palin. So what is the Bus h Doctrine? According to international law as generally understood since the cre ation of the United Nations, a pre-emptive attack is legal only if a country has certain knowledge that an attack on it is imminent - too imminent for the matte r to be taken to the U.N. Security Council. Pre-emptive war is different from pr eventive war, in which a country, fearing that another country may become strong enough to threaten it at some time in the future, attacks it to prevent this po ssibility. Preventive wars are illegal under international law. This distinction , however, creates a terminological problem: Although preventive war is worse th an pre-emptive war, to most ears preemption sounds worse. Many people, therefore , speak of pre-emptive war when they mean preventive war. To avoid confusion, we can use the term pre-emptive-preventive war. Neoconservatives, the most powerfu l of whom is Vice President Dick Cheney, had long disliked the idea that America 's use of military power could be constrained by the prohibition against preempt ive-preventive war. In 1992, his last year as secretary of defense, Cheney produ ced a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance that said the United States should use force to "pre-empt" and "preclude threats." After the 9/11 terrorist attacks , the neocons were able to turn their wish into U.S. policy. Note: This article is by WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin. He analyzes t he significance of the 9/11 attacks for the acceptance of the Bush Doctrine in m ore detail in his recent book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, pointing out that the author of the document which first made the doctrine official policy was Phi lip Zelikow, who then later became executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom 2008-09-09, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/world/africa/09cairo.html Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom [in Cairo] that Osama bin Lade n and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 1 1, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in thei r planning, if not their execution, too. Look, I don t believe what your government s and press say. It just can t be true, said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. Why would they tell the truth? I th ink the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oi l. Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs like themselves could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington s post-9/11

foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks , especially with the invasion of Iraq. Maybe people who executed the operation w ere Arabs, but the brains? No way, said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store ow ner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. It was organized by other people, the Uni ted States or the Israelis. Zein al-Abdin, 42, an electrician, [said] What happene d in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda. They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that s why. Note: For a two-page summary of many reports from reliable, verifiable sources t hat highlight unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click her e.

Officer calls Sept. 11 cases tainted 2008-06-05, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-tribunal5-2008jun05,0,79... When Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged collaborators in the Sept. 11 terror ist attacks appear before the war crimes tribunal here today, ousted chief prose cutor Col. Morris D. Davis will not be celebrating. Davis, who has spent half of his life in the military justice system, still considers it "the most ethical p rocess in the world." But the Pentagon's push to prosecute the so-called 9/11 Fi ve is tainted, in his view, by political intrusions, illegal influence applied b y more-senior officers and reliance on evidence obtained through coercion or tor ture. Davis drew the wrath of many in the Pentagon hierarchy when he objected la st fall to pressures from Bush administration political appointees to prosecute Mohammed, known in intelligence circles as KSM, ahead of other war crimes suspec ts whose cases were already researched and on whom vital evidence was declassifi ed. Unless the evidence prosecutors have against Mohammed and his codefendants i s declassified, much of their prosecution will be conducted behind closed doors, depriving the American media and public of a clear view of the proceedings, he says. Davis ran afoul of superiors ... when he advised his prosecutors against r elying on evidence obtained through waterboarding and other interrogation techni ques that have been deemed coercive or tantamount to torture. Davis resigned aft er political appointees at the Pentagon rejected his judgment on the choice of c ases to be tried in the months leading up to this November's election, as well a s his advice against building prosecutions on coerced and potentially unreliable confessions.

360 post-9/11 workers have died, including 80 of cancer 2008-05-08, New York Daily News http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008/05/08/2008-05-08_360_post911_workers_hav... More than 360 workers who dealt with the aftermath of the World Trade Center dis aster have died, state health officials said Wednesday. Officials have determine d the cause of death of 154 of the responders and volunteers who toiled at Groun d Zero, the blocks nearby and at the Fresh Kills landfill, where debris from the site was taken. Of those, 80 died of cancer. "It's the tip of the iceberg," sai d David Worby, who is representing 10,000 workers - 600 with cancer - who say th ey got sick after working on rescue and recovery efforts. "These statistics bear out how toxic that site was," Worby said. Most of the deadly tumors were in the lungs and digestive system, according to the tally from the state's World Trade Center Responder Fatality Investigation Program. Other deaths were traced to bl ood cancers and heart and circulatory diseases. Five ex-workers committed suicid e, said Kitty Gelberg, who is tracking the deaths for the program. Gelberg said ... there is an overall undercount of workers who have died. Last year, the head of Mount Sinai Medical Center's monitoring and treatment program, Dr. Robin Her

bert, predicted a "third wave" of 9/11-related deaths from cancer. Cathy Murray, whose husband, Fire Lt. John Murray, died of colon cancer April 30, "absolutely " connects his disease to his work at Ground Zero. He was diagnosed in June and was 52 when he died, she said. "He was perfectly healthy," said Cathy Murray, 53 , of Staten Island. "He never smoked a day in his life, and neither did I. It ha ppened so quick and so aggressive. He was responding at first, but then he wasn' t," she added. "And now he's gone." Note: For a powerful summary of reports from major media sources questioning the official story of what happened on 9/11, click here.

Blame U.S. for 9/11: 'Plots' Thicken in Shocking Poll 2007-11-24, New York Post http://www.nypost.com/seven/11242007/news/nationalnews/blame_u_s__for_9_11_id... Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found. Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal offi cials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World T rade Center and Pentagon. Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was "not likely," according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll. The findings followed a 2 006 poll by the same researchers, who found that 36 percent of Americans believe federal government officials "either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no ac tion" because they wanted "to go to war in the Middle East." In that poll, 16 pe rcent said the Twin Towers might have collapsed because of secretly planted expl osives - not hijacked passenger jets flown into them. And what hit the Pentagon? Twelve percent figured it was a US cruise missile. In the latest Scripps Howard /Ohio University poll, 811 US adults were interviewed Sept. 24 to Oct. 10. Among [other] findings: 42 percent believe the federal government knew in advance of the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy, compared with 40 percent who call that theory "not likely." 37 percent believe UFOs are real and that the feds have bee n hiding the truth about them. Eight out of 10 Americans suspect oil companies a re conspiring to keep fuel prices high and 50 percent said a conspiracy is "very likely." Only 14 percent felt it was unlikely. Note: We normally don't use the New York Post as a reliable source. Yet this key news is based on a very reliable poll, which you can read in the Scripps News S ervice report available here. Sadly, the Post was the only major newspaper to pi ck up this important news, and they took a heavy editorial slant against 9/11 tr uth. For a concise summary of major media reports suggesting that the official a ccount of 9/11 cannot be true, click here.

The Good Germans Among Us 2007-10-14, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14rich2.html?ex=1350014400&en=83a8b... Bush lies doesn t cut it anymore. It s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves. By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alber to Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever s ince photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As An drew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Time s of London, America s enhanced interrogation techniques have a grotesque provenance : Verschrfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the third degree. It le ft no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep depri vation. We must ... examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed

in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one tha t put Verschrfte Vernehmung on the map. The war was sold by a ... fear-fueled Whi te House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press the powerful institutions that should have pr ovided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration s case failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objecti ons. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top. [But] as the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow t o notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin. Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those good Ger mans who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.

Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11 2007-08-25, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9 /11. I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kero sene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twi n towers whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C would snap through a t the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third to wer the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 which collapsed in 6.6 seconds i n its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all th ree buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explo sions" in the towers ... the [FBI's] list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which inclu ded three men who were and still are very much alive and living in the Middle Ea st. What about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, whose "Islami c" advice to his gruesome comrades released by the CIA mystified every Muslim fr iend I know in the Middle East? Like everyone else, I would like to know the ful l story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, mer etricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan a nd in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once sa id that "we're an empire now we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. Note: Robert Fisk is an award-winning, veteran Middle East reporter for the Inde pendent. For a concise summary of reliable news reports that raise serious quest ions about what really happened on 9/11, click here

The Padilla Conviction 2007-08-17, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/opinion/17fri1.html?ex=1345003200&en=b04dde... It would be a mistake to see [the verdict against Jose Padilla] as a vindication for the Bush administration s serial abuse of the American legal system in the na me of fighting terrorism. On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical ... that the crime he was convicted of conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas b ears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the Unit ed States which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. When Mr. Padilla was arrested in 2002, the government said he was an Al Qaeda operative who had plotted to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb inside the United States. Mr. Padil la, who is an American citizen, should have been charged as a criminal and put o

n trial in a civilian court. Instead, President Bush declared him an enemy combat ant and kept him in a Navy brig for more than three years. The administration s ins istence that it had the right to hold Mr. Padilla indefinitely simply on the pre sident s word was its first outrageous act in the case, but hardly its last. Mr. P adilla was kept in a small isolation cell, and when he left that cell he was bli ndfolded and his ears were covered. He was denied access to a lawyer even when h e was being questioned. It was only after the Supreme Court appeared poised last year to use Mr. Padilla s case to decide whether indefinite detention of an Ameri can citizen violates the Constitution, that the White House suddenly decided to give him a civilian trial. He will likely never be brought to trial on the dirty -bomb plot. The administration did everything it could to keep Mr. Padilla away from a jury and deny him impartial justice.

Contingencies for nuclear terrorist attack 2007-05-11, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/11/MNG2OPP22R1.DTL Senior government and military officials and other experts, organized by a joint Stanford-Harvard program called the Preventive Defense Project, met behind clos ed doors in Washington for a day-long workshop called "The Day After." The organ izers of the nonpartisan project, Stanford's William Perry, a secretary of defen se in the Clinton administration, and Harvard's Ashton Carter, a senior Defense Department official during the Clinton years, assumed the detonation of a bomb s imilar in size to the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. A paper [ they] are writing ... urges local governments and individuals to build undergrou nd bomb shelters; encourages authorities who survive to prevent evacuation of at least some of the areas attacked for three days ... and proposes suspending reg ulations on radiation exposure so that first responders would be able to act, ev en if that caused higher cancer rates. "The public at large will expect that the ir government had thought through this possibility and to have planned for it," Carter said in an interview. "This kind of an event would be unprecedented. We h ave had glimpses of something like this with Hiroshima, and glimpses with 9/11 a nd with Katrina. But those are only glimpses. If one bomb goes off, there are li kely to be more to follow," Carter said. "This fact, that nuclear terrorism will appear as a syndrome rather than a single episode, has major consequences." It would, he added, require powerful government intervention to force people to do something many may resist -- staying put. Note: Ashton Carter was co-author, with Philip Zelikow (later Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission) and John Deutch (former CIA Director), of a 1998 Foreig n Affairs article, "Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger," which warn ed of a possible catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center and accurately de scribed the governmental aftermath of 9/11.

9/11 Panel Members Weren t Told of Meeting 2006-10-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01cnd-book.html?ex=1317355200&en... Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they w ere told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Ten et, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condol eezza Rice...about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to tak e action. Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two mo nths before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward. The final report from the Sept. 11 commissi on made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an enco

unter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice. Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book. The disclosures took members of the biparti san Sept. 11 commission by surprise. Some questioned whether information about t he July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel. [A] Democratic com missioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. W oodward s book and agreed that the meeting was never mentioned to us. Philip D. Zeli kow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward s book. Note: Isn't it interested that the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Mr . Zelikow, co-authored a book with Condaleeza Rice prior to 9/11 and is now a to p aide of hers. As executive director, Mr. Zelikow had more say than anyone else over who was interviewed and what went into the final report. Do you think he m ight have had some bias? Is it possible he's not telling the truth here?

Disturbing 9/11 film is work of Hoosier 2006-09-07, Indianapolis Star http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060907/ENTERTAINMENT03/6... Familiar, disturbing images from five years ago flash by in "9/11: Press for Tru th." But the 86-minute documentary, directed by Ray Nowosielski of Indianapolis, also asks what warnings top government officials received before the terrorist attacks, and why so many questions remain unanswered. The limited-run movie, ope ning in 27 cities, premieres tonight in Manhattan. It will show in Indianapolis Friday through Monday. Nowosielski, 25, and co-producer John Duffy got the idea for the movie in 2003, during their last semester of film school at Columbia Col lege Chicago. It was there they learned of Paul Thompson's "The Complete 9/11 Ti meline," and went online to read the researcher's compilation detailing the even ts surrounding that fateful day. "We ended up reading until the sun came up," sa id Nowosielski, who recently opened a Massachusetts Avenue office. Nowosielski s aid he double-checked whatever they used. "We did everything we could" to ensure accuracy. The documentary prominently features Thompson; Bob McIlvaine, whose s on died in the World Trade Center attack; and several 9/11 widows who became kno wn as "the Jersey Girls." McIlvaine, after screening a rough version of the film , sent Nowosielski an e-mail signed "Forever grateful," thanking the filmmakers and saying, "Every high school, college and university should have a copy of thi s documentary." Note: Don't miss this amazing, moving 9/11 documentary (86 minutes) now availabl e for free viewing on Google video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1 016720641536424083. The film is also available for purchase at http://cooperativ eresearch.org/911_press_for_truth.html.

9/11: Truth, Lies and Conspiracy 2006-08-25, CBC (Canada's equivalent to PBS) http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/911griffin.html Solomon: I've put many of the questions that you raise in your book to Lee Hamil ton, and he simply said that they were inundated. [They couldn't] possibly respo nd to every question. [David Ray] Griffin: I'm sure there's an element of truth in that. On the other hand, the questions that I summarized in my book were not idiosyncratic - these were the main questions that had been raised by many, many

members of the 9/11 Truth movement. I'm afraid his answer is just an excuse for not dealing with any of these questions. They have constantly refused to enter into any public debate with any of the members of the 9/11 truth movement on the se issues. We would like to have a genuine investigation...one that is not contr olled by an insider to the Bush administration. The [9/11] Commission was really run by Philip Zelikow, the executive director. Zelikow determined what subjects would be investigated and what ones not. Zelikow would also have been in the po sition of determining what got deleted and what got included in the final report . Zelikow...was essentially was a member of the Bush administration. He and Cond i Rice had served together in the administration of Papa Bush. They wrote a book together. Then when George W. Bush became President, and named Condi the Nation al Security Adviser, she brought Zelikow on to help with the transition. Then he was appointed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. I do not develop a theory as to what really happened, there are so many mysteries. But wh at I say we can be confident of is that the official story is false, and if the administration is the one putting out the official story, it should be the numbe r one suspect for who actually orchestrated the attacks. Note: For excellent information and free videos of Prof. Griffin: www.WantToKnow .info/050504davidraygriffin

Judge Slams Ex-EPA Chief Over Sept. 11 2006-02-02, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1574465 A federal judge blasted former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine T odd Whitman on Thursday for reassuring New Yorkers soon after the Sept. 11 attac ks that it was safe to return to their homes and offices while toxic dust was po lluting the neighborhood. U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts refused to grant Whitman immunity against a class-action lawsuit brought in 2004 by residents, st udents and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn who said they were exposed to hazardous materials from the destruction of the World Trade Center. "No reasona ble person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-ter m health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," the judge said. She called Whitman's actions "conscience-shocking," saying the EPA chief knew that the collapse of the twin towers released tons of hazardous m aterials into the air. In her ruling, Batts noted that the EPA and Whitman said repeatedly beginning just two days after the attack that the air appeared safe t o breathe. The EPA's internal watchdog later found that the agency, at the urgin g of White House officials, gave misleading assurances.

A Scandal Beyond What Has Been Seen Before 2005-12-00, WantToKnow.info/The Journal of Psychohistory Winter 2005 Issue http://www.wanttoknow.info/050726scandal911 "If what I say is right, the whole US government should end up behind bars."- An dreas von Blow, former German government minister and author of "Die CIA und der 11." .... A Zogby poll in late August 2004 found 49 per cent of New York City re sidents and 41 per cent of New York citizens overall agreed that "some leaders i n the U.S. Government knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around Sep tember 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to take action." Stanley Hilto n -- a former aide to Senator Bob Dole -- has filed a $7 billion suit on behalf of the families of 14 victims of the 9/11 attacks, alleging that Bush, along wit h Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, actually ordered 9/11 to happen for political gai n. Hilton says he has incriminating documents and witnesses showing this. Even a

n investigation into just a few of these questions, such as those around the war games on 9/11, could be enough to start a major scandal. However, as numerous w riters and independent researchers have found, there are so many suspicious circ umstances that the truth could be very different to what we have been led to bel ieve. The human rights lawyer Richard Falk has written: "There are so many gapin g holes in the official accounts of 9/11 that no plausible coherent narrative re mains, and until now we have been staggering forward as if the truth about these traumatic events no longer mattered." But if the mainstream press start investi gating properly, it could lead to a completely unprecedented '9/11 scandal.' Note: The cover of this issue of the respected Journal of Psychohistory is title d "The New 9/11 Scandal."

Former Scotland Yard Official Peter Power on London Bombings 2005-07-07, Global Research/BBC Radio http://globalresearch.ca/audiovideo/070705londonterrorexercise.mp3 POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going o ff precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now. HOST: To get this q uite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this, and it happened while you were running the exercise? POWER: Precisely, and it w as about half past nine this morning. We planned this for a company, and for obv ious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd me t. And so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the r eal one, and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis manageme nt procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking. Note: For Mr. Power's comments on CBC radio, Canada's PBS, click here. For many more serious questions raised around the London bombings, click here and here. F or a very similar "coincidence" on 9/11, click here.

Over 70 Million American Adults Support New 9/11 Investigation 2006-05-22, Yahoo! News/PRWeb http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20060522/bs_prweb/prweb388743_4 A new Zogby poll reveals that less than half of the American public trusts the o fficial 9/11 story or believes the attacks were adequately investigated. The pol l is the first scientific survey of Americans' belief in a 9/11 cover up. Poll r esults indicate 42% believe there has indeed been a cover up. 45% think "Congres s or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whet her any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their s uccess." According to Janice Matthews, executive director of 911truth.org, "Thes e results are both heartening and frankly quite amazing, given the mainstream me dia's ongoing refusal to cover the most critical questions of that day. The coll apse of WTC 7...was not even mentioned by the 9/11 Commission and has seldom bee n reported in the media. [The poll showed that] only 52% had known about it, but over 70% of this group believe it should have been investigated. 911truth.org i s a coalition of researchers, journalists and victim family members working to e xpose and answer the hundreds of still unresolved questions concerning 9/11, esp ecially the nearly 400 questions that the Family Steering Committee filed with t he 9/11 Commission. Initially welcomed by the commissioners as their "road map". ..the Commission ultimately ignored 80% of these issues. The victim families' mo st incisive questions remain unaddressed to this day.

Note: Zogby is a higly respected polling agency used by many major media organiz ations. Why did the media largely ignore the results of this astounding poll? A previous Zogby poll showed that half of New Yorkers believe US leaders had forek nowledge of the impending 9-11 attacks and 'consciously failed' to act. The high ly revealing 9/11 documentary "Loose Change" has at times been ranked the #1 mos t popular of the many thousands of videos available on Google. In spite of the v irtual media blackout, an ever increasing number of people are willing to ask th e hard questions.

CNN Raises Serious Questions About 9/11 Over Several Days 2006-03-22, CNN http://www.WantToKnow.info/cnn9-11cover-up [March 22] HAMMER: A Charlie Sheen shocker. Tonight, the actor`s stunning statem ents on 9/11. Maybe the airplanes did not take down the Twin Towers. And maybe t he government is covering it all up. SHEEN: The more you look at stuff, especial ly specific incidents, specific events in and around the fateful day, it just -it just raises a lot of questions. HAMMER: Charlie Sheen, star of CBS`s success ful sitcom, "Two and a Half Men", says point blank, 9/11, the Pentagon, the Worl d Trade Center, this is all a cover up. [March 23] It's been pretty hard to beli eve the response we got today to the incredible story Showbiz Tonight broke last night, after Charlie Sheens' startling claims that the government may be coveri ng up what really happened on 9/11. So many emails coming in...we've been really overwhelmed today. Between the emails, the blogs, the websites -- everybody is writing and talking about it. [March 27] HAMMER: Over the weekend I had the oppo rtunity to sit down with Sharon stone. She commended Charlie Sheen for having th e guts to speak his mind. SHARON STONE: I think you have to be brave enough to s ay how you feel and stand in the face of authority and say it. That`s why we hav e freedom of speech. HAMMER: Responses at SHOWBIZ TONIGHT absolutely overwhelmin g. The e-mails continue to flood in. They were coming in all weekend long. We we re asking the question; do you agree there is a government cover-up of 9/11? Mor e than 53,000 of you voted in our online poll. Eighty-three percent of you agree d and said yes; 17 percent of you said no.

Pentagon, Senate committee bicker over 9/11 probe 2005-09-23, ABC/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1154206 The Pentagon and the Senate Judiciary Committee squabbled publicly on Friday abo ut whether lawmakers could question five key witnesses in public about their cla ims the U.S. military identified four September 11 hijackers long before the 200 01 attacks. The panel's chairman, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said at Wednesday's hearing the Pentagon could be guilty of obstructing congres sional proceedings. Other lawmakers accused the Defense Department of orchestrat ing a cover-up. On Friday, the Senate committee announced the Pentagon had rever sed its position and would allow the five witnesses to testify at a new public h earing scheduled for October 5. The five witnesses in question were all involved with Able Danger and contend the team identified September 11 ringleader Mohame d Atta and three other hijackers as members of an al Qaeda cell in early 2000. O ne prospective witness, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, has said publicly that Ab le Danger members tried to pass the information about Atta along to the FBI thre e times in September 2000 but were forced by Pentagon lawyers to cancel the meet ings. Much of the information related to Able Danger was destroyed in 2000.

Able Danger disabled 2005-08-13, Toledo Blade http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050813/COLUMNIST14/508130... What may be a bigger scandal is that the staff of the 9/11 Commission knew of Ab le Danger and what it had found, but made no mention of it in its report. This i s as if the commission that investigated the attack on Pearl Harbor had written its final report without mentioning the Japanese. Mr. Weldon unveiled Able Dange r in a speech on the House floor June 27, but his remarks didn't attract attenti on until the New York Times reported on them Tuesday. When the story broke, form er Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat from Indiana, co-chairman of the 9/11 Commissio n, at first denied the commission had ever been informed of what Able Danger had found, and took a swipe at Mr. Weldon's credibility: "The Sept. 11th Commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of the surveillanc e of Mohammed Atta or his cell," Mr. Hamilton said. "Had we learned of it obviou sly it would have been a major focus of our investigation." Mr. Hamilton changed his tune after the New York Times reported Thursday, and the Associated Press c onfirmed, that commission staff had been briefed on Able Danger in October, 2003 , and again in July, 2004. The 9/11 commission wrote history as it wanted it to be, not as it was. The real history of what happened that terrible September day has yet to be written.

'Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11' by Kathryn S. Olmsted 2009-02-28, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-0228-real-enemiesfeb28,0... In August 2006, almost five years after the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 20 01, a poll by Scripps Howard and Ohio University found that 36 percent of respon dents thought it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that officials of the federa l government "either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and t he Pentagon or took no action to stop them." The poll also found that those who regularly use the Internet but do not habitually consult mainstream media "are s ignificantly more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracies." Kathryn S. Olmsted, i n her exquisitely researched and annotated new book Real Enemies: Conspiracy The ories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, points out that although such views "may seem to belong to the fringe," they are held by millions of American s and a majority of those between the ages of 18 and 29. In fact, Olmsted assert s that the tendency to see conspiracies everywhere "long ago spread from the mar gins into the main body of American political culture," and that the quelling of political dissent is an exacerbating factor. She has set out to track the histo ry and patterning of conspiratorial beliefs as they relate to politics and publi c policy. Her thesis that conspiracy theories thrive in part because the governm ent has misled the public or acted illegally and covertly, and been caught at it frequently enough to make them credible is a disconcerting one. But the histori cal detail she marshals (which demonstrates a tendency for fusion of far-left an d far-right political views) is persuasive in its cumulative power. Note: For more on the important Scripps/Howard poll showing that high percentage s of American citizens suspect US government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, cli ck here. For a 15-minute clip of a powerfully revealing documentary on this, 9/1 1: Press for Truth, click here.

Hating America (Dallas Mavericks' billionaire owner on 9/11 cover-up) 2007-03-26, Fox News

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,261242,00.html There's a movie called "Loose Change" that asserts hundreds, if not thousands, o f Americans colluded to kill their fellow citizens on 9/11. That Al Qaeda didn't attack us, we essentially attacked ourselves. Billionaire Mark Cuban is going t o distribute the film so people all over the world can see it. We reported the s ituation last night and I talked with Mr. Cuban today on "The Radio Factor": [BI LL] O'REILLY: The people in my town, Mr. Cuban, do now want "Loose Change" playi ng in the theater or Charlie Sheen narrating it. They believe that this is disho nest. They believe it diverts attention away from the real villains. MARK CUBAN, OWNER OF THE DALLAS MAVERICKS: Well, let's qualify here. First of all, it's alr eady been on the Internet. O'REILLY: Rationalization, sir. CUBAN: It's not ratio nalization. This is just fact. When you have things that are in the shadows that people can't find and take on mythic proportions, that's what they can take. An d they can take innuendo. Once you can see something, you can refute it. Note: To understand how one of the richest people in the world (Mark Cuban) and a famous actor (Charlie Sheen) came to believe in a major cover-up of 9/11, see our 9/11 Information Center. Mr. Cuban is financing a new version of the Interne t blockbuster which opened the eyes of millions to the cover-up. The new version will be narrated by Charlie Sheen. To see the earlier version of this powerful documentary, click here.

How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century 2006-12-10, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480,00.html In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapid ly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and wha t isn't. The juniors in Bill Stroud's class are riveted by a documentary called Loose Change unspooling on a small TV screen at the Baccalaureate School for Glo bal Education, in urban Astoria, N.Y. The film uses 9/11 footage and interviews with building engineers and Twin Towers survivors to make an oddly compelling if paranoid case that interior explosions unrelated to the impact of the airplanes brought down the World Trade Center on that fateful day. Afterward, the student s--an ethnic mix of New Yorkers with their own 9/11 memories--dive into a discus sion about the elusive nature of truth. Raya Harris finds the video more convinc ing than the official version of the facts. Marisa Reichel objects. "Because of a movie, you are going to change your beliefs?" she demands. "Just because peopl e heard explosions doesn't mean there were explosions." Stroud has posed this qu estion to his class on the blackboard: "If truth is difficult to prove in histor y, does it follow that all versions are equally acceptable?" Throughout the year , the class will examine news reports, websites, propaganda, history books, blog s, even pop songs. The goal is to teach kids to be discerning consumers of infor mation and to research, formulate and defend their own views, says Stroud, who i s founder and principal of [the] school. Note: To view the highly engaging documentary Loose Change, click here. For more on 9/11, click here.

Pentagon Employee Was Ordered to Destroy Data Identifying Atta As a Terrorist 2005-09-15, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1131137 A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Att a as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday.

The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Commi ttee and was expected to identify the person who ordered him to destroy the larg e volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. Weldon declined to identify the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as "2.5 terabytes" as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Librar y of Congress, he added.

Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger 1998-11-01, Foreign Affairs, (the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations) http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19981101faessay1434/ashton-carter-john-deutch-%... A successful attack with weapons of mass destruction could certainly take thousa nds, or tens of thousands, of lives. If the device that exploded in 1993 under t he World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pa thogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to descri be it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in Ameri can history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peaceti me and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atom ic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and fu ture into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian mea sures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, de tention of suspects, and use of deadly force. Note: Is this not a remarkable statement? This 1998 article was written by Phili p Zelikow (who later was Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission!!!), John Deu tch (former CIA Director), and Ashton Carter (former deputy secretary of defense ). Dr. David Ray Griffin, an esteemed WTK team member, asks in his new book, Deb unking 9/11 Debunking, "Would it not be interesting if we were to learn that tho se who orchestrated the attacks of 9/11 were able to put one of their own -- som eone who at least had foreknowledge of the attacks -- in charge of carrying out the official investigation into these attacks?" To view the full article, click here.

9/ 11 Conspiracy Theorists Thriving 2006-08-06, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2279963 Kevin Barrett believes the U.S. government might have destroyed the World Trade Center. Steven Jones is researching what he calls evidence that the twin towers were brought down by explosives detonated inside them, not by hijacked airliners . These men aren't uneducated junk scientists: Barrett will teach a class on Isl am at the University of Wisconsin this fall. Jones is a tenured physicist at Bri gham Young University. The movement claims to be drawing fresh energy and credib ility from a recently formed group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Publicity ove r Barrett's case has helped boost membership to about 75 academics. Some are wel l educated, with degrees from elite universities such as Princeton and Stanford and jobs at schools including Rice, Indiana and the University of Texas. Members of the group don't consider themselves extremists. They simply believe the gove rnment's investigation was inadequate, and maintain that questioning widely held assumptions has been part of the job of scholars for centuries. Daniel Orr, a P rinceton Ph.D. and widely published retired economics chair at the University of Illinois, said he knew instantly from watching the towers fall that they had be en blown apart by explosives. David Gabbard, an East Carolina education professo r, acknowledges this isn't his field, but says "I'm smart enough to know ... tha t fire from airplanes can't melt steel." Judy Wood, until recently an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Clemson University, has been cited by con

spiracy theorists for her arguments the buildings could not have collapsed as qu ickly as they did unless explosives were used. Note: This article was published on the website of more than 100 media outlets. People are waking up all over!

Invoking Secrets Privilege Becomes a More Popular Legal Tactic 2006-06-04, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/washington/04secrets.html?ex=1307073600&en=... Facing a wave of litigation challenging its eavesdropping at home and its handli ng of terror suspects abroad, the Bush administration is increasingly turning to a legal tactic that swiftly torpedoes most lawsuits: the state secrets privileg e. Officials have used the privilege...to ask the courts to throw out three lega l challenges to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program. Th e privilege claim, in which the government says any discussion of a lawsuit's ac cusations would endanger national security, has short-circuited judicial scrutin y and public debate. While the privilege...was once used to shield sensitive doc uments or witnesses from disclosure, it is now often used to try to snuff out la wsuits at their inception. "If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," said Representative C hristopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut. Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University...said the administration's legal strategy "raises pro found legal and policy questions." Under Mr. Bush, the secrets privilege has bee n used to block a lawsuit by a translator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation , Sibel Edmonds, who was fired after accusing colleagues of security breaches. T wo lawsuits challenging the government's practice of rendition, in which terror suspects are seized and delivered to detention centers overseas, were dismissed after the government raised the secrets privilege. Note: Sibel Edmonds is one of several whistleblowers with powerfully incriminati ng information on 9/11 who have been silenced with tactics like those mentioned above. To learn more about this critical case which has been blocked, see http:/ /www.WantToKnow.info/050131sibeledmonds

FBI Agent Slams Bosses at Moussaoui Trial 2006-03-21, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/21/ap/national/mainD8GFLTIGA.shtml The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 testified Monday he spent almost four weeks trying to warn U.S. officials about the radical Islamic student pilot but "criminal negligence" by superiors in Washington thwarted a c hance to stop the 9/11 attacks. Samit told MacMahon he couldn't persuade FBI hea dquarters or the Justice Department to take his fears seriously. Samit's complai nts echoed those raised in 2002 by Coleen Rowley, the bureau's agent-lawyer in t he Minneapolis office. Rowley went public with her frustrations, was named a Tim e magazine person of the year for whistleblowing. Samit revealed far more than R owley of the details of the investigation. For each nugget of information, MacMa hon asked Samit if Washington officials called to assess the implications. Time after time, Samit said no.

9/11 Case Could Bring Broad Shift on Civil Suits 2009-07-21, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21bar.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewante...

The most consequential decision of the Supreme Court s last term got only a little attention when it landed in May. And what attention it got was for the wrong re ason. But the lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the dec ision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just the last two months. On its face, the Iqbal decision concerned the aftermat h of the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that a Muslim man swept up on immigra tion charges could not sue two Bush administration officials for what he said wa s the terrible abuse he suffered in detention. But something much deeper and bro ader was going on in the decision, something that may unsettle how civil litigat ion is conducted in the United States. For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the ru les call a short and plain statement of the claim in a document called a complaint . Information about wrongdoing is often secret. Plaintiffs claiming they were th e victims of employment discrimination, a defective product, an antitrust conspi racy or a policy of harsh treatment in detention may not know exactly who harmed them and how before filing suit. But plaintiffs can learn valuable information during discovery. The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward wit h concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss l awsuits that strike them as implausible. It obviously licenses highly subjective judgments, said Stephen B. Burbank, an authority on civil procedure at the Univer sity of Pennsylvania Law School. This is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor. Note: For many important reports from major media sources on the erosion of civi l liberties since the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Cheney was key in clearing CIA interrogation tactics 2008-12-16, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-cheney16-2008dec16... Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approvin g severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanam o Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely. Cheney's comments ... mark the fir st time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA's us e of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a ... method kno wn as waterboarding. "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in hel ping get the process cleared," Cheney said in an interview with ABC News. Asked whether he still believes it was appropriate to use the waterboarding method on terrorism suspects, Cheney said: "I do." His comments come on the heels of discl osures by a Senate committee showing that high-level officials in the Bush admin istration were intimately involved in reviewing and approving interrogation meth ods that have since been explicitly outlawed and that have been condemned intern ationally as torture. Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, the CIA "in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talk ed to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it." Waterboarding involves strapping a prisoner to a tilted surface, covering h is face with a towel and dousing it to simulate the sensation of drowning. CIA D irector Michael V. Hayden has said that the agency used the technique on three A l Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. Cheney has long defended the technique. But h e has not previously disclosed his role in pushing to give the CIA such authorit y. Note: For lots more from major media sources on US torture and other war crimes committed in the Iraq and Afghan wars, click here.

U.N. Rights Investigator Expelled by Israel 2008-12-16, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html?partner=rss... Israeli authorities on Monday expelled Richard Falk, a United Nations investigat or of human rights in the Palestinian territories, saying he was unwelcome becau se of what the government has regarded as his hostile position toward Israel. Mr . Falk, an American, arrived in Israel on Sunday. He was held [overnight] at the airport and placed on the first available flight back to Geneva, his point of d eparture. Mr. Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, has the title of United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur for the Palestinian t erritories. He has long been criticized in Israel for what many Israelis say are unfair and unpalatable views. He has compared Israel s treatment of the Palestini ans to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspi racy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies betwee n the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a cl osed book. In his capacity as a United Nations investigator, Mr. Falk issued a st atement this month describing Israel s embargo on Gaza ... as a crime against huma nity. Regardless of Mr. Falk s views, some Israelis questioned the wisdom of banni ng him, noting that it would hardly make his reports more sympathetic. Jessica M ontell, the executive director of B Tselem, an Israeli group that monitors human r ights in the occupied territories, said that ... barring his entry was an act unb efitting of democracy. Note: Israel quite explicitly raised the issue of Falk's call for a genuine inve stigation of the 9/11 attacks in its explanation of his deportation. Why would t he state of Israel oppose such an investigation? For information from major medi a sources on this and many other questions about what really happened on 9/11, c lick here.

The 30 greatest conspiracy theories 2008-11-19, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3483477/The-30-greate... From the assassination of John F Kennedy to the death of Diana, Princess of Wale s. From Roswell, New Mexico, to Nasa's moon landings. From the bloodline of Chri st to the death of Elvis Presley. From the Moscow appartment bombings to the Ind ian Ocean tsunami. From Pearl Harbour to Peak Oil, the Philadelphia experiment a nd Pan Am flight 103. Every major event of the last 2,000 years has prompted a c onspiracy theory and here we examine those with the biggest followings and the m ost longevity. 1. September 11, 2001. Thanks to the power of the web and live br oadcasts on television, the ... theories surrounding the events of 9/11 ... have surpassed those of Roswell and JFK in traction. The [alternative] theories cont inue to grow in strength. At the milder end of the spectrum are the theorists wh o believe that the US government had prior warning of the attacks but did not do enough to stop them. Others believe that the Bush administration deliberately t urned a blind eye to those warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch wars i n the Middle East to usher in another century of American hegemony. A large grou p of people - collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement - cite evidence that a n airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not ha ve been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. Many w itnesses - including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time - claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves. Note: For a concise two-page summary of many unanswered questions about what rea

lly happened on 9/11, click here.

Mark Cuban Is Charged With Insider Trading 2008-11-18, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/18insider.html?_r=1&partner=rss&em... Mark Cuban, the Internet entrepreneur turned owner of the Dallas Mavericks baske tball team, has never shied from a fight. But now the pugnacious billionaire is squaring off against his biggest adversary yet: the federal government. On Monda y, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit charging Mr. Cuban with insider trading for selling shares of a small Internet search company in 20 04, just before its share price fell. [Allegedly] Mr. Cuban saved himself a $750 ,000 loss. Scott W. Friestad, the S.E.C. s deputy director of enforcement, said th e investigation of Mr. Cuban s trading began in early 2007, but declined to say wh at had set off the inquiry. A person close to Mr. Cuban provided what he said wa s one of a series of e-mail messages from Jeffrey B. Norris, an S.E.C. lawyer in Fort Worth, who accused the billionaire of being unpatriotic for helping to fin ance a movie named Loose Change. In the e-mail message, Mr. Norris described the m ovie as a vicious and absurd documentary that posits that President Bush planned th e demolition of the World Trade Center as a pretext for going to war against Ira q. In the e-mail message, sent from his S.E.C. e-mail address, Mr. Norris said he was informing Christopher Cox, the chairman of the S.E.C., of Mr. Cuban s actions . If this upsets you, I wonder how George Bush feels, Mr. Norris wrote. I assume th at Mr. Cox would view your involvement with Loose Change much as I do. After all, he served his country as a Republican congressman from Orange County for nearly 20 years and was appointed by President Bush. Note: This New York Times report clearly suggests that Cuban is being pursued by the SEC because of his support for the 9/11-truth documentary Loose Change Fina l Cut, for which WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin acted as script consul tant. To read the full text of the email from Norris to Cuban, click here. Anoth er project Mark Cuban supports is the highly useful website for tracking the Wal l Street bailout, bailoutsleuth.com, which has recently estimated the bailout to date at over $2.5 trillion!

Senators Want CIA to Release 9 / 11 Report 2007-05-17, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-CIA-Sept-11-Probe.html A bipartisan group of senators is pushing legislation that would force the CIA t o release an inspector general's report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 20 01. The CIA has spent more than 20 months weighing requests under the Freedom of Information Act for its internal investigation of the attacks but has yet to re lease any portion of it. The agency is the only federal office involved in count erterrorism operations that has not made at least a version of its internal 9/11 investigation public. The law requires agencies to respond to requests within 2 0 days. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and two other intelligence committee leaders -chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and senior Republican Kit Bond of Missouri -are pushing legislation that would require the agency to declassify the executi ve summary of the review within one month and submit a report to Congress explai ning why any material was withheld. "It's amazing the efforts the administration is going to stonewall this,'' Wyden said. "The American people have a right to know what the Central Intelligence Agency was doing in those critical months bef ore 9/11.'' Completed in June 2005, the inspector general's report examined the personal responsibility of individuals at the CIA before and after the attacks. The CIA has not released any documents to The Associated Press or other organiza

tions that began requesting the information at least 20 months ago. Groups inclu ding the National Security Archive have clashed with the agency over its FOIA po licies. Last year, the archive gave the CIA its prize for the agency with the wo rst FOIA record. ''CIA has for three decades been one of the worst FOIA agencies ,'' archive Director Thomas Blanton said this week. Note: For more reliable information on what US intelligence agencies knew about the coming attacks, click here.

The Path from 9/11 2006-09-13, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/rory_oconnor/2006/09/the_path_from_911.html Attention still must be paid...to the many questions about 9/11 that remain unan swered...such as why the Pentagon held back so much information about air defens e deficiencies from the 9/11 commission that Chairmen Kean and Hamilton came clo se to asking the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation; such as why the Able Danger intelligence program...was ignored and closed down; such as why Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape from Afghanistan when cornered in Tora Bora. There is little doubt that that the 9/11 commission report has become the Warren commission report of our time. Chairman Thomas Kean's recent paid involv ement with ABC's fictitious "historical" docudrama is but the latest reminder th at the 9/11 tragedy has yet to be investigated fully or fairly. Both Kean and hi s Democratic Party counterpart Lee Hamilton now acknowledge...that they and thei r fellow commissioners bowed to political pressure when they didn't fully questi on New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani about his management decisions and emergency res ponses. Other commissioners complained repeatedly about White House obstacles pu t in their path. The commissioners also allowed the president and vice president to testify together (and not under oath) and went along with other administrati on demands, such as the one that only a minority of the commissioners could see a minority of the documents requested - and even then had to vet their notes wit h the White House before sharing them with the full Commission! We must continue to "press for truth" in connection with the events of September 11, 2001. Note: The author is the executive director of the stunning new documentary 9/11: Press for the Truth. To watch this powerful, inspiring documentary which is ava ilable for free viewing, click here. And for an excellent new list of top offici als who have publicly slammed the 9/11 Commission Report, click here.

Robert Scheer: Gaping Holes in the 9/11 Narrative 2006-09-11, Yahoo! News http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060911/cm_huffpost/029174 What we still don't know about 9/11 could kill us. The public that has been kept in the dark for five years by a president who may know the truth but has chosen to ignore it. The belated release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's second report...concluded that there not only was zero connection between Saddam Husse in and Al Qaeda, but that Iraq was the one country in the region where Osama bin Laden could not operate. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, an d yet there has been no serious investigation of the extended Royal family's rol l in the recruitment of bin Laden's "soldiers" and the ease with which they secu red legal visas to enter the United States. Last week, Bush conceded that there were indeed secret CIA prisons. Some [key 9/11 witnesses] have been interrogated in secret for up to five years. After five years of official deceit, it is not too difficult to believe that the isolation of those prisoners was done less for reasons of learning the truth about 9/11 and more in an effort to politically m

anage the narrative released to the public. There is glaring evidence that the l atter was the case. The 9/11 Commission report contains a disclaimer box on page 146, in which it is stated that the report's account of what happened on 9/11 w as in considerable measure based on what those key witnesses allegedly told inte rrogators, and that the commissioners were not allowed to meet the witnesses or their interrogators. In short, the most cited source that we have on what happen ed on 9/11, the much celebrated 9/11 Commission Report, was stage-managed by the Bush administration, just as it has controlled and distorted so much other info rmation. Note: Robert Scheer frequently writes for the Los Angeles Times, though this art icle did not appear there.

BYU Professor Has Theory About 9/11 Attacks 2005-11-10, CBS Affiliate KUTV http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_314234334.html A BYU [Brigham Young University] professor has developed a new theory about the terrorist attack in New York on September 11, 2001. Both towers collapsed in pla ce after the attacks, and later that day, 7 World Trade Center, which was never hit by a plane, fell in less than seven seconds. Professor Steven E. Jones says that planes alone did not bring down the towers. Jones is a 20-year physics prof explosiv essor at BYU, who's penned an academic paper raising another hypothesis es may have been pre-positioned in the buildings. Notice how it's straight down, J ones says referring to the fall of one of the buildings. Especially intriguing t o Jones was the destruction of 7 World Trade Center, damaged and ablaze from tow er debris but never hit by a plane. "Symmetrically now, it doesn't topple over, as you might expect. It comes straight down. This is the goal of prepositioned e xplosives in a controlled demolition, says Jones. He wants a fresh new independen t investigation. Note: For other media coverage of Prof. Jones' claims, click here. For his paper describing how he came to these conclusions, click here. For a short video clip of the collapse of WTC 7, click here.

Supreme Court Denies FBI Translator's Case 2005-10-28, CBS/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/28/ap/national/mainD8E5IMD00.shtml A former FBI translator failed Monday to persuade the Supreme Court to revive he r lawsuit alleging she was fired for reporting possible wrongdoing by other ling uists involved in counterterrorism investigations. Edmonds...argued that a trial court judge was wrong to accept the Justice Department's claim that allowing he r lawsuit to go forward would threaten "state secrets," or national security. Ed monds' firing was controversial among some lawmakers in Congress, especially aft er the Justice Department's inspector general found that the FBI had not taken h er complaints seriously enough and had fired her for lodging complaints about th e translation unit. Note: The article fails to mention Edmonds' allegations of the criminal involvem ent in 9/11-related matters of top government officials. For more on this, see h ttp://www.wanttoknow.info/sibeledmonds To sign Congressman Weldon's petition for open testimony on the Able Danger program, click here.

Bush Renews Sept. 11 Emergency Declaration 2005-09-08, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR20050908015... President Bush on Thursday renewed the national emergency he declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In a letter to Congress, Bush said the nation is still under the terrorist threat that led him to declare a national emergenc y three days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The p resident's declaration allows for the mobilization of reserve military forces an d other steps. By law, a national emergency declaration automatically expires on the anniversary date of its declaration unless the president renews it. Bush's action will renew the declaration for another year.

More remember Atta ID d as terrorist pre-9/11 2005-09-01, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9163145 Pentagon officials said Thursday they have found three more people who recall an intelligence chart that identified Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta as a terror ist one year before the attacks on New York and Washington. But they have been u nable to find the chart or other evidence that it existed. On Thursday, four int elligence officials provided the first extensive briefing for reporters on the o utcome of their interviews with people associated with Able Danger and their rev iew of documents. They said they interviewed at least 80 people over a three-wee k period and found three, besides Philpott and Shaffer, who said they remember s eeing a chart that either mentioned Atta by name as an al-Qaida operative or sho wed his photograph. Four of the five recalled a chart with a pre-9/11 photo of A tta; the other person recalled only a reference to his name. The intelligence of ficials said they consider the five people to be credible but their recollection s are still unverified.

Secret FBI Report Questions Al Qaeda Capabilities 2005-03-09, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=566425&page=1 No 'True' Al Qaeda Sleeper Agents Have Been Found in U.S. A secret FBI report ob tained by ABC News concludes that while there is no doubt al Qaeda wants to hit the United States, its capability to do so is unclear. The 32-page assessment sa ys flatly, "To date, we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the US, " seemingly contradicting the "sleeper cell" description prosecutors assigned to seven men in Lackawanna, N.Y., in 2002. It also differs from testimony given by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who warned in the past that several sleeper cells were probably in place.

9/11 Skeptics Share Theories 2006-06-26, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/25/AR20060625010... About 1,200 people gathered over the weekend for what organizers billed as the l argest conference on the conspiracy theories that consider the Sept. 11, 2001, a ttacks to be a result of official negligence or a U.S. attempt to incite world w ar. "There are so many prominent people . . . who have stated that the evidence is overwhelming that 9/11 was an inside job," syndicated radio talk show host Al ex Jones said at a news conference. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that the

U.S. military command "stood down" on the day of the attacks, that the hijackers were trained at U.S. military bases and that the World Trade Center towers coll apsed because of a series of controlled explosions set before they were hit by t wo hijacked planes. Suggested motives include expected benefits for U.S. arms an d oil conglomerates, and revolutionary plans for a new world order headed by the United States. Note: We are grateful that the media is actually paying some attention to the 9/ 11 movement these days. With over 1,000 people attending 9/11 conferences, it is getting harder to justify not covering the movement.

Opinion split over 9/11 report 2006-05-28, The Times Herald (a small Pennsylvania newspaper) http://www.timesherald.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16703919&BRD=1672&PAG=461&dep... More than 40 percent of Americans believe that the 9/11 Commission Report that i nvestigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is a cover-up, according to a recent poll. And nearly half surveyed said the attacks should be reinvestigated. In May, a Zogby International poll of adults found that 42 percent of adults po lled believe the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission "concealed or refused t o investigate critical evidence" that contradicts the official explanation of th e attacks. The Zogby poll was sponsored by a leading activist group, 911 Truth.o rg, which is highly skeptical of the official report published in July 2004. "Wi th half the country believing as we do, (the poll) is some form of vindication," said Jonathan Gold, a former member of 911 Truth's steering committee. Gold, wh o lives in Plymouth Meeting, complained that major media has ignored the truth m ovement. "The media is not covering that fact that 45 percent of voting American s believe we should have another investigation," he said. "It deserves attention ." Note: Small newspapers like this are rarely included in these summaries, but as only the Washington Post and Yahoo! News covered this key poll, this article is included here. Though the Yahoo! article was balanced, the Post article claimed that the poll (done by one of the most respected polling agencies in the world) was complete bunk. The Times Herald actually ran this on their front page! For l ots more, see http://www.wantToKnow.info/911information

F.B.I. Says House of Ex-C.I.A. Deputy Is Searched 2006-05-12, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/washington/11cnd-foggo.html?ex=1305086400&e... The home and office of Kyle Foggo, who stepped down on Monday as the Central Int elligence Agency's No. 3 official, were searched today. Mr. Foggo resigned after becoming entangled in a widening investigation that has already brought down fo rmer Representative Randy Cunningham. Mr. Foggo's workplace in Langley, Va., and his residence in Virginia were searched this morning by agents of the Federal B ureau of Investigation and the C.I.A. inspector general's office. April Langwell , a spokeswoman for the F.B.I.'s San Diego office, said Mr. Foggo had been under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and the Defense Criminal Investig ative Service of the Defense Department's inspector general's office, as well as by the C.I.A.'s inspector general and the F.B.I. The inquiry by the C.I.A.'s in spector is examining whether he improperly awarded agency contracts to a longtim e friend, Brent R. Wilkes, a military contractor whose companies have received n early $100 million in government contracts over the years. Mr. Foggo, 51, has ad mitted attending poker parties throughout the 1990's that Mr. Wilkes held in a s uite at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The parties were primarily attended b

y C.I.A. officials and congressmen, and Mr. Cunningham, a California Republican, occasionally attended. Several news media accounts have reported that prostitut es frequented the parties. Note: This article has huge significance. Until just a few years ago, there was a virtual blackout in the media on any negative coverage of the CIA. The fact th at the Feds raided the home of the #3 man in the CIA and it was reported in top newspapers is an external manifestation of huge shake-ups going on behind the sc enes. Buzzy Krongard, the previous #3 at the CIA has been linked to the millions of dollars in suspicious stock option trades made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.

No Trials for Key Players 2006-05-04, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-legal4may04,0,2472327.story Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person prosecuted in connection with the worst terr orist attack in American history, did not get the death penalty because some jur ors concluded that he had little to do with Sept. 11. Yet two presumed key plann ers of the Al Qaeda [9/11] plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, ha ve not been charged, though they have been in U.S. custody for more than three y ears. A central contradiction in the Bush administration's fight against terrori sm is that bit players often have been put on trial, while those thought to have orchestrated the plots have been held in secret for questioning. Current and fo rmer intelligence officials have said that the CIA has used aggressive interroga tion techniques -- including "waterboarding," which makes a suspect feel as if h e is drowning -- on captured Al Qaeda leaders. As a result, many legal experts s ay it may be too late to try Mohammed and Binalshibh in a regular court of law. "They cannot be prosecuted because of the way they have been interrogated," said University of Maryland law professor Michael Greenberger. "They have been subje cted to very aggressive questioning, and any statements they made now can't be u sed against them." An open trial for the Al Qaeda leaders could reveal that U.S. agents used harsh methods, even torture, to extract information, he added. "We have prosecuted a marginal character who appeared unmoored from reality, while t he real planners of the crime will not be brought before justice in the United S tates," Greenberger said. Note: The powerful 9/11 documentary "Loose Change" was listed in the top ten of Google's most popular videos every day for the month of April 2006 (see http://v ideo.google.com/videoranking). People are waking up all over. Tell your friends and colleagues about this history-making documentary and consider ordering 10 co pies for $30 at http://www.loosechange911.com/order.htm

The suppression of Able Danger 2006-02-18, Toledo Blade http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060218/COLUMNIST14/602180... Mr. Kleinsmith and the two colleagues who testified with him in [a House Armed S ervices Committee] open session are convinced that had the information they deve loped been acted on, not only 9/11, but also the October 2000, attack on the des troyer USS Cole in which 17 sailors died could have been prevented. Through comp uter scanning of some 2.5 terabytes of classified and unclassified data, the Abl e Danger team identified five "nodes" of al-Qaeda activity. One was in Brooklyn. Another was in the port of Aden in Yemen, where the USS Cole was attacked. Able Danger linked Mohamed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers to the Brooklyn cell, said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who was the liaison between the Defense Intelligenc

e s n l

Agency and the Able Danger team. Colonel Shaffer testified he tried three time to have Able Danger data on the Brooklyn cell presented to the FBI, but that o each occasion Pentagon lawyers forbade the meeting. In a commentary in the Wal [Street] Journal last November, Louis Freeh, who was FBI director at the time, said that if he had been told about what Able Danger had learned, 9/11 likely w ould have been prevented. In March, 2000, Mr. Kleinsmith was ordered to stop all work on Able Danger, and, later, to delete all the information collected. It is clear there is a cover-up. One would think a Washington press corps obsessing a bout a hunting accident in Texas would be more curious about it. Note: Though Able Danger received wide media coverage when first reported six mo nths ago, the amazing revelations of the recent hearings have received very litt le attention, which is why we include this article from the leading newspaper of Toledo, Ohio. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on Able Danger, se e http://www.WantToKnow.info/abledanger911

Bush team sought to snuff CIA doubts 2005-10-26, San Francisco ChronicleCongressional Quarterly http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/26/MNG62FDUGL1.DTL In the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon's policy of dtente was under attack by some former military officials and conservative policy intellectuals, Ford admi nistration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were among those challengin g as too soft the CIA's estimate of Moscow's military power. Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to create a "Team B." CIA Director William Colby rejected the Team B ide a and was fired. Colby's successor as head of the spy agency, George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, accepted it. Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by cr eating his own intelligence shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Hussein's nuclear weapons, which later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House. "In retrospect, and with the Team B report an d records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. amb assador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Inte lligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criti cized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlargi ng the impression of danger and threat." When Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz wanted to secretly back Saddam Hussein against the Iranians, Schultz by passed the CIA and sent Rumsfeld, then a businessman, to Baghdad to seal the dea l.

Court Closes FBI Case Arguments to Public 2005-04-21, Los Angeles Times/Associated Press http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-fbi-contractor-l... A federal appeals court Thursday barred the public from arguments in the case of a fired FBI contractor who alleged security breaches and misconduct at the agen cy. Sibel Edmonds' lawsuit against the government was thrown out of a lower cour t when the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to withhold information to safeguard national security. The Just ice Department's inspector general said Edmonds' allegations to her superiors ab out a co-worker "raised serious concerns that, if true, could potentially have e xtremely damaging consequences for the FBI." The inspector general concluded tha t the FBI did not adequately investigate the allegations and that Edmonds was re taliated against for speaking out. Note: Ms. Edmonds has repeatedly claimed that top government officials had clear

foreknowledge of 9/11, yet 9/11 is not even mentioned in the article.

Dangerous World Fuels Conspiracy Theorists 2007-01-30, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/29/national/main2411081.shtml Five years later, it's the violent rattling of the ground moments before the Wor ld Trade Center's South Tower fell ... that keeps Gary Welz raising questions ab out just what he survived on Sept. 11, 2001. "I felt what was like an earthquake ... just before the South Tower fell," recalls Welz, an adjunct math lecturer a t John Jay Criminal College and Fordham University. "The official explanation th at I've heard doesn't make sense because it doesn't explain why I heard and felt an explosion before the South Tower fell." Welz is among the growing ranks of c onspiracy theorists who question the official explanation of ... the Sept. 11 at tacks. The actions of U.S. administrations in recent American history have done nothing to dissuade conspiracy theorists. The details of the 1980s Iran-Contra a ffair, after all, read like an implausible conspiracy theorist's dream. The Wate rgate scandal provides fodder too. The Bush administration, it can be argued, ha s encouraged a new generation of theorists after implying there was a link betwe en Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks ... and insisting Iraq was riddled with w eapons of mass destruction. Although he is doubtful of the official 9/11 story, Welz ... does not consider himself a conspiracy theorist. Welz' own skepticism t oward 9/11, while based on personal experience, has been reinforced by broadcast quality, highly-polished films on the Internet such as "9/11 Mysteries." There are hundreds of others out there. One such film is "Loose Change" ... a polished , albeit journalistically flawed, attempt to poke holes in the U.S. government's explanation and response to the Sept. 11 attacks. "Loose Change" has been downl oaded over 30 million times in 50 countries. Note: For free viewing of "Loose Change," click here. To view "9/11 Mysteries," click here. For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a ma jor cover-up of 9/11, click here.

Suit airs Able Danger claims 2006-03-04, Sacramento Bee (Leading newspaper of California's capital city) http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/14225641p-15049903c.html Two operatives at the center of the Able Danger controversy have sued the Defens e Department for denying them contact with their lawyers during closed congressi onal hearings. Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and J.D. Smith were among a dozen i ntelligence officers and contractors who worked on the clandestine program set u p long before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to track al-Qaida. They are accusing the Pentagon...of violating their First Amendment rights by blocking th eir access to legal counsel during the closed sessions. "Able Danger identified the Sept. 11, 2001, attack leader Mohamed Atta, and three of the 9/11 plot's 19 hijackers, as possible members of an al-Qaida cell linked to the 1993 World Trad e Center attack or its participants," the suit said. Shaffer, a Bronze Star reci pient who fought undercover in Afghanistan, caused a stir in August when he step ped forward to say that he and other Able Danger operatives had identified Atta as long as 21 months before the Sept. 11 attacks. That claim - later supported b y the Able Danger team's leader, Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott - contradicted a cen tral finding of the commission Congress had set up to probe the Sept. 11 attacks , which concluded that none of the hijackers had been known to U.S. authorities before the assault. Note: Though the major media once gave Able Danger good coverage, only the Sacra

mento Bee has mentioned that the team's leader is one of the individuals who ste pped forward. For lots more on the vitally important Able Danger program, click here.

Revisiting 9/11 Failures 2007-01-31, Newsweek http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16907952/site/newsweek Senators are renewing calls for the declassification of a CIA report documenting the agency s mistakes in preventing the 2001 attacks. The Senate Intelligence Com mittee and the CIA may be headed for a new confrontation over an old issue: why an internal report documenting the agency s failures in the run up to the Septembe r 11 terror attacks is still being withheld from the public. The report, prepare d by the CIA s inspector general, is the only major 9/11 government review that ha s still not been made publicly available. While Bush administration officials ar e hardly eager for a public rehash of the 9/11 intelligence failures, the issue is an especially sensitive one at CIA headquarters. The report provides the CIA s own internal account of what some believe was the most spectacular of the pre-9/ 11 failures: the agency s failure to alert the FBI and other U.S. government agenc ies to information showing that two of the hijackers had entered the United Stat es as early as January 2000.

9/11's Las Vegas Connection 2006-09-10, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/10/eveningnews/main1992178.shtml The title is "Loose Change." It may be the internet's first blockbuster movie. I t says: "If the government has nothing to hide, why are they so afraid to answer a few questions?" Ten million have watched so far, and that's only a fraction o f the 42 percent of Americans recently polled by Reuters who believe its message -- that our own government covered up critical evidence of 9/11. But it's more than conspiracy theories on the Internet at work here. Some of the very people w ho first investigated 9/11 admit there's still a lot they don't know about the p lot. Dale Watson ran counterterrorism for the FBI and led the investigation into 9/11. And one of the things that still puzzles him most is the Las Vegas connec tion. All four of the 9/11 hijacker pilots flew Las Vegas in the months precedin g the attack. Some came twice. But once here, the men essentially disappeared. O n his first trip here hijacker Muhammad Atta rented a car, and drove it 110 mile s in two days. But where did he go? Who did he visit with, if anyone? There's no t a clue. Why did Muhammad Atta and his sidekick travel all the way to Portland, Maine, to connect with -- and almost miss -- the Boston flight they later hijac ked? Why did Atta earlier travel all the way from Florida to Virginia Beach, Va. , just to rent a mailbox? The FBI still doesn't know -- but hasn't stopped looki ng. Five years after the crime a dozen agents remain on the 9/11 case. And they still get 20 new leads a week. Note: Is it possible that practically no one supported the alleged hijackers pri or to 9/11? Why has only one man every been caught and tried? And FBI agents wer e stymied by top officials in their attempts to search his laptop before 9/11. W hy haven't we heard that they are still investigating the Las Vegas connection?

Religious book points 9/11 finger at Bush 2006-09-01, Indianapolis Star/Associated Press http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060829/LIVING/608290305/...

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has tumbled into a new dispute over the Sept. 1 1 attacks of five years ago. Its Presbyterian Publishing Corp. has issued "Chris tian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11" (Westminster John Knox), containing perhap s the most incendiary accusations leveled by a writer for a mainline Protestant book house. Author David Ray Griffin tells of concluding that "the Bush-Cheney a dministration had orchestrated 9/11 in order to promote this (American) empire u nder the pretext of the so-called war on terror." Griffin has solid mainline cre dentials. He's an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ ) and recently retired after a long teaching career at the United Methodists' Cl aremont (Calif.) School of Theology. Such a massive cover-up is possible, he exp lains, because people don't want to believe high officials would "launch an atta ck on their own citizens." Griffin also asserts claims about "abundant evidence" of Bush administration orchestration of 9/11 in a separate anthology from Westm inster and also did so in two previous books for a small secular publisher. He a lso has spoken to campus and church groups. He's a member of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" along with Kevin Barrett, a Muslim instructor at the University of Wiscon sin who is under fire for making similar accusations. The publisher's publicity contends that Griffin "applies Jesus' teachings to the current political adminis tration" and puts forth "an abundance of evidence and disturbing questions that implicate the Bush administration." Note: The article also tries to tear down Prof. Griffin. It is interesting to no te that none of the top U.S. papers picked up this important Associated Press ar ticle.

Author, filmmakers fight over adaptation of 9/11 expose 2006-08-18, Miami Herald (Miami's leading newspaper) http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/television/15308882.htm What was already expected to be a controversial documentary that charges that Os ama bin Laden's top spy infiltrated three different branches of U.S. national se curity has gotten even hotter. Veteran investigative reporter Peter Lance call[e d] the TV documentary based on his book a whitewash. The documentary, Triple Cro ss, is scheduled to air on the National Geographic Channel Aug. 28, with Lance's book of the same name set for publication a few weeks later. But their accounts of the way bin Laden's master spy Ali A. Mohamed outwitted the CIA, the FBI and the U.S. Army may be overshadowed by the acrimonious war of words. National Geo graphic's producers at one point held back transcripts of interviews they were s upposed to share with Lance, and still won't let him see the final documentary u nless he signs what they call a "non-disparagment agreement." Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to...detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant at the same time he was smuggling bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, writing most of the al Qaeda terrorist man ual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa. Finally arrested in 1998, Mohamed cut a deal with the Justice Departmen t. His whereabouts remain shrouded in official secrecy. Lance, an Emmy winner wh o spent nine years as a producer-reporter at ABC, was one of the first journalis ts on the trail of the Mohamed story. "The FBI allowed the chief spy for al Qaed a to...plan the bombings of the embassies in Africa right under their noses.''

Bush Behind 9/11? Tucker Carlson with Professor David Ray Griffin 2006-08-09, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14285603/

CARLSON: My next guest is one of the leading voices in the increasingly noisy mo vement that claims our own government orchestrated the attacks of September 11th . David Ray Griffin is a theology professor and a member of the group Scholars f or 9/11 Truth. He's also the author of the book, Christian Faith and the Truth B ehind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action. That book is published by the Presb yterian Church's publishing arm. Mr. Griffin...you have no evidence that the gov ernment's behind 9/11. GRIFFIN: These things have to be determined in terms of e vidence. If you read this book and...my two previous books, The New Pearl Harbor , and then The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, you will see t here are literally dozens of reasons to disbelieve the official theory about 9/1 1. CARLSON: I'm merely saying it is wrong, blasphemous, and sinful for you to su ggest, imply, or help other people come to the conclusion that the U.S. governme nt killed 3,000 of its own citizens. GRIFFIN: I thought the same thing for the f irst year and a half. But then when I finally looked at the evidence, I saw that it was truly overwhelming. CARLSON: You say six of the hijackers may still be a live. What's the evidence? GRIFFIN: Both the BBC and the "Telegraph" put out sto ries -- let's take the one about Waleed al-Shehri. Several days after 9/11, he.. .announced to the world that he's still alive in Morocco where he's a pilot. We didn't get a word of that from the 9/11 Commission. [The 47-story WTC] Building 7 was not hit by an airplane. CARLSON: And it came down. GRIFFIN: The 9/11 Commi ssion did not even mention in their 571-page report the fact that Building 7 col lapsed. Note: To see the video clip on the MSNBC website, click here. Though Carlson cle arly is attacking Griffin, I am thrilled that this interview was aired. At this stage, I believe any publicity is good publicity.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth Under Attack 2006-07-04, July 4, 2006, PRWeb http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/7/prweb406904.htm The author of an article about the attack on the World Trade Center has found hi mself under attack for having published it in a new on-line publication, Journal of 9/11 Studies. Entitled "The Third Elephant", the article discusses evidence that a third airplane was captured on video at the time of the WTC attack. He ha s now received a thinly-veiled threat against his children, who are cited by nam e, suggesting it would be a good idea if his article were to simply "go away". S cholars for 9/11 Truth is a non-partisan society of experts and scholars committ ed to exposing falsehoods and revealing truths about the events of 9/11. The jou rnal, which is archived at journalof911studies.com, is its latest attempt to cre ate forums for discussion and debate about these important issues beyond its web site, which is archived at st911.org. The author, Reynolds Dixon, a writer and Professor of English, former lecturer and Fellow at Stanford University, has wit hdrawn from the society. Prominent experts and scholars who are members of S9/11 T include Steven Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University; Morg an Reynolds, former Chief Economist for the Department of Labor in the George W. Bush administration; Bob Bowman, who directed research on the "Star Wars" progr am in both Republican and Democratic administrations; Andreas von Buelow, the fo rmer director of Science and Technology for Germany; and David Ray Griffin, prof essor emeritus of theology at the Claremont Graduate School and author or editor of four books on the events of 9/11. Note: We rarely use PRWeb as a source for articles, but as I helped with the for mation of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and know key people there, and as no other maj or media are reporting on this alarming news, I'm including this here for those who want to know.

Panel Weighs Whistleblower Law Changes 2006-02-14, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/14/AR20060214015... Five government whistleblowers said Tuesday they had faced retaliation for calli ng attention to alleged government wrongs. They told their stories to the House Government Reform Committee's national security subcommittee, whose chairman, Re p. Chris Shays, R-Conn., indicated an interest in altering the law to better pro tect national-security whistleblowers. Army Spc. Samuel Provance laid out what h e considers to be a pattern of systemic abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. He s aid his rank was reduced for disobeying orders not to speak about mistreatment h e saw at the prison. Russ Tice, a former NSA analyst, has called attention to po ssible constitutional abuses and security breaches at NSA. He said he was given psychological evaluations deeming him mentally unstable, and his clearance was r evoked. He's now unemployed. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer says the Defense Intellige nce Agency has made a series of allegations against him since he disclosed infor mation about a program known as Able Danger. He says the program identified four Sept. 11 hijackers before the attack. Richard Levernier, a retired Energy Depar tment nuclear security specialist, said he lost his security clearance and effec tively his job for giving the media an unclassified report about shortfalls in n uclear security.

F.A.A. Alerted on Qaeda in '98, 9/11 Panel Said 2005-09-14, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/politics/14terror.html?ex=1284350400&en=de7... American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "se ek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to pr eviously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commissi on. The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that two of t he three airports used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses. Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001 in a report p repared for the agency that airport screeners' ability to detect possible weapon s had "declined significantly" in recent years, but little was done to remedy th e problem. The White House and many members of the commission...have been battli ng for more than a year over the release of the commission's report on aviation failures. A footnote that was originally deleted from the report showed that a q uarter of the security screeners used in 2001 by Argenbright Security for United Airlines flights at Dulles Airport had not completed required criminal backgrou nd checks. Much of the material now restored in the public version of the commis sion's report centered on the warnings the F.A.A. received about the threat of h ijackings, including 52 intelligence documents in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that mentioned Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. Richard Ben-Veniste, a form er member of the Sept. 11 commission, said the release of the material more than a year after it was completed underscored the over-classification of federal ma terial. "It's outrageous that it has taken the administration a year since this monograph was submitted for it to be released," he said.

Report on CIA before 9/11 slams Tenet 2005-08-26, San Francisco Chronicle/New York Times http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/26/MNG4PEDOTL1.DTL New director must decide whether to discipline any of the dozen-plus criticized. A long-awaited CIA inspector-general's report on the agency's performance befor e the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks includes detailed criticism of more than a doze

n former and current agency officials, aiming its sharpest language at George Te net, the former director of central intelligence. Tenet is censured for failing to develop and carry out a strategic plan to take on al Qaeda in the years befor e 2001, even after he wrote in a 1998 memo to the intelligence agencies that "we are at war" with the terrorist group. The findings place Goss in a delicate pos ition. Now, as director of the CIA, he will have to decide whether to discipline any of those criticized, risking a further blow to the morale of an agency stil l charged with protecting the country against future terrorist attacks. Note: Though various whistleblowers on the 9/11 cover-up have been fired or demo ted, there has never been a report of a single government official being discipl ined for failures which led to the 9/11 attacks. As pressure builds for accounta bility, Tenet, who resigned over a year ago, may be the chosen scapegoat.

9/11 Commission's Staff Rejected Report on Early Identification of Chief Hijacke r 2005-08-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/politics/11intel.html?ex=1281412800&en=3c4c... The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days befor e issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without referenc e to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later. The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer's account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed At ta, the plot's leader. [Republican Congressman Curt] Weldon has accused the comm ission of ignoring information that would have forced a rewriting of the history of the Sept. 11 attacks. He has asserted that the Able Danger unit...sought to call their superiors' attention to Mr. Atta and three other future hijackers in the summer of 2000. In a letter sent Wednesday to members of the commission, Mr. Weldon criticized the panel in scathing terms, saying that its "refusal to inve stigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent effort s to feign ignorance of the project...brings shame on the commissioners." Al Fel zenberg, who served as the commission's chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in Oct ober 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terro rist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.

Brothers, Bad Blood and the Blackwater Tangle 2007-11-17, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17brothers.html?ex=1352955600&en=1cb325e... They were smart, scrappy brothers who rose from modest circumstances in Baltimor e to become lacrosse stars at Princeton, succeed in business and land big govern ment jobs. Now the Krongard brothers who have carried childhood nicknames, Buzzy and Cookie, through long careers are tied up in the tangled story of Blackwater , the security contractor accused in the deaths of at least 17 Iraqis while guar ding a State Department convoy in Baghdad. The shorthand version boils their inv olvement down to that Washington catchall conflict of interest. The full story a ppears more complicated. Alvin [Buzzy] Krongard, 71, ... left a $4 million-a-yea r job in investment banking to serve in top posts at the Central Intelligence Ag ency from 1998 to 2004. Buzzy Krongard spoke [to the New York Times] in his 15,0 00-square-foot Georgian mansion, Torch Hill, north of Baltimore. After rising to the helm of Alex. Brown & Sons, the venerable Baltimore investment banking firm

, Buzzy Krongard oversaw its acquisition by Bankers Trust in 1997 and left the n ext year for the C.I.A., as a counselor to George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. He became executive director, the No. 3 post, in 2001 and helped design the agency s secret detention program after the Sept. 11 attacks. B uzzy Krongard vigorously defends Blackwater s record in Iraq. It s very easy to secon d-guess them when you re sitting back in an air-conditioned office, he said. Note: Buzzy Krongard took quite a cut in pay to move from Bankers Trust to the c omparatively modest salary of even a high-ranking CIA position. Bankers Trust wa s purchased by the same company that placed the highly unusual and suspicious "p ut options" on United Airlines stock just days before 9/11. For a powerful summa ry of similarly strange, unexplained facts related to 9/11, click here.

Sandy Berger gives up law license 2007-06-08, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19106937/ Berger, now an international business consultant, said in a statement last month that he "decided to voluntarily relinquish my license" as a result of pleading guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, a misdemean or. "I realized then that my law license would be affected," Berger said in the statement obtained Thursday. In April 2005, Berger admitted destroying some of t he documents and then lying about it. He called his actions a lapse of judgment that came while he was preparing to testify before the Sept. 11 commission. The documents he took contained information on terror threats in the United States d uring the 2000 millennium celebration. Berger had only copies of documents; all the originals remain in the government's possession. A report by the archives in spector general said that Berger acknowledged hiding some of them at a construct ion site near the archives building in Washington. Note: For a more in-depth analysis of Berger's admitted crime, which tries to an swer the question "What information was worth risking his reputation, his career , and his freedom to keep hidden?", click here.

Can the 20th hijacker of Sept. 11 stand trial? 2006-10-24, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361462/ Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him l ike a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was to ld that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male inte rrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and for ced to perform dog tricks. That much is known. These details were among the find ings of the U.S. Army s investigation of al-Qahtani's aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But only now is a picture emerging of how the interrogatio n policy developed, and the battle that law enforcement agents waged, inside Gua ntanamo and in the offices of the Pentagon, against harsh treatment of al-Qahtan i and other detainees by military intelligence interrogators. In interviews with MSNBC.com the first time they have spoken publicly former senior law enforcemen t agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, working to build legal cas es against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used...a fter Guantanamo's prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimately carried thei r battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who approv ed the more aggressive techniques. And they described their disappointment when

military prosecutors told them not to worry about making a criminal case against al-Qahtani, the suspected "20th hijacker" of Sept. 11, because what had been do ne to him would prevent him from ever being put on trial.

The enduring conspiracy factor 2006-09-10, Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... Five years after the most reported and recorded cataclysmic event in world histo ry, one would expect the conspiracy theorists to have been pushed to society's m argins. Think again. As time passes, more and more Americans are convinced the m ost bizarre theory is that 19 guys with box cutters, directed by a bearded man i n a cave in Afghanistan, pulled off the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. An inside job ? Those who believe that are not crackpots, says Mark Fenster, a University of F lorida law professor and author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in Ame rican Culture. Fenster says the John F. Kennedy assassination and the 9/11 attac ks are huge events that have been officially explained by tiny scenarios, someth ing people find unsatisfying. Kevin Ryan, a leading figure in the conspiracy mov ement, [will] tell you what started him down the conspiracy path. "I first began to be suspicious ... after it was clear the Bush administration had lied to us about the reasons for going to war in Iraq," says Ryan, who was lab director at an Underwriters Laboratory subsidiary in South Bend, Ind., until he was fired af ter questioning official reports on the collapse of the twin towers. "Since then , I've wondered when the lying began." In Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9 /11: A Call to Reflection and Action, David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus of philosophy and theology at California's Claremont School of Theology, accuses t he Bush administration of orchestrating the attacks. Some of the leading conspir acy theorists are scientists, engineers, theologians and university professors, 75 of whom formed Scholars For 9/11 Truth.

Was 9/11 an 'inside job'? 2006-08-03, Seattle Post-Intelligencer http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/279827_conspiracy02ww.html More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assiste d in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United Sta tes could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio U niversity poll. Suspicions that the 9/11 attacks were "an inside job"...quickly have become nearly as popular as decades-old conspiracy theories that the federa l government was responsible for President John F. Kennedy's assassination and t hat it has covered up proof of space aliens. Thirty-six percent of respondents o verall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials eith er participated in the attacks...or took no action to stop them. "One out of thr ee sounds high, but that may very well be right," said Lee Hamilton, former vice chairman of...the 9/11 Commission. "A lot of people I've encountered believe th e U.S. government was involved," Hamilton said. "Many say the government planned the whole thing," he said. The poll also found that 16 percent of Americans spe culate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the re al reason the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed. Twelve pe rcent suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rathe r than by an airliner captured by terrorists. "We know that there are a lot of p eople now asking questions," said Janice Matthews, executive director of 911Trut h.org, one of the most sophisticated Internet sites raising doubts about officia l explanations of the attacks. "We didn't have the Internet after Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin or the Kennedy assassination. But we live in different times now."

Security breach of FBI's translator program to be questioned 2005-03-02, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-03-02-fbi-translator_x.htm After listening to former translator Sibel Edmonds complain about her treatment at the hands of the Justice Department and the FBI, Reps. Christopher Shays, R-C onn., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said their staffs would debrief Edmonds and c onfront Justice Department officials with the information. Edmonds commented on the issue while testifying at a House Government Reform subcommittee hearing on the government's designation of information as classified. She told lawmakers th e people she accused were still working at the FBI. The Justice Department's ins pector general said last month that the FBI never adequately investigated Edmond s' complaints, even though evidence and witnesses supported her. Edmonds filed a lawsuit seeking to keep her job, but last summer a judge threw out her case aft er Attorney General John Ashcroft said her claims might harm national security b y exposing government secrets. Note: This article fails to mention Ms. Edmonds claims that top individuals in g overnment concealed critical information about 9/11 suggesting complicity by com promised politicians. For more, click here.

National security whistle-blowers allege retaliation 2006-02-16, Sacramento Bee (leading newspaper of California's capital city) http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/politics/story/3168792p-11877323c.html Military and intelligence officers told spellbound lawmakers Tuesday that their careers had been ruined by superiors because they refused to lie about Able Dang er, Abu Ghraib and other national security controversies. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaff er...told a House Government Reform subcommittee that he and other intelligence officers and contractors working on the top-secret program code-named "Able Dang er" had identified Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, but were p revented from passing their findings to the FBI. "Many of us have a personal com mitment to ... going forward to expose the truth and wrongdoing of government of ficials who, before and after the 9/11 attacks, failed to do their job." Shaffer contradicted recent statements by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, who denied having met with Shaffer and other Able Dange r operatives in Afghanistan in October 2003. "I did meet with him," Shaffer said . "I have the business card he gave me. I find it hard to believe that he could not remember meeting me." The commission's chairman and vice chairman, former Ne w Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, released a statement say ing the panel had looked into the work of Able Danger and found it "historically insignificant." Note: Though Able Danger received wide media coverage when it first came out six months ago, CNN was the only major media outlet to give significant coverage to this most important news. Yet CNN did not post the text of the program on their website. Why isn't our media covering this vital topic? For lots more on this, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/911information and http://www.WantToKnow.info/abl edanger911

The war on paperclips 2005-05-11, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1480940,00.html

The FBI, as we know, blocked all manner of investigations into the [9/11] plot i n the run up to its execution, whether these involved highly specific warnings f rom its own agents or from government sources in Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain , the Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco and Russia. Meanwhile, I worry why the nearest military aircraft weren't scrambled to intercept any of the hijacked flights when this is standard procedure and why , when more distant jets were finally aloft, they flew at less than half speed, thus failing to prevent the impacts at the twin towers.

Court prevents release of most September 11 emergency calls 2005-03-24, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/24/sept11.tapes The emergency phone calls made by people trapped inside the World Trade Center o n September 11, 2001, need not be released to the public, a New York court ruled Thursday. The families sought release of the 9-1-1 calls possessed by the Fire Department of New York, along with department dispatcher calls and interviews wi th firefighters who participated in the September 11 rescue effort. The FDNY had resisted the disclosures, citing privacy concerns. The FDNY also sought to bloc k the release of six unidentified tapes and transcripts selected by federal pros ecutors as evidence in the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person fa cing trial in the United States for the September 11 attacks.

Judge dismisses New York Times libel suit 2007-01-12, MSNBC News/Associate Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16600278 A federal judge on Friday dismissed a libel lawsuit filed against The New York T imes by a former Army scientist once identified as a person of interest in the 2 001 anthrax attacks. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton in Alexandria dismissed t he case a week after lawyers for the Times argued that Steven Hatfill should be considered a public figure under libel law, which makes it much more difficult f or a public figure to win a judgment than a private citizen. The judge did not e xplain his ruling in the order issued Friday. Hatfill had claimed that a series of columns falsely implicated him as the culprit in the anthrax attacks. Kristof said all along that he never intended to accuse Hatfill but simply wanted to pr od a dawdling FBI investigation. He initially referred to Hatfill in his columns only as Mr. X, and identified him by name only after Hatfill held a news conferen ce to denounce rumors that had been swirling around him. Hatfill argued that the columns contained enough information about him that people could deduce his ide ntity. Five people were killed and 17 sickened by anthrax that had been mailed t o lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florid a just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The case remains unsol ved. Note: There is much more here than meets the eye. This article fails to mention some key facts. As reported by the highly respected Federation of American Scien tists, "the New York Times invoked the 'state secrets' doctrine last month in a motion to dismiss the libel suit brought against it by Steven J. Hatfill." What secrets would be divulged? Could this have anything to do with the many microbio logists who were murdered or died under mysterious circumstances within months o f the anthrax scares? For more, click here.

TV show host boots out 9/11 conspiracy theorists 2007-10-23, Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2197237,00.html It's the conundrum that faces all television personalities broadcasting live: ho w to deal with hecklers trying to disrupt the show. Do you ignore the perpetrato rs? Do you try to reason with them? Or do you do what the American comic and tal k show host Bill Maher did - jump into the audience, threaten the hecklers with an "ass kicking" and scream "Get the fuck out of my building!" In one of the mor e unconventional displays of audience interaction on US television in recent yea rs, that is now doing hot trade as a clip on YouTube, Maher reacted to the inter ruptions of hecklers in his studio audience with the memorable words: "Do we hav e some fucking security in this building?" He then tore off his lapel microphone and stormed off the stage and up to some protesters wielding "expose the 9/11 c over-up" banners. It was at that point during a panel discussion on his HBO show , Real Time With Bill Maher, that the nature of the comic's difficulties with an element of his audience became clear. Maher is a darling of the US liberal inte lligentsia for his brand of Bush-bashing and anti-religious pedantry. But the on e point over which he will not bash the Bush administration is the events of Sep tember 11 2001. He does not agree with 9/11 conspiracy theorists, or Truthers as they call themselves, that the Bush administration brought down the Twin Towers in a controlled explosion. The trouble started a few weeks ago when Maher launc hed a verbal assault on air against the Truthers, calling them "crazy people". H e advised the conspiracy theorists, who had been demonstrating outside his studi o, to visit their doctor to ask whether the antidepressant Paxil was right for t hem. In 2002 ABC ended its relationship with him over comments he made in his fo rmer show, Politically Incorrect, about the 9/11 hijackers. Note: To watch Bill Maher's performance on YouTube, click here. For a concise su mmary of reliable reports from major media sources which raise many unanswered q uestions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

More Canadians blaming U.S. policies for Sept. 11 attacks 2006-09-11, Ottawa Citizen http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=864d6b12-1abd-49d3-b24f-06b... A poll conducted for Canwest News Service indicates that 53 per cent of Canadian s believe the attacks were "a very specific violent reaction to foreign policies of the U.S. government." The results show that Canadians are more firm in their blame since the first anniversary of Sept. 11, in 2002, when only 15 per cent s aid that U.S. foreign policy was responsible. Only 36 per cent reported that the terrorist bombings signalled an attack against "all western-style, affluent dem ocracies because they hate their ideas and values, symbolized most by the United States." In a bizarre finding, the polling firm reported that 22 per cent of Ca nadians believe in a conspiracy theory in which the terrorist attacks were orche strated by a "group of highly influential Americans and others" rather than by s upporters of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network. The theory that the U.S. pulled off an inside job to ultimately justify going to war for Iraqi oil persists in Canada and in the United States, fuelled by a few books and a co mpelling Internet documentary called Loose Change, created by two young American s, which has been viewed by millions and is particularly popular on university c ampuses and in Internet chat rooms. The poll shows young adults aged 18 to 34 ar e most likely to believe in the conspiracy theory (26 per cent). Note: For our reliable, verifiable 9/11 Information Center: http://www.WantToKno w.info/911information

Grenades 'caused Beslan tragedy' 2006-08-29, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5294548.stm A Russian investigator has said grenades fired by surrounding Russian forces cou ld have triggered the Beslan school bloodbath in September 2004. Yuri Savelyev's conclusions contradict the official view that bombs planted by the hostage-take rs in the school gym went off just before the gun battle. Mr Savelyev is a membe r of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating the siege, in which 331 people died. Mr Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, said that during the investigation, he "discovered that the consequences of those blasts could not at all be explained by the explosions of the home-made devices installed by the re bels". The head of the commission, Stanislav Kesayev, said he had confidence in Mr Savelyev's conclusions. "He had more resources than our commission. He relied on his own knowledge as a weapons specialist and mathematician," Mr Kesayev tol d the radio. For weeks after the siege Russian officials had denied the use of f lamethrowers. Note: The Russian school bombing is very likely one of many examples of a falseflag operation -- a terrorist act staged secretly by a government and blamed on another group or government in order to achieve a certain agenda. To understand more about that agenda, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/brighterfuture. To see Te rrorstorm, an excellent, free documentary on false flag operations, click here.

Kevin Barrett: Media hide truth: 9/11 was inside job 2006-05-11, The Capital Times http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/index.php?ntid=83698&ntpid=1 Last Saturday, former Bush administration official Morgan Reynolds drew an enthu siastic capacity crowd to the Wisconsin Historical Society auditorium. Reynolds, the ex-top economist for George W. Bush's Labor Department, charged the Bush ad ministration with gross malfeasance, and proposed the prosecution of top adminis tration officials. Normally, if a prestigious UW alumnus and ex-Bush administrat ion official were to come to the Wisconsin Historical Society to spill the beans about a Bush administration scandal, it would make the news. The local TV stati ons would cover it, and it would merit front page headlines in The Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal. When a former Bush administration insider makes su ch charges, how can the media ignore them? Is Reynolds a lone crank? Hardly. A l ong list of prominent Americans have spoken out for 9/11 truth: Rev. William Slo ane Coffin, Sen. Barbara Boxer, former head of the Star Wars program Col. Robert Bowman, ex-Reagan administration economics guru Paul Craig Roberts, progressive Jewish author-activist Rabbi Michael Lerner, former CIA official Ray McGovern, author-essayist Gore Vidal, and many other respected names from across the polit ical spectrum have gone on the record for 9/11 truth. It is time to break the 9/ 11 truth blackout. Please put pressure on your local media through letters to th e editor, call-ins to talk radio, and phone calls to local and national journali sts.

Conspiracy film rewrites Sept. 11 2006-04-27, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-04-27-conspiracies-sept-11_x.htm Loose Change...is being downloaded from the Internet and shown in small screenin gs here and overseas. The film appears especially popular among young people imm ersed in a Web culture brimming with sites that question the credibility of gove

rnment. They see 9/11 as the defining moment of their lives. Professors and rese archers of film and politics say the Internet is making it far easier to spread such theories because the traditional media are losing their hold on the news. I nternet chat rooms are full of promos for screenings of Loose Change. Most of wh at the film alleges is refuted by the evidence at hand. Anything not answered de finitively by the government is interpreted by the film as proof of a coverup. S ome college students who saw Loose Change and are promoting it say it's good to raise questions. The film "at the very least suggests that we don't know the who le truth" says Matt Latham, a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cr uz. People believe in conspiracy theories because the truth "is either too simpl e or too remote," says sociologist Clifton Bryant of Virginia Tech University. " We're always ready to believe something about which we know nothing." Note: A big thank you to USA Today for carrying this article, even though overal l it is trying to debunk the film. Loose Change ranked in the top 10 most viewed videos on Google for many months, and even reached the #1 position for a number of days. Don't miss this incredibly eye-opening film which is waking up caring citizens around the world. Click here.

Physicist says heat substance felled WTC 2006-04-10, Deseret News (a leading newspaper in Utah) http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635198488,00.html A Brigham Young University physicist said he now believes an incendiary substanc e called thermite, bolstered by sulfur, was used to generate exceptionally hot f ires at the World Trade Center on 9/11, causing the structural steel to fail and the buildings to collapse. "It looks like thermite with sulfur added," Steven J ones, professor of physics at BYU, told a meeting of the Utah Academy of Science , Arts and Letters. Jones is co-chairman, with James H. Fetzer, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota of Scholars for 9/11 Trut h, a group of college faculty members who believe conspirators other than pilots of the planes were directly involved in bringing down New York's Trade Towers. The group, which Jones said has 200 members, maintains a Web site at www.st911.o rg. A 40-page paper by Jones, along with other peer-reviewed and non-reviewed ac ademic papers, are posted on the site. Last year, Jones presented various argume nts for his theory that explosives or incendiary devices were planted in the Tra de Towers, and in WTC 7, a smaller building in the Trade Center complex, and tha t those materials, not planes crashing into the buildings, caused the buildings to collapse. Jones said his studies are confined to physical causes of the colla pses, and he doesn't like to speculate about who might have entered the building s and placed thermite and sulfur. Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up: http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up

An Inside Job? Theologian scoffed at 9/11 conspiracy theories, then looked close r 2006-03-30, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/30/NSGB3HTBQ61.DTL When David Ray Griffin, noted theologian and professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, first heard someone say that Sept. 11 was an inside job, he scoffed. [But later] Griffin began to delve into 9/11 conspiracy theories after looking at a time line of the events of Sept. 11, 2001...on the Internet. He fo und himself swayed by the catalog of inconsistencies and strange coincidences. G riffin points to historical evidence that the U.S. government would be capable o

f such a thing. Operation Northwoods, a plan concocted by the Pentagon in the '6 0s as a way of taking Castro from power, included ideas about how a terrorist at tack on U.S. soil could provide a pretext for military action. While many conspi racy theories have been passed around, it's been very easy to dismiss many of th e theorists as...crazy. But Griffin comes to his controversial conclusions with lucidity and calm. He even sees a connection between his long-standing work as a theologian and his new position as a political writer. "In both cases, the conc ern is for the good of the world as a whole."

Moussaoui Jury Riveted by 9/11 Transcript 2006-03-08, CBS/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/08/ap/national/mainD8G7AG300.shtml The details of what happened to the four hijacked jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001, h ave been known for years, but when a prosecutor read a simple minute-by-minute a ccount of the attacks, the jury deciding the fate of confessed al-Qaida conspira tor Zacarias Moussaoui hung on every word. In a similar vein, the missed opportu nities of the FBI and other agencies to prevent Sept. 11 have been known for yea rs, but when FBI agents are forced to admit them on cross-examination, they seem fresh to the jury. FBI agents have been forced to admit under cross-examination that the FBI knew years before Sept. 11 that al-Qaida had plans to use planes a s missiles to destroy prominent buildings. They also had to acknowledge numerous missed opportunities in the months before Sept. 11 to catch two of the hijacker s with terror links known to the government, even though the pair frequently use d their own names in this country to rent cars, purchase plane tickets and even, once, to file a police report after getting mugged. Note: What all of the media articles on this important case fail to mention is t he laptop computer of Moussaoui was confiscated weeks before 9/11, yet FBI headq uarters systematically undermined requests by Minneapolis FBI agents to search t he computer. See http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up10pg#moussaouilaptop. An d a full two weeks before 9/11 an FBI Minnesota supervisor said he was trying ke ep Moussaoui from taking control of a plane and fly it into the WTC," yet his inv estigation was repeatedly blocked by top officials. See http://www.WantToKnow.in fo/9-11cover-up10pg#moussaoui

Court Frees Sept. 11 Convict 2006-02-07, ABC/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1589740 A Moroccan convicted of belonging to a terrorist cell that included three Sept. 11 hijackers was freed from prison Tuesday after a federal court ruled he should n't be jailed with appeals still pending. A statement by Germany's Federal Const itutional Court said the lower court had been wrong to order el Motassadeq retur ned to custody because appeals by both the defense and prosecutors were still pe nding. Mounir el Motassadeq, 31, was sentenced to seven years in prison in Augus t by a court in Hamburg. In 2003, he became the first person anywhere to be conv icted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks when he was found guilty of member ship in a terrorist organization. The Moroccan acknowledges he was close to the hijackers but insists he knew nothing of their plans. Defense lawyers criticized the lack of direct testimony from witnesses such as Ramzi Binalshibh, a key Sep t. 11 suspect held by the U.S. Note: See http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up10pg#hijackersmilitary to read news articles by CBS, New York Times, and Los Angeles times describing how the F BI identified 50 individuals involved in orchestrating 9/11 and had 40 of them i

n custody. Yet not one of these people was ever tried. Is it logically possible that the 19 hijackers could have pulled off 9/11 without any support? Why have o nly two people worldwide ever been officially accused on involvement in 9/11 pla nning? And one of those two is now freed?

No evidence? It must be conspiracy 2005-11-20, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/no-evidence-it-must-be-conspiracy/2005/11/20... The twin towers did not fall because aircraft hit them. Demolition explosive cha rges made them collapse. If you look at close-up video you see puffs of explosiv es coming out the sides of the buildings as they topple. An advertisement that m akes this allegation has been airing in New York for months. It ends with a voic e saying: "Reopen the investigation and address the unanswered questions of 9/11 ." If you go to the website reopen911.org you find a series of even more startli ng claims. Did a plane actually hit the Pentagon? Photos taken on September 11, 2001, show no cabin, no tail and no engines. What about the phone calls by passe ngers from the hijacked planes? "You can't make calls from aircraft." Note: Though this article pokes fun at people who challenge the 9/11 story, yet it also raises serious questions. We are thankful for any media attention, even that which refutes the 9/11 movement, as any press brings the subject more fully into public awareness. See our 9/11 Information Center for more.

The President's 'Pit Bull' 2005-10-04, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-profile4oct04,0,7005879.... After they left Texas for Washington following the 2000 presidential election, M iers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the cr ucial "presidential daily briefing" hinting at terrorist plots against America j ust a month before the Sept. 11 attacks. Note: No other major media reported this significant fact on the topic of U.S. S upreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. The respected Editor and Publisher had this to say: "On its front page Tuesday, The New York Times published a photo of new U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers going over a briefing paper with Presid ent George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch 'in August 2001,' the caption reads. US A Today and the Boston Globe carried the photo labeled simply '2001,' but many o ther newspapers ran the picture in print or on the Web with a more precise date: Aug. 6, 2001. The PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing] was headed 'Bin Laden Deter mined to Strike in U.S.,' and notes, among other things, FBI information indicat ing 'patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparation s for hijackings or other types of attacks.' " For the entire article, click her e.

Sibel Edmonds v. Department of Justice: A Patriot Silenced 2005-09-26, ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) http://www.aclu.org/court/court.cfm?ID=19163&c=317 The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower court's dismissal of the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator wh o was fired in retaliation for reporting security breaches and possible espionag e within the Bureau. Lower courts dismissed the case when former Attorney Genera

l John Ashcroft invoked the rarely used "state secrets" privilege. An unclassifi ed summary of a report by the DOJ's Inspector General, released in January 2005, corroborates Edmonds' allegations. The IG report concludes that the FBI had ret aliated against Edmonds for reporting serious security breaches, stating that ... her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services. Fourteen 9/11 family member advocacy groups and publi c interest organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Edmonds case before the District Court. Edmonds' ordeal is highlighted in a 10-page art icle in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair titled An Inconvenient Patriot. Th e article, which chronicles FBI wrongdoing and possible corruption charges invol ving a high-level member of Congress, further undercuts the government's claim t hat the case can't be litigated because certain information is secret.

Weldon doubts DoD on Able Danger 2005-09-08, UPI http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20050908-122856-3635r The congressman who first made public claims that a secret Pentagon data mining project linked the Sept. 11 attacks ringleader to al-Qaida more than a year befo re the attacks took place says he does not believe the military's account of how the results of the project's work came to be destroyed. "I seriously have my do ubts that it was routine," Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Penn., told United Press Internat ional. Weldon said he had asked the Pentagon for the certificates of destruction that military officials must complete when classified data is destroyed. He sai d that there had been "a second elimination of data in 2003," in addition to the destruction acknowledged last week. "For some reason, the bureaucracy in the Pe ntagon -- I mean the civilian bureaucracy -- didn't want this to get out," he sa id. Note: The New York Times reported that the 9/11 Commission was informed of Able Danger and of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta being identified as a threat and an al Qaeda member more than a year before 9/11. Why was this crucial fact not even me ntioned in the 9/11 Commission report?

'Able Danger' Could Rewrite History 2005-08-12, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165414,00.html The federal commission that probed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks was told t wice about "Able Danger," a military intelligence unit that had identified Moham ed Atta and other hijackers a year before the attacks. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa.,. ..wrote to the former chairman and vice-chairman of the Sept. 11 commission late Wednesday, telling them that their staff had received two briefings on the mili tary intelligence unit -- once in October 2003 and again in July 2004. Weldon... wrote to former Chairman Gov. Thomas Kean and Vice-Chairman Rep. Lee Hamilton. " The 9/11 commission staff received not one but two briefings on Able Danger from former team members, yet did not pursue the matter. "The commission's refusal t o investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly wi thholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners" Note: For an abundance of excellent, incriminating information on this, see our Able Danger Information Center.

Experts Call for Release of 9/11 Evidence 2006-03-01, Yahoo News/PR Web http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20060301/bs_prweb/prweb352979_1 A society of experts and scholars has now joined with Judicial Watch in calling for release of videos that are being held by the Department of Defense, which ar e essential to understanding events at the Pentagon that transpired on September 11, 2001. Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which is dedicated to exposing falsehoods an d establishing truths about the events of 9/11, has gone beyond Judicial Watch b y calling for the release of other films and evidence that, its officers maintai n, are essential to understanding 9/11. "It is outrageous that the government is withholding this vital information", said James H. Fetzer, founder and co-chair of the society. They are calling for immediate release of the full Pentagon sur veillance tape as well as video tapes seized by FBI agents minutes after the Pen tagon hit; a complete inventory of the plane wreckage and debris from Flights 11 , 77, 93, 175 or any other aircraft that crashed or was destroyed on September 1 1, 2001. Note: Though Yahoo! News picked up this important article, no major media found it newsworthy until many months later.

The Conspiracy to Rewrite 9/11 2006-09-03, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/03/INGR0KRCBA1.DTL According to a poll by Ohio University and Scripps Howard News Service, 36 perce nt of Americans believe that government officials "either assisted in the 9/ 11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks." Sixteen percent of Americans, th e survey indicates, believe that "secret explosives"...brought down the World Tr ade Center towers. Robert Bowman, who directed the "Star Wars" defense program u nder Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, reached his own conclusion after q uestioning...why the American military hadn't intercepted the hijacked planes be fore they hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center [and] why the Pentagon did n't release surveillance tapes of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the milita ry complex. A former U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel with a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology...Bowman theorizes that Cheney and other off icials stood to benefit financially. Bowman says they had a long-standing desire to control Iraq's oil and to use the country as a strategic hub for controlling the entire Middle East. The Sept. 11 commission, he says, neglected to investig ate these possible connections, leaving a huge gap in the official account. Scho lars for 9/11 Truth [is] an organization that believes the U.S. government "perm itted 9/11 to occur." Among the group's members are Paul W. Rea, a humanities le cturer at St. Mary's College in Moraga; Tracy Belvins, a research scientist in b ioengineering at Rice University; Kevin Barrett, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...and Stephen LeRoy, an economics professor at UC Santa Barba ra who has been a visiting economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisc o.

9/11 Thefts Not Prosecuted 2006-06-16, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/16/ap/national/mainD8I9H5EG4.shtml A disaster relief company that took supplies that were supposed to go to Sept. 1 1 rescuers at the World Trade Center escaped punishment after the government dis covered its own employees had stolen artifacts from ground zero, once-secret fed eral documents show. Dan L'Allier...told The Associated Press he witnessed 45 to

ns of the New York loot being unloaded in Minnesota at his company's headquarter s. He and a colleague...complained to a company executive but were ordered to ke ep quiet. They went instead to the FBI. The two whistleblowers eventually lost t heir jobs, received death threats and were blackballed in the disaster relief in dustry. But they remained convinced their sacrifice was worth it to make sure ju stice was done. They were wrong. Federal prosecutors eventually charged KEI...bu t excluded the Sept. 11 thefts. The lead investigators for the FBI and [FEMA] to ld AP that the plan to prosecute...stopped as soon as it became clear in late su mmer 2002 that an FBI agent in Minnesota had stolen a crystal globe from ground zero. That prompted a broader review that ultimately found 16 government employe es, including a top FBI executive and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, had such artifacts from New York or the Pentagon. "It's a sad indictment of our just ice system that they would let people go in order to cover up misconduct by fede ral employees," said Jane Turner, the lead FBI agent. She too became a whistlebl ower alleging the bureau tried to fire her for bringing the stolen artifacts to light.

The 9/11 conspiracy: Rubbish or reality? 2006-09-11, MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14789644/ It is a bright and hopeful morning that greeted Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. The n it starts. By lunchtime, both buildings are gone, having crumbled to the groun d, neatly compacting themselves in the descent. In the ensuing hours we begin to learn the names of those involved in the tragedy. Their passports sitting atop the smoldering rubble prove easier to find than virtually indestructible black-b ox data recorders that vanish without a trace. We are told that Osama bin Laden -- a known terrorist who had been trained in war tactics by the United States -is to blame. The destruction of a third Manhattan skyscraper -- the 47-story Bu ilding #7 -- also collapsed, although no plane struck it. It's owner, Larry Silv erstein, insured the building for $7 billion shortly before the disaster. "You h ave to ask yourself some simple questions, like how is it that Morgan Bush, the president's younger brother, owned the company that was in charge of security fo r the World Trade Center, yet it has never appeared in The New York Times?" Note: This article largely seeks to debunk the 9/11 cover-up, yet it does give s ome good information.

September 11th Terrorist Attacks 2006-07-29, C-SPAN http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record... Panelists talked about the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Among the issues they addressed were various theories concerning t he origins of the attacks, charges of a government and media cover-up of key fac ts, the results of investigations into the attacks, and public perceptions of th e events of September 11, 2001. Participants...called on citizens to question of ficial versions of the terrorist attacks, examine independent sources of informa tion, and conduct grassroots education campaigns to change public opinion. Follo wing their presentations they answered questions from the audience. The two-day event, "American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 and The Neo-Con Agenda," was held in t he ballroom of the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown. Note: This 105-minute program was aired on C-SPAN four times over the course of four days! Click on the links to see the schedule: July 29th, 8:00 PM, July 29th 11:00 PM, July 30th, 3:18 PM, and Aug. 1st, 6:11 PM. To view the program on C-S

PAN's website as broadcast, see rtsp://video.c-span.org/60days/ap072906_theories .rm or see http://www.911blogger.com/2006/07/cspans-coverage-of-american-scholar s.html. We express gratitude to C-SPAN for their courage in broadcasting this pr ogram and helping people to question what really happened on that fateful day.

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden 2006-07-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/washington/04intel.html?ex=1309665600&en=3f... The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the miss ion of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials c onfirmed Monday. The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year a nd its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the offici als said. The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit befo re Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sep t. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "de ad or alive." "The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and th e decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus." Michael Scheuer, a forme r senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move refle cted a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he onc e was. Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken. "This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said. Note: They disband the unit to capture the man on the most wanted list? What's u p with that?

Unwelcome Attention From Moussaoui Trial 2006-03-25, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/politics/25moussaoui.html?ex=1300942800&en=... The sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui was supposed to have been the governm ent's best opportunity to hold someone accountable for the deaths on Sept. 11, 2 001. But after federal prosecutors finished laying out their case this week, eve n those who strongly supported an aggressive prosecution may wonder whether the trial has shed as much light on Mr. Moussaoui's culpability as it has on the mis steps and mistakes by law enforcement agencies. The testimony of two prosecution witnesses, in particular, has brought renewed and unwelcome attention to how th e [FBI] dealt with early warning signs. Mr. Moussaoui is the sole person to go t o trial in an American courtroom for the attacks. Under cross-examination...Mr. Samit acknowledged that after the attacks he had written strongly worded reports saying his superiors had improperly blocked his efforts to investigate Mr. Mous saoui. He added that he was convinced that Mr. Moussaoui was a terrorist involve d in an imminent hijacking plot. He offered a devastating comment from a supervi sor who said pressing too hard to obtain a warrant for Mr. Moussaoui would hurt his career. Mr. Samit also wrote that his superiors did not act because they wer e guilty of "criminal negligence" and they were gambling that Mr. Moussaoui had little to offer. The lost wager, Mr. Samit said, was paid in many lives.

Wis. lawmaker wants lecturer fired for 9-11 conspiracy views 2006-06-29, CBS News Chicago, Associated Press http://cbs2chicago.com/wisconsinwire/WI--Instructor-Sept.1_k_n_0wi--/resource... A state lawmaker is calling on the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire a par

t-time instructor who has spoken out on his beliefs that figures in the U.S. gov ernment, not al-Qaida, were behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Kevin Barrett is scheduled to teach a class in the fall in the UW-Madison Department of Langu ages and Cultures of Asia. During his appearance Wednesday night on Jessica McBr ide's show on WTMJ, Barrett disputed most of the widely accepted information abo ut the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center. Among other things, he claimed the group believed to have carried out the attacks was "a bunch of loser s who couldn't even fly planes," and that evidence indicates the buildings were brought down by controlled demolitions. He acknowledged discussing Sept. 11 in t eaching classes, but said it was only to give both sides of the issue, not to co nvert anyone to his point of view. State Rep. Stephen Nass...issued a statement demanding Barrett be fired immediately, calling him an embarrassment and accusin g him of spewing "garbage." Barrett received his doctorate from UW-Madison in 20 04 in African languages and literature and folklore Note: Vote in a website poll on this issue at http://www.channel3000.com/news/94 57154/detail.html. Kevin Barrett is the courageous director of a 9/11 website at http://www.mujca.com and a member of the influential group of professors and sc holars who make up Scholars For 9/11 Truth: http://www.st911.org

Opium Bumper Crop Seen to Benefit Taliban 2006-09-03, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=2390033&page=1 Already the world's largest producer of opium, Afghanistan's 2006 output has soa red a staggering 59 percent, according to a survey by the U.N.'s drug control pr ogram. So this year, the country that the United States invaded five years ago t o stabilize will produce 16,000 tons of opium. Drugs now make up more than half of gross domestic product. Top government officials are tied to the drug trade. Corruption runs rampant. Addiction rates in Afghanistan and neighboring Central Asia, Iran and Pakistan are skyrocketing. Note: How is it possible that the opium production continues to skyrocket in Afg hanistan, when it was decimated the year before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan? Fo r a possible answer, click here.

Report Urges F.A.A. to Act Regarding False 9/11 Testimony 2006-09-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/washington/02faa.html?ex=1314849600&en=a5b7... The Transportation Department's inspector general urged the Federal Aviation Adm inistration on Friday to consider disciplinary action against two executives who failed to correct false information provided to the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The acting inspector general, Todd J. Zinser, whose office acts as the department's internal watchdog, found in a new report that the F.A.A. executives...learned after the fact that false informati on was given to the commission in May 2003 about the F.A.A.'s contacts with the Air Force on the morning of Sept. 11. The inspector general's report, prepared i n response to complaints from the independent Sept. 11 commission, found that th e three F.A.A. executives failed to act on an "obligation" to correct the false information provided to the commission, which found widespread confusion within the aviation agency and the military on the morning of the attacks. The F.A.A., part of the Transportation Department, declined to identify the three executives , whose names and titles were not revealed in the inspector general's report. No r did the agency say whether it would consider disciplinary action. Richard Ben Veniste, a commission member, said in an interview on Friday that he was trouble

d that it had taken the inspector general two years to complete his investigatio n -- more time than it took the 9/11 commission to complete all of its work -- a nd that he released the report "on the Friday afternoon before the Labor Day wee kend."

Naval officer says Atta's identity known pre-9/11 2005-08-23, San Francisco Chronicle/New York Times http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/23/MNG66EBPJ71.DTL An active-duty Navy captain has become the second military officer to come forwa rd publicly to say that a secret defense intelligence program tagged the ringlea der of the Sept. 11 attacks as a possible terrorist more than a year before the attacks. The officer, Capt. Scott Phillpott, said in a statement Monday that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. His comments came on the same day that the Pentago n's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, told reporters that the Defense Departmen t had been unable to validate the assertions made by an Army intelligence vetera n, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and now backed up by Phillpott, about the early ide ntification of Atta. Shaffer went public with his assertions last week, saying t hat analysts in the intelligence project had been overruled by military lawyers when they tried to share the program's findings with the FBI in 2000 in hopes of tracking down terrorist suspects tied to al Qaeda.

Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00 2005-08-09, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/politics/09intel.html?ex=1281240000&en=bc4d... More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified militar y intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress. I n the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bure au of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania , and the former intelligence official said Monday. The recommendation was rejec ted and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part b ecause Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas.

The basics of alternative 9-11 theories 2006-02-21, Village Voice (alternative NY newspaper - liberal) http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0608,murphy,72255,6.html Operation Northwoods. This 1962 white paper from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested possible justifications for a war against Cuba, including a never exec uted idea in which the CIA would detonate a drone aircraft to make it look like Fidel Castro had shot down an American passenger plane. Project for the New Amer ican Century [PNAC]. As evidence of the motives behind a government-planned 9-11 , theorists point to one 28-word passage in a September 2000 [PNAC] report writt en with help from the likes of Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz: "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor. " Theorists point to Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision to stop flying comm

ercial [planes] in the summer of 2001, as well as a San Francisco Chronicle repo rt that Mayor Willie Brown received a warning of 9-11, as evidence that some peo ple had foreknowledge of the attack. World Trade Center 7. This building -- the last to fall on 9-11 -- is key to all controlled-demolition theories. Its sudden fall onto its own footprint, and developer Larry Silverstein's reference on TV to telling the FDNY to "pull it," are seen as evidence that WTC7 was rigged to f all. Meanwhile, a convincing official explanation hasn't exactly been forthcomin g. Note: We generally avoid partisan sources, but as so few are reporting the vital questions around 9-11, we've included this article. You can find another inform ative article from the same newspaper on the same day at http://villagevoice.com /news/0608,murphy,72254,6.html. For our highly reliable, verifiable information on the 9-11 cover-up, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/911information. For an amaz ing free video with testimony from dozens of survivors on all of this, see http: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=psP_9RE0V2I

Conspiracy theories propel AM radio show into Top 10 2006-11-12, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/12/MNGV9MBB3T1.DTL There was a time when "Coast to Coast AM," the late-night syndicated talk radio show dedicated to paranormal activities and political conspiracies, didn't get m uch respect. That all changed when millions from the mainstream met up with the after-midnight fringe folks to make "Coast to Coast AM" a top-rated radio show. George Noory...has hosted the program on weeknights from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. PST f ull time since 2003. The show...was taking calls about Sept. 11 conspiracy theor ies just two weeks after the terrorist attacks. "Coast to Coast AM"...can now re ach upward of 3 million listeners through 500 stations each week. "There's absol utely a growing conspiracy climate," said Noory. "People are tired of being misl ed and confused from taking information directly from a government official." No ory, 56, took over "Coast to Coast AM" when the show's founder, Art Bell, retire d. Bell, who has come in and out of retirement several times over the years, now hosts the program on weekends from his new home in the Philippines. Judging by the 300-plus phone calls and 1,000 e-mails the show receives on an average night ...listeners include liberals, conservatives, senior citizens in San Francisco, college students in South Carolina and even soldiers in Iraq. Talkers magazine, the trade publication that tracks radio ratings, has Noory in the top 10 of its "Top Talk Radio Audiences," alongside Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly [and] Sean Ha nnity. "Coast to Coast" has on occasion scooped major media outlets like the New York Times and CNN, according to Noory. "We broke the story on the Dubai ports, " said Noory. "We broke the story on SARS, and we were the first to report on th e bird flu pandemic."

9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Gather in N.Y. 2006-09-10, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-conspiracy10sep10,1,8... Striding into Washington Square Park with a fistful of photocopied circulars and an earnest expression, Eric Williams could have been an environmental canvasser or a hip missionary. In fact, he is a pastry chef or was until last week, when he quit his job to devote himself full time to proving that the World Trade Cent er attack was ordered not by terrorists but by officials in the U.S. government. As New York readied for another anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, conspiracy theorists and researchers who belong to a group known as the 9/11 Truth Movemen t gathered in Greenwich Village. Among them were proponents of the "LIHOP" theor

y, who believe that members of the government "let it happen on purpose," and th e "MIHOP" theory, who hold that government officials "made it happen on purpose. " A Zogby International poll taken in May found that 42% believed the government concealed evidence that contradicts official accounts. Last week, Brigham Young University announced that physics professor Steven E. Jones, co-chairman of the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth, would be put on indefinite leave while authoriti es investigated his claims that the buildings were intentionally demolished usin g explosives. For Williams, the former chef...his fascination with the events of Sept. 11 grew so intense over the last two years that making pastries seemed po intless. He...now devotes six to eight hours a day to researching and writing, a nd hosts an Internet radio show and website. He has just sold the German and Tur kish rights to two of his books, "The Puzzle of 9/11" and "9/11 101." Europeans are always interested, he said. Engaging New Yorkers is more challenging.

A Skeptic on 9/11 Prompts Questions on Academic Freedom 2006-08-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/education/01madison.html?ex=1312084800&en=d... Kevin Barrett ticked off a few examples of what he saw as evidence that the Sept . 11 attacks had been an "inside job." Mr. Barrett, 47, described how some news orgainzations...had reported that an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency visited with Osama bin Laden two months before the attacks. He also said fires c ould not have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers at free-fall speed, as reported by the special Sept. 11 commission. "The 9/11 report will be universally reviled as a sham and a cover-up very soon," said Mr. Barrett, who h as been a teacher's assistant or lecturer on Islam, African literature and other subjects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1996. "The 9/11 commiss ion has its conspiracy theory, and we have ours." Mr. Barrett's views, which he described on a conservative radio talk show in June, have outraged some Wisconsi n legislators and generated a fierce debate about academic freedom on a campus l ong known as a haven for progressive ideologies and student activism. Mr. Barret t, a co-founder of a group called Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Trut h, argued that he had never presented his personal opinions in class and that he was free to offer those opinions on his own time outside the classroom. Mr. Bar rett and [University of Wisconsin] Chancellor Wiley both said the controversy mi ght actually be helping provide Mr. Barrett with a larger platform to voice his ideas.

Supporter Defends Controversial Univ. Lecturer's Theories About 9/11 2006-07-13, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,203415,00.html KEVIN BARRETT, PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: I know that 9/11 was an insid e job. Professor Steven Jones has found residue on the steel samples from the Wo rld Trade Center. We now know that it was taken down in a controlled demolition. (END VIDEO CLIP) SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: That was a clip from our exclusive inte rview Monday night with University of Wisconsin Islamic studies professor Kevin Barrett. Now the university, in fact, says they will allow him to teach his clas s on Islam, in spite of his controversial theories about 9/11. But Professor Bar rett isn't alone in his beliefs. One of his supporters joins us now. Dr. Bob Bow man is a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, currently a Florida Democratic congr essional candidate. So you believe this is an inside job. You believe this was a controlled demolition as he does? BOWMAN: I don't know who did it, and neither do you. We have a right to know who did it. And so do the families of the victim s. We need a truly independent investigation to find out the truth. The most unb elievable of all the wild conspiracy theories is the one that our government has

told us. COLMES: You believe the United States government itself is putting for th a conspiracy theory when it talks about 19 people with box cutters in an airp lane and Usama bin Laden being the mastermind? BOWMAN: Absolutely. There [were] 20 people involved, right? That makes it a conspiracy. More than one person plan s a crime. That's a conspiracy.

Conspiracy theorists down but not out 2006-05-17, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4990686.stm The release of new video pictures of the Pentagon being attacked on 9/11 will no t quell the endless claims in the world of conspiracy theorists that a missile o r military aircraft hit the building instead. If you look closely, you do see wh at could be a plane, flying very low and then hitting the building, causing a hu ge fireball. It is consistent with the official account. However, the new frames do not absolutely without doubt show that this was American Airlines 77 in its final moments, so hope will spring eternal for the conspiracists that they have not been knocked out. To understand the conspiracy theory, it is worth consideri ng a film called "Loose Change: 2nd edition". Available on the internet, it reve als the full alternative version of what happened to the Pentagon in all its glo ry. It states AA 77 did not crash into the building. And if there was no AA 77, it must have been a missile, a military aircraft or a drone that did it. The all eged pilot Hani Hanjour was not skilled enough to execute the manoeuvre and the plane would have stalled in the tight turn alleged. The film is quite profession ally done on a technical level, with sinister music and fast cutting. It is prov ing popular on the internet in reinforcing beliefs that 9/11 might not have been all it seems. Note: Thank you BBC for having the courage to recommend this amazing 9/11 docume ntary! To see an engaging, recent BBC News video clip on 9/11 conspiracies in wh ich they also mention the powerful five-minute video "Pentagon Strike" and the l onger video "In Plane Site" (which has its weaknesses), click here. And why won' t the government release several other videotapes of the alleged plane hitting t he Pentagon on 9/11?

9-11 Conspiracy Theory 2006-07-11, NBC Milwaukee Affiliate http://www.todaystmj4.com/_content/news/special/story_3451.asp Could the attacks of September 11 have been planned by someone other than terror ists? Some people are blaming our own government. The booming conspiracy theory movement claims the point was to launch wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are thousands of Web pages that talk about a cover up. The theorists believe it was an inside job. "There isn't a single word of truth in [the 9/11 Commission Repor t]," begins Kevin Barrett. Barrett is a lecturer at UW Madison. He's part of a g roup that calls itself the 9-11 Truth Movement. "I'm sure that the official stor y that we've been given about what happened is a lie," he says. The 9-11 Truth M ovement also believes a tape of Osama Bin Ladin confessing to the attacks... is a fake. They compare the tape to other pictures, and believe the "fake" Osama is too fat. They say the guys is obviously an imposter - a guy that weighs fifty p ounds more than Osama ever did - and who has a completely different facial struc ture and looks about as much like Osama as Laurel looks like Hardy is in this vi deo claiming responsibility for 9-11. Barrett has caught a lot of heat for his i deas because he teaches at UW Madison. The UW Provost says despite complaints ag ainst Barrett, he will be allowed to continue teaching.

Note: For an hour-long interview on Wisconsin Public Radio with Kevin Barrett, c lick here. The most interesting thing about this interview is that at least half of the listeners who called in to the program supported Barrett's position that there was a major cover-up of what really happened on 9/11.

Hijackers Were Not Identified Before 9/11, Investigation Says 2006-09-22, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/21/AR20060921018... The Defense Department's inspector general has concluded that a top secret intel ligence-gathering program did not identify Mohamed Atta or any other hijacker be fore the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, determining that there is no evidence to subst antiate claims that Atta's name and photograph were on charts collected by milit ary officials before the strikes. Pentagon officials said that the recollections of several officials involved in the "Able Danger" data-mining operation "were not accurate" and that a chart they said included a blurry image of Atta and his name never existed. The report concluded that there were no efforts to prevent contact between the Pentagon group and the FBI. The investigation began after me mbers of Congress raised concerns over reports that Navy Capt. Scott Philpott an d Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer remembered seeing Atta's photograph on d ocuments collected by the intelligence program, and that the commission investig ating the attacks had ignored their assertions. The assertions gained considerab le steam when Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) said...that, two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, he presented White House officials with a chart that depicted people a ffiliated with al-Qaeda, including lead hijacker Atta. "I am appalled that the D oD IG would expect the American people to actually consider this a full and thor ough investigation," Weldon said. "I question their motives and the content of t he report, and I reject the conclusions they have drawn." Shaffer has consistent ly maintained that he believes he saw Atta's image. Note: This article is a prime example of how the media at times is seriously bia sed to support the official story of 9/11. I invite you to read the article and then read our summary of information gathered from highly respected media at htt p://www.WantToKnow.info/abledanger911. When a prominent Republican congressman a nd several military officers have clearly stated the opposite, is it really poss ible to conclude that "there is no evidence to substantiate claims that Atta's n ame and photograph were on charts collected by military officials before the str ikes." Were these military and government representatives all lying, and if so, why?

Who really blew up the twin towers? 2006-09-05, The Guardian http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,,1864657,00.html Shards of glass and dust from the World Trade Centre towers sit on Professor Ste ven Jones's desk at Brigham Young University in Utah. Evidence, he says, of the biggest cover-up in history - one too evil for most to believe, but one he has s taked his academic career on exposing. Jones, a physics professor, is not alone. He is a member of 9/11 Scholars for Truth, a recently formed group of around 75 US professors determined to prove 9/11 was a hoax. In essays and journals, they are using their association with prominent universities to give a scholarly sta mp to conspiracy theories long believed in parts of Europe and the Arab world, a nd gaining ground among Americans. It is impossible, says Jones, for the towers to have collapsed from the collision of two aeroplanes, as jet fuel doesn't burn at temperatures hot enough to melt steel beams. The horizontal puffs of smoke squibs - emitted during the collapse of the towers are indicative of controlled

implosions on lower floors. The scholars have collected eyewitness accounts of flashes and loud explosions immediately before the fall. What's more, the nearby World Trade Centre 7 also collapsed later that afternoon. The building had not been hit by a plane, only damaged by fire.

Lecturer Under Fire for 9/11 Conspiracy Belief 2006-07-25, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2233348&page=1 Wisconsin lawmakers are demanding that a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecture r be pulled from his fall teaching position because of his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were not carried out by terrorists, but by the U.S. government . Kevin Barrett...drew widespread criticism, including action from 52 Wisconsin state Assembly representatives and nine state senators [who] signed a letter las t week [which] demands that Barrett be released from his lecturing post. Barrett maintains, however, that he will not present only his views in the classroom. " I present what I consider to be interesting and/or defensible positions, and urg e the students to come to their own conclusions. I've been saying these things f or three years on local and national radio and TV," he said. "Nobody even compla ined before, least of all the students." It appears he is not alone with his [vi ews]. According to a March 2004 Gallup poll, 53 percent of those surveyed said t hey thought the Bush administration was covering up pre-9/11 intelligence. Unive rsity of Wisconsin provost Patrick...Farrell's investigation concluded that Barr ett would be a qualified instructor. Barrett is co-founder of an organization ca lled the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance. The organization says on its Web site that it is "dedicated to uniting members of the Jewish, Islamic and Christian f aiths in pursuit of 9/11 truth." Note: For why Barrett makes these claims, don't miss our two-page summary of rel iable information from major media sources (links included): http://www.WantToKn ow.info/9-11cover-up. And for a two-star U.S. general on video questioning what really hit the Pentagon: http://www.undersiegemovie.com/media/stubblebine.wmv

Theologian calls for response to 9/11 2005-04-18, The Capitol Times (Madison, Wisconsin) http://www.madison.com/tct/mad/local/index.php?ntid=36617 David Ray Griffin asks the tough questions about Sept. 11, contending U.S. offic ials had some knowledge of what was coming and possibly orchestrated the attacks . Griffin, whose book, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bus h Administration and 9/11," came out a year ago, drew an enthusiastic standing o vation from the majority of the 400 or so people who packed his lecture Monday n ight at Bascom Hall. A retired Christian theologian, Griffin, 65, taught for mor e than 30 years at the Claremont School of Theology in California. While Griffin noted that his books and talks have not received attention from the mainstream media, C-SPAN had a cameraman at the event and plans to air the lecture at a fut ure date.

BYU places '9/11 truth' professor on paid leave 2006-09-08, Deseret News http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/1,1249,645199800,00.html Brigham Young University placed physics professor Steven Jones on paid leave Thu rsday while it reviews his involvement in the so-called "9/11 truth movement" th

at accuses unnamed government agencies of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, atta cks on the World Trade Center. Such a review is rare for a professor with "conti nuing status" at BYU, where Jones has taught since 1985. Jones was teaching two classes this semester, which began Tuesday. Other professors will cover those cl asses, and Jones will be allowed to continue to do research in his area of acade mic study. Jones became a celebrity among 9/11 conspiracy-theory groups after he wrote a paper titled "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Collapse? " The paper was published two weeks ago in the book "9/11 and American Empire: I ntellectuals Speak Out" and lays out Jones' hypothesis that the three towers fel l because of pre-positioned demolition charges -- not because of the planes that hit two of the towers. Recent articles about Sept. 11 conspiracy theories that focused at least in part on Jones have appeared in the New York Times, the Washi ngton Post, the Guardian in London and other publications. A modified version of Jones' paper was scheduled to be published this week in the online Journal of 9 /11 Studies. Jones is a co-editor of the journal.

Backers hail 9/11 theorist's speech 2006-10-30, Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4572518 The standing ovation has finally died down, and Steven E. Jones, a soft-spoken p hysics professor, finds himself pinned against the stage by some of the enthusia stic fans who packed a University of Denver auditorium. "Can I just shake your h and?" a woman in a baggy red sweater asks Jones. "You're doing such important wo rk." If anything, Jones appears embarrassed by all the attention. Quiet and self -effacing, he's an unlikely hero for 9/11 conspiracy theorists of every stripe, but that's exactly what he's become. A physicist whose background includes work on nuclear fusion, Jones was put on leave by Brigham Young University in Septemb er after publishing a paper saying that the twin towers couldn't have collapsed solely as a result of the planes that rammed the upper floors on Sept. 11. The p aper theorizes that explosives planted inside the building must have been involv ed. Though Jones doesn't specify who he believes planted the charges, he concede s it would have had to be "an inside job" and likely would have included either very powerful figures on the American scene or entities inside the government. J ones and his work reflect the mainstreaming of a movement that has defied the Bu sh administration's efforts to put it to rest and mystified people who have stud ied the events of that day closely. A startlingly large percentage of the popula tion simply doesn't believe the official explanation. A national poll by the Scr ipps Survey Center at Ohio University conducted in the summer found that more th an a third of people questioned believed the government either planned the attac ks or could have stopped them but didn't.

9/11 theorists are either silly or shrewd 2006-10-29, Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_4543650 They believe the federal government had a hand in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Members of Colorado911Visibility.org include psychologists, lawyers, civil engineers, electrical engineers, an aerospace engineer, physicists and lot s of people with doctorates and master's degrees in the sciences. They understan d why people want to dismiss them. They say people want to attack them as messen gers because it's too disturbing to believe the government that is supposed to p rotect us would orchestrate the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans. One of the organizers invited three scholars to speak...to "take this out of the realm of c onspiracy theory." (Details at denverpostbloghouse.com/rodriguez.) The year-old group has an e-mail list of about 350 people. Among them is Earl Staelin, a 66-y

ear-old civil litigator. He said many of his friends who are engineers didn't be lieve the official story, that the towers fell because [of] burning fuel from th e planes. After he showed films, such as "9-11 Mysteries," they came to the same conclusion: demolition experts must have planned this in advance. Why would the government do it? The explanations are plentiful, as is the evidence that group s such as this one, which exist throughout the nation...share on such websites a s 911truth.org. And for those who say these groups are wacko fringe groups, thin k again: According to a poll by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio Unive rsity taken this August, 36 percent of Americans believe the government was eith er complicit in the 9/11 attacks or knew about it and didn't try to stop it. 16 percent believe explosives were used to bring down the towers.

Police 'exaggerated evidence' against British 9/11 suspect 2006-10-09, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2395400,00.html Police and prosecutors are facing allegations that they misled a judge and gross ly exaggerated evidence against the only man to be detained in Britain over Sept ember 11. There is renewed scrutiny on two fronts of the role played by Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service in making unfounded claims that Lotfi Ra issi trained the 9/11 hijackers. The Independent Police Complaints Commission ha s opened an investigation into the conduct of the Anti-Terrorist Branch detectiv es who arrested Mr Raissi in 2001 and prepared the evidence against him. The all eged terrorist link was one of a number of false allegations made against Mr Rai ssi. Prosecutors claimed in court that he was the lead instructor for the main hij ackers who crashed aircraft into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The FB I was said to have video material showing him in the company of Hani Hanjour, on e of the hijack pilots. However, all the evidence was shown to be unsubstantiate d and, in February 2002, District Judge Timothy Workman ordered Mr Raissi s releas e. Mr Raissi has since made several unsuccessful attempts to obtain an official apology from the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police. Successive Home Secret aries have resisted his request for an acknowledgment that he was wrongfully arr ested. Mr Raissi said: My life has been ruined. I lost my freedom, my reputation and my career. The courts have said I am innocent why does the Home Secretary no t accept this?

Study Finds Lung Problems in WTC Workers 2006-09-05, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Attacks-Health.html Nearly 70 percent of the rescue and cleanup workers who toiled in the dust and f umes at ground zero have had trouble breathing, and many will probably be sick f or the rest of their lives, doctors said Tuesday in releasing results of the big gest Sept. 11 health study yet. The Mount Sinai Medical Center study is conclusi ve proof of a link between recovery work at the World Trade Center ruins and lon g-term respiratory problems, doctors aid.

2 U.S. Reports Seek to Counter Conspiracy Theories About 9/11 2006-09-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/nyregion/02conspiracy.html?ex=1314849600&en... Faced with an angry minority of people who believe the Sept. 11 attacks were par t of a shadowy and sprawling plot run by Americans, separate reports were publis hed this week by the State Department and a federal science agency insisting tha

t the catastrophes were caused by hijackers who used commercial airliners as wea pons. The official narrative of the attacks has been attacked as little more tha n a cover story by an assortment of radio hosts, academics, amateur filmmakers a nd others. As a motive, they suggest that the Bush administration wanted to use the attacks to justify military action in the Middle East. A nationwide poll tak en earlier this summer...found that more than a third of those surveyed said the federal government either took part in the attacks or allowed them to happen. A nd 16 percent said the destruction of the trade center was aided by explosives h idden in the buildings. Details are available at http://newspolls.org. The State Department report...is titled, "The Top Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theories" and says, "Numerous unfounded conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks continue to circulate, especially on the Internet." Produced by an arm of the State Departme nt known as a "counter-misinformation team," the report is dated Aug. 28...at ht tp://usinfo.state.gov/media/misinformation.html. Among those now propelling the argument that explosives took down the trade center is Steven E. Jones, a physic s professor at Brigham Young University, coeditor with Mr. Ryan of www.journalof 911studies.com, which published his paper, "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Cente r Buildings Completely Collapse on 9-11-2001?"

Wis. school lets radical instructor teach 2006-07-10, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Instructor_Sept_11.html An instructor at the University of Wisconsin who has said he believes U.S. offic ials orchestrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be allowed to te ach a course on Islam, the school said Monday. Some state politicians had called for the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire part-time instructor Kevin Barr ett after he spoke about his theories on a radio talk show last month. "We canno t allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free e xchange of ideas," Provost Patrick Farrell said in a statement. "To the extent t hat his views are discussed, Mr. Barrett has assured me that students will be fr ee - and encouraged - to challenge his viewpoint." The university does not endor se Barrett's theories, Farrell said, noting they are widely believed in parts of the Muslim world. Note: Kevin Barrett has drawn quite a bit of attention on Fox News and in the me dia in Wisconsin. Other than Fox and the above article, no major media picked up this story. In the charged interview on Fox News, he did quite a respectable jo b. You can view it at http://www.911podcasts.com/display.php?vid=135.

Controversial prof to leave BYU 2006-10-22, Salt Lake Tribune http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_4528049 Steven Jones, the Brigham Young University physics professor embroiled in contro versy over his theories on the Twin Towers' collapse, is retiring Jan. 1. "I am electing to retire so that I can spend more time speaking and conducting researc h of my choosing," Jones said in an interview Friday. "I appreciate the wonderfu l opportunity I have had to teach and serve and do research at BYU for more than 21 years." In September, the university...placed Jones on paid leave in order t o conduct a professional review of his controversial Sept. 11 theories. The revi ew...has been canceled due to Jones' retirement. The professor had given several public lectures on his theories of why the World Trade Center collapsed. Jones published the paper, "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Collapse?" online and began lecturing about his theories. Jones also recently was appointe d co-chairman of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, "a nonpartisan association of faculty,

students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affa irs, psychology and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealin g truths behind 9/11." He is also the co-editor of Journal of 9/11 Studies. He s aid he is not bitter toward BYU, and hopes to continue his research. [Jones' let ter states] "Two structural engineering professors in Switzerland have recently spoken out as I have also done, declaring that explosives were with 'utmost prob ability' responsible for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 on Sept. 11."

Press Conference of the President 2006-09-15, Official White House Website http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060915-2.html The information that the Central Intelligence Agency has obtained by questioning men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has provided valuable information and has helpe d disrupt terrorist plots, including strikes within the United States. For examp le, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed described the design of planned attacks of buildings inside the U.S. and how operatives were directed to carry them out. That is valu able information for those of us who have the responsibility to protect the Amer ican people. He told us the operatives had been instructed to ensure that the ex plosives went off at a high -- a point that was high enough to prevent people tr apped above from escaping. Note: What exactly did he mean by explosives going off in the planned attacks of building inside the U.S.? And wouldn't you want to hit low to keep more people trapped above?

Energy News Articles Excerpts of Key Energy News Articles in Major Media Below are many highly revealing excerpts of important energy articles from the m ainstream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major media websites . If any link should fail to function, click here. These energy news articles ar e listed by order of importance. For the same articles by date posted to this li st, click here. For the list by date of news article click here. By choosing to educate ourselves on these important issues and to spread the word, we can and w ill build a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. BlackLight's physics-defying promise: Cheap power from water 2008-07-02, CNN Money http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/01/smallbusiness/blacklight.fsb/index.htm Imagine being able to convert water into a boundless source of cheap energy. Tha t's what BlackLight Power, a 25-employee firm in Cranbury, N.J., says it can do. The only problem: Most scientists say that company's technology violates the ba sic laws of physics. Such skepticism doesn't daunt Dr. Randell Mills, a Harvardtrained physician and founder of BlackLight, who recently claimed that he has cr eated a working fuel cell using the world's most pervasive element: the hydrogen found in water. Mills says he has a market-ready product: a fuel cell that prod uces a chemical reaction to alter hydrogen atoms. The fuel cell releases heat th at turns water into steam, which drives electric turbines. The working models in his lab generate 50 kilowatts of electricity - enough to power six or seven hou ses. But these, Mills says, can be scaled [up] to drive a large, electric power plant. The inventor claims this electricity will cost less than 2 cents per kilo watt-hour, which compares to a national average of 8.9 cents. Mills developed th e patented cocktail that enables the reaction - a solid fuel made of hydrogen an d a sodium hydride catalyst - only a year ago. (He recently posted instructions on the company's Web site, blacklightpower.com). Now that the device is ready fo r commercialization, he says, BlackLight is negotiating with several utilities a nd architecture and engineering firms. The business, Mills says, has attracted $ 60 million in funding from wealthy individuals, investment firms ... and it is n o longer seeking money. BlackLight's board of directors reads like a Who's Who o f finance and energy leaders. Note: For two New York Times articles showing the viability of this amazing tech nology, click here and here. For many exciting stories on new energy inventions, click here.

Enron Schemes Caught On Tape 2005-02-03, CBS News

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/03/eveningnews/main671618.shtml During the West Coast Power crisis homes went dark and streetlights were out ... causing injuries and accidents. But the danger didn't stop Enron's energy trade rs from having a good laugh. CBS ... reports on the Enron scheme, as caught on n ew audio tape. The traders and plant operator laugh and plot in a display that s eems to prove the theory that years before the energy crisis, Enron manipulated markets. "They had to do a rolling blackout through the town and there was a red light there he didn't see," one Enron trader says on tape. "That's beautiful," a second voice responds. Enron secretly shut power plants down so they could cau se, and then cash in on, the crisis. Enron also pulled power out of states like California, causing emergency conditions to worsen. "Sorry California," an Enron trader says. "I'm bringing all our power out of state today." Plant operators w ere coached on how to lie to officials. "We want you guys to get a little creati ve..." one voice says on the tape, "and come up with a reason to go down. Just c all 'em, Hey guys we're coming down." The plant operator replies, "OK, so we're ju st comin' down for some maintenance?" "Right," the trader says. "And that's cool ?" the plant operator asks. "Hopefully," the trader responds, to which the men a re heard laughing. Enron also pulled power out of states like California, causin g emergency conditions to worsen. The "shut downs" and "pull outs" triggered sky high power prices. "We're just making money hand over fist!" one voice is heard saying on the tape. And when states complained, the guys at Enron seemed to hav e a response. "Get a f****** clue," one says. "Yeah," another chimes in. "Leave us alone. Let us make a little bit of money." Note: For an eye-opening two-minute video clip on CBS, watch "Enron Schemers on Tape" at this link. MSNBC also published a revealing article on this. And a New York Times article states "Company officials had long denied that they illegally shut down plants to create artificial shortages. Two months after the recording showed how the Nevada plant was shut down, [Enron CEO Kenneth] Lay called any c laims of market manipulation 'conspiracy theories.'" For lots more reliable info rmation on the energy cover-up, click here.

Cold Fusion Is Hot Again 2009-04-19, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/17/60minutes/main4952167.shtml Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could b e solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion - nuclear energy like that whic h powers the sun - but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be che ap, limitless and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change ever ything. But then, just as quickly as it was announced, it was discredited. So th oroughly, that cold fusion became a catch phrase for junk science. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion - for many scientists today, cold fusion is hot again. "We can yield the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The pote ntial is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man," resea rcher Michael McKubre told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. McKubre says h e has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for th e government. McKubre is an electro-chemist who imagines, in 20 years, the creat ion of a clean nuclear battery. "For example, a laptop would come pre-charged wi th all of the energy that you would ever intend to use. You're now decoupled fro m your charger and the wall socket," he explained. The same would go for cars. " The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four ye ars, for example. And you'd take it in for service every four years and they'd g ive you a new power supply," McKubre told Pelley.

Note: For more and to watch the full, revealing 12-minute video clip of this seg ment that was strangely removed, only to be reposted after a campaign by WantToK now.info, click here and here.

Loremo: The 'Low Resistance Mobile' 2008-02-20, MSN http://editorial.autos.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=457882 The idea is deceptively simple. Forget about fancy batteries, regenerative braki ng, and alternative fuels. Instead, make a car that's elegant in its minimalism and efficiency. The Loremo's German designers revisited the basics engine effici ency, low weight, and minimal drag to create a car that offers fuel-efficiency i n the neighborhood of 130 to 150 miles per gallon. The Loremo is likely to dazzl e drivers not with its acceleration, but with its ability to drive from New York to L.A. with only three stops at the pump. Loremo stands for low resistance mob ile, and its engineers have stuck obsessively to this idea. By building the car around a 2-cylinder turbodiesel engine, and cutting back on weight, drag, and ot her excess fat such as side-opening doors, the Loremo puffs out a mere 50 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer. This is about 40 grams less per kilometer than the tiny diesel smart. According to its creators, this will make the Loremo the most efficient production car ever sold. If the Loremo showed up as a concept on an auto show pedestal, it would certainly garner some attention. But the Loremo is not a car for dreamers; not only will it enter mass production next year, it will sport a base price attainable by mortal motorists: 15,000 euros (about U.S . $22,000). After its 2009 release in Europe, the Loremo will be redesigned to r each the North American market the following year. A $30,000, 3-cylinder GT mode l will also become available, offering better acceleration (0-60 in roughly 10 s econds, vs. 16 for the base model). Both hybrid and fully electric versions are also in the works. Note: For many exciting, reliable reports on new energy and automobile technolog ies, click here.

Researcher sets saltwater on fire 2007-11-14, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/11/14/saltwater.fire/ Last winter, inventor John Kanzius was already attempting one seemingly impossib le feat -- building a machine to cure cancer with radio waves -- when his device inadvertently succeeded in another: He made saltwater catch fire. TV footage of his bizarre discovery has been burning up the blogosphere ever since, drawing c rackpots and Ph.D.s alike into a raging debate. Can water burn? And if so, what good can come of it? Some people gush over the invention's potential for desalin ization or cheap energy. Briny seawater, after all, sloshes over most of the pla net's surface, and harnessing its heat energy could power all sorts of things. S keptics say Kanzius's radio generator is sucking up far more energy than it's cr eating, making it a carnival trick at best. For now, Kanzius is tuning out the h ubbub. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2002, he began building his radio-wave blaster the next year, soon after a relapse. If he could seed a person's cancerous cell s with nanoscopic metal particles and blast them with radio waves, perhaps he co uld kill off the cancer while sparing healthy tissue. The saltwater phenomenon h appened by accident when an assistant was bombarding a saline-filled test tube w ith radio waves and bumped the tube, causing a small flash. Curious, Kanzius str uck a match. "The water lit like a propane flame," he recalls. "People said, 'It 's a crock. Look for hidden electrodes in the water,' " says Penn State Universi ty materials scientist Rustum Roy, who visited [Kanzius] in his lab in August af

ter seeing the feat on Google Video. A demo made Roy a believer. "This is discov ery science in the best tradition," he says. Meanwhile, researchers at MD Anders on Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have made progress using Kanzius's technology to fight cancer in animals. They publi shed their findings last month in the journal Cancer. Note: For other compelling articles on this fascinating invention, see recent ar ticles in the Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and especially Medical News Today.

The Prophet of Garbage 2007-03-00, Popular Science - March 2007 Issue http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/873aae7bf86c0110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd... The Plasma Converter ... can consume nearly any type of waste from dirty diapers t o chemical weapons by annihilating toxic materials in a process ... called plasma gasification. A 650-volt current passing between two electrodes rips electrons f rom the air, converting the gas into plasma. The plasma arc is so powerful, it d isintegrates trash into its constituent elements by tearing apart molecular bond s. The system is capable of breaking down pretty much anything except nuclear wa ste. The only by-products are an obsidian-like glass [and] a mixture of primaril y hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be converted into a variety of marketabl e fuels, including ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen. Perhaps the most amazing p art of the process is that it s self-sustaining. Once the cycle is under way, the 2,200F syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run th e converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or sold ba ck to the utility grid. Even a blackout would not stop the operation of the faci lity. New York City is already paying an astronomical $90 a ton to get rid of it s trash. According to Startech, a few 2,000-ton-per-day plasma-gasification plan ts could do it for $36. Sell the syngas and surplus electricity, and you d actuall y net $15 a ton. But the decision-making bureaucracy can be slow, and it is hams trung by the politically well-connected waste-disposal industry. Startech isn t th e only company using plasma to turn waste into a source of clean energy. A handf ul of start-ups Geoplasma, Recovered Energy, PyroGenesis, EnviroArc and Plasco Ene rgy, among others have entered the market in the past decade. Note: Why isn't this amazing, proven machine and technology making front page he adlines? Read this exciting article to find how it is already being used. For wh y you don't know about it, click here. And for another amazing new energy source not yet reported in the major media, click here.

A Faith-Based Fuel Initiative 2007-01-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/30/opinion/30tue1.html?ex=1327813200&en=8ce942... In 1975, after the oil embargo, Congress approved the most successful energy-sav ing measure this country has ever seen: the Corporate Average Fuel Economy syste m, known as CAFE, which set minimum mileage standards for cars. Within 10 years, automobile efficiency had virtually doubled, to 27.5 miles per gallon in 1985 f rom just over 14 miles per gallon in 1976. The mileage standards are still 27.5 m.p.g. Except for minor tweaks, Congress has refused to raise fuel efficiency re quirements or close a gaping loophole that lets S.U.V. s and pickups be measured b y a more lenient standard. Note: Thank you New York Times for pointing out what so few have bothered to men tion. In the U.S., it is not the automotive industry that determines fuel mileag

e standards, but rather Congress. Whenever Congress has rasied the mileage stand ard, industry complies and average mileage increases. When the standards are not raised, average car mileage for new cars stays the same. Yet Congress has refus ed to significantly raise the standards since 1985, despite the increasing talk of an energy crisis. Why? If you really want to know, click here and here.

Brazil's alcohol cars hit 2m mark 2006-08-18, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5263384.stm Brazil's new generation of cars and trucks adapted to run on alcohol has just hi t the two-million mark. "Flex-fuel" vehicles, which run on any combination of et hanol and petrol, now make up 77% of the Brazilian market. Brazil has pioneered the use of ethanol derived from sugar-cane as motor fuel. Ethanol-driven cars ha ve been on sale there for 25 years, but they have been enjoying a revival since flex-fuel models first appeared in March 2003. Just 48,200 flex-fuel cars were s old in Brazil in 2003, but the total had reached 1.2 million by the end of last year and had since topped two million, the Brazilian motor manufacturers' associ ation Anfavea said. Note: With sky-high gasoline prices and the fear of depletion of global oil supp olies, why don't such cars exist in the U.S.? Why are the trains of almost every other developed nation far advanced from trains in the U.S.? And why isn't the U.S. media reporting on this important development? For possible answers, click here. The excellent movie Who Killed the Electric Car is also incredibly reveali ng.

Car achieves almost 10,000 miles per gallon 1999-07-16, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/395366.stm A car driven by a 10-year-old and built at a French school has set a new world r ecord for fuel efficiency. The Microjoule team managed the equivalent of 9,845 m iles per gallon while driving for 10 miles around Silverstone race track in the UK. More than 100 teams competed in the Shell Eco-Marathon. Their one goal was t o see how far they can get these amazing machines to travel on a minuscule amoun t of fuel. While we might be delirious if we managed 40 miles (64 kilometres) to the gallon (4.5 litres) pottering about town in our super minis, these people a re not happy until they have seen the mileometer click through the thousands. Th e teams have a choice of petrol or diesel, with solar assistance permitted for t he first time this year. A car is allowed three 40-minute runs. It must average at least 15 mph (24 kph) after which the stewards at the meeting calculate the m achine's fuel efficiency. "The top fuel teams do about 10 miles, which is six la ps on the club circuit at Silverstone," says the event's fuel manager Geoff Houl brook. "They do that on less than 10 millilitres which is just two teaspoons of fuel." The entries come from all over Europe. Some teams use advanced materials like titanium and carbon fibre. Some of the machines built by schoolchildren are made from parts of old sewing and washing machines. "It's fun but it's also sci ence," says BBC Top Gear presenter and racing driver Tiff Needell. "It's like an experiment with people learning how to save energy." Note: Some of these amazing vehicles built in 1999 were "built by schoolchildren ," yet the auto industry still can't come up with a car that get's 100 mpg? Gran ted these cars are slow and small, but if they can get almost 10,000 mpg, don't you think similar technology could be used to get at least several hundred mpg i n regular cars? For why car mileage hasn't increased much since the 1908 Model T

got 25 mpg, click here and here.

Solar Panel Drops to $1 per Watt 2009-02-26, Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4306443.html A long-sought solar milestone was eclipsed on Tuesday, when Tempe, Ariz. based Fir st Solar Inc. announced that the manufacturing costs for its thin-film photovolt aic panels had dipped below $1 per watt for the first time. With comparable cost s for standard silicon panels still hovering in the $3 range, it's tempting to c onclude that First Solar's cadmium telluride (CdTe) technology has won the race. But if we're concerned about the big picture (scaling up solar until it's a che ap and ubiquitous antidote to global warming and foreign oil) a forthcoming stud y from the University of California Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Labora tory suggests that neither material has what it takes compared to lesser-known a lternatives such as we're not kidding fool's gold. Even if the solar cell market wer e to grow at 56 percent a year for the next 10 years slightly higher than the rapi d growth of the past year photovoltaics would still only account for about 2.5 per cent of global electricity, LBNL researcher Cyrus Wadia says. "First Solar is gr eat, as long as we're talking megawatts or gigawatts," he says. "But as soon as they have to start rolling out terawatts, that's where I believe they will reach some limitations." Even the current rate of growth won't be easy to sustain. De spite the buck-per-watt announcement, First Solar's share price plummeted more t han 20 percent on Wednesday, thanks to warnings from CEO Mike Ahearn about the e ffect of the credit crisis on potential solar customers as much as 10 to 15 percen t of current orders might default. Note: Solar energy costs have dropped consistenly and steadily over the past 30 years. In the late 1970s solar energy cost $100 per watt. The price will almost certainly continue to drop. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2005 that "t he electricity currently provided by utilities ... averages $1 per watt." Why is n't it being trumpeted loudly worldwide in the media that solar energy is reachi ng parity with traditional energy sources? Could it be that powerful interests d on't want solar energy to be competitive with oil and nuclear?

Blacklight Power bolsters its impossible claims of a new renewable energy source 2008-10-21, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/external/venturebeat/2008/10/21/21venturebeat-blacklig... Ask nearly any physicist if it s possible for a hydrogen atom to enter a lower ene rgy state than the ground, or resting, state they hold in nature, and you re likel y to get an unequivocal no . But a tiny company in New Jersey called Blacklight Pow er has been disputing that assumption for over a decade, and of late, making gad -fly claims that its founder says will overturn the accepted scientific order. B lacklight s claims have a special significance: If they re true, there s a source of c heap, clean energy that can be easily tapped anywhere in the world. Blacklight i s now saying that it has physical proof of its energy generator, verified by an independent university lab. Its hydrino theory isn t put forth by a single crackpot; instead, the company employs a good handful of high-level scientists who would presumably rebel if the idea was totally false. It has also taken over $60 milli on in venture funding. Despite a hearty rejection by the scientific mainstream, and being ignored for years on end, its founder, Randell Mills, has plugged on. Now an engineering team at Rowan University ...has come forward with results fro m its own tests of the Blacklight process. Tests conducted in sealed chambers, a nd measured with a device called a calorimeter, show a heat reaction from a subs tance provided by Blacklight far beyond anything anticipated. We ve been able to re

gularly reproduce these results and we believe any research lab could do the sam e, Peter Jansson, the faculty member heading the experiments, [said]. Note: For a seven-minute video demonstrating this amazing new energy source, cli ck here. See list with links by clicking here. Exciting news!

Puzzled Researchers Vet BlackLight s Physics-Defying Hydrogen Power 2008-10-21, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2008/10/21/21gigaom-blacklight-validat... BlackLight Power, the company that has pulled in $60 million for its seemingly p hysics-defying fuel cell, is back with an announcement about an independent vali dation of its technology. A team of engineers, headed by Dr. Peter Jansson at Ro wan University, have tested BlackLight s prototypes and found that the devices per form as BlackLight claims, ambiguously concluding that there is a novel reaction of some type causing the large exotherm which is consistently produced. To transl ate: There s definitely lots of energy being produced. They re just not sure why. Bl ackLight says its technology can push an electron closer to the nucleus by way o f a catalytic reaction, resulting in a huge amount of clean energy. The company describes the reaction as somewhere between a nuclear and a chemical reaction, but without any of the messy fallout. The team at Rowan tested BlackLight s 1,000- an d 50,000-watt reactors over three months and were able to replicate BlackLight s e nergy claims, saying that the energy produced cannot be explained by other known sources like combustion or nuclear energy. The company says a complete verificati on of the whole process will likely happen within a year. BlackLight tells us it is now in the process of licensing its technology to power producers. The compa ny says it has enough capital to get through commercialization and plans to have its reactors in a power plant in the next two years. Note: For a seven-minute video demonstrating this amazing new energy source, cli ck here. These results have been published in dozens of peer-reviewed scientific journals. See list with links by clicking here. Exciting news!

The New Dawn of Solar 2007-12-01, Popular Science magazine http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/green/item_59.html Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of pain t, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suc k power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just acros s sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, beca use even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that s ubiquitous because it s ch eap. The basic technology has been around for decades, but this year, Silicon Va lley based Nanosolar created the manufacturing technology that could make that pro mise a reality. The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-pr ess-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. Nanos olar s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year. Cost has always be en one of solar s biggest problems. Traditional solar cells require silicon, and s ilicon is an expensive commodity. That means even the cheapest solar panels cost about $3 per watt of energy they go on to produce. To compete with coal, that f igure has to shrink to just $1 per watt. Nanosolar s cells use no silicon, and the company s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient a

s most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. "It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently alt ering the economics of solar," says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewab le and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley . Note: For exciting reports of other new energy technologies, click here.

Kids Build Soybean-Fueled Car 2006-02-17, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/17/eveningnews/main1329941.shtml The star at last week's Philadelphia Auto Show wasn't a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car one that combines performance and practicality under one hood. But as CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman reports in this wee k's Assignment America, the car that buyers have been waiting decades [for] come s from an unexpected source and runs on soybean bio-diesel fuel to boot. A car t hat can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gal lon would be enough to pique any driver's interest. So who do we have to thank f or it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School. The five kids ... built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them m ore than a year rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went . As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren't exactly the cream of the aca demic crop. "If you give kids that have been stereotyped as not being able to do anything an opportunity to do something great, they'll step up," he says. Stepp ing up is something the big automakers have yet to do. They're still in the earl y stages of marketing hybrid cars while playing catch-up to the Bad News Bears o f auto shop. "We made this work," says Hauger. "We're not geniuses. So why aren' t they doing it?" Kosi thinks he knows why. The answer, he says, is the big oil companies. Note: So why isn't this remarkable engine design breakthrough making front page headlines in all major media? Why aren't the many other major energy breakthroug hs that have been reported given the headlines they deserve? Could it be that th ose who are reaping huge profits from oil sales have much more political and med ia influence than you might imagine? For lots more reliable information on this, click here.

Eco-car more efficient than light bulb 2005-07-05, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/07/04/eco.car An eco-car that can travel the world using a fraction of the electricity it take s to power a light bulb has been unveiled by its British creators. The hydrogenpowered Ech2o needs just 25 Watts -- the equivalent of less than two gallons of petrol -- to complete the 25,000-mile global trip, while emitting nothing more h azardous than water. But with a top speed of 30mph, the journey would take more than a month to complete. Ech2o, built by British gas firm BOC, will bid to smas h the world fuel efficiency record of over 10,000 miles per gallon at the Shell Eco Marathon. The record is currently ... 5,385 km/per liter [12,900 mpg!]. John Carolin, BOC global director sustainable energy: "It sounds unbelievable how li ttle power is used to keep the BOC Ech2o moving, but it demonstrates the impact of careful design and is a valuable lesson for car makers in the future. Note: If these small test cars get over 10,000 miles per gallon, why aren't new

cars getting at least 100 mpg?

Refiners Maintain a Firm but Legal Grip on Supplies 2005-06-18, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-calgas18jun18,0,7589520.story California refiners are simply cashing in on a system that allows a handful of p layers to keep prices high by carefully controlling supplies. The result is a ki nd of miracle market in which profits abound, outsiders can't compete and a dwin dling cadre of gas station operators has little choice but go along. Refiners "n ot only control how much supply is in the marketplace, they control who gets it and at what price," said Dennis DeCota, executive director of the California Ser vice Station and Automotive Repair Assn. The recent history of California's fuel industry is a textbook case of how a once-competitive business can become skewe d to the advantage of a few, all with the federal government's blessing. Refiner s acknowledge their California businesses have become the most profitable in the nation. The rest of the country isn't far behind. Characteristics once unique t o California specialty fuels, a refinery shortage, the growing dominance of a fe w companies have begun to plague other gasoline markets.

Toyota smashes fuel economy record 2002-10-20, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,588-451038,00.html Tucked away on the Toyota stand you will find a cheeky little coup that looks spo rty but whose raison d tre is fuel economy, the lowest exhaust emissions and ease o f recycling. The ES3 the initials stand for Eco Spirit achieves 104mpg in the of ficial European fuel consumption tests, a record for a four-seat car. Some month s ago I drove this prototype and not only is it even more economical than the sp ecial 3 litre (three litres of fuel for every 100km travelled, or 94mpg) versions of the Audi A2 and VW Lupo that sell in Germany, but the Toyota is more lively a nd responsive and would be very acceptable as an everyday car. The ES3 has a 1.4 litre turbocharged diesel engine and CVT (continuously variable transmission). The engine cuts out when the car stops, automatically and instantly restarting w hen you touch the accelerator to move off again. Energy that would be lost from braking is used to charge the car s battery, and the body panels are made from bio degradable plastics. You will see more of these things in future Toyotas. Note: If this article is no longer available at the link above, click here. So w hat happened to this amazing car? Why haven't we heard anything about it since t he article was published in 2002? For an excellent essay which provides key info rmation on this topic, including a detailed list of inventions which greatly imp rove gasoline mileage reported over the years in respected magazines, click here .

Method and Apparatus for Tunneling by Melting 1972-09-22, US Patent and Trademark Office http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&... The invention described herein was made in the course of, or under, a contract w ith the U. S. ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION. It relates ... to a method and apparatus for drilling, tunneling and shaft-sinking in rock with particular advantage at hitherto inaccessible depths. The present invention uses the basic apparatus and method disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,357,505 and in Los Alamos Scientific Labora

tory of the University of California Report No. LA-3243 (1965) entitled "Rock Me lting as a Drilling Technique." In the existing rock melting devices of the prio r art, a major difficulty which limited performance was that of delivering a suf ficiently large heat flux to the melting face of the drill or penetrator. The de velopment of the heat pipe alleviates this problem in that the use of heat pipes enables the transfer of heat energy from a compact heat source to the extended melting surface of the penetrator at rates high enough to maintain the surface a bove the melting temperature of the rock. The extrapolation of a mechanism usefu l for forming large holes in the earth in accordance with the present invention uses the combination of a refractory rock-melting tool, an in situ heat source p referably a small nuclear reactor and an exceedingly efficient heat transfer mec hanism such as a system of heat pipes to convey heat from the source to the wall s of the drilling tool. Note: This patent shows that government scientists at Los Alamos were using a "s mall nuclear reactor" to drill underground tunnels. Several of the inventors lis ted on the patent worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including: McInteer, Berthus B.; Mills, Robert L.; Potter, Robert M.; Robinson, Eugene S.; Rowley, J ohn C.; and Smith, Morton C.. For photos and more fascinating information on thi s most intriguing patent, click here.

2,757.1 MPG Achieved at 2009 Shell Eco-marathon Americas 2009-04-19, CNBC News http://classic.cnbc.com/id/30287740 Distance, not speed, was the goal this weekend on the track at the 2009 Shell Ec o-marathon Americas(R), a challenge for students to design, build and test fuelefficient vehicles that travel the farthest distance using the least amount of f uel. This year, more than 500 students from North and South America were on hand to stretch the boundaries of fuel efficiency. So who came out on top? The stude nt team from Laval University, with an astonishing 2,757.1 miles per gallon, equ ivalent to 1,172.2 kilometres per liter, won the grand prize in the "Prototype" category. And in the "UrbanConcept" category - new to the Americas event this ye ar - the team from Mater Dei High School took the grand prize by achieving 433.3 mpg, equivalent to 184.2 km/l. With 44 participating teams at track competition was steep. This year's challenge brought together a number of returning teams d etermined to beat the 2,843 mpg (1,208 km/l) record set by Mater Dei High School (Evansville, Ind.) in 2008, combined with a number of new teams adding fresh in novation and vehicle designs to the competition. "The Shell Eco-marathon is a pl atform for students to let their imaginations run wild," said Mark Singer, globa l project manager for the Shell Eco-marathon. "By encouraging these students to build vehicles with greater energy efficiency, we hope this will help inspire ot hers; and together we can find solutions that will help meet the global energy c hallenge." Note: Why so little media attention to this most exciting race for top gas milea ge? And if high school students can build a car that gets over 2,500 mpg, what's up with Detroit? Could big business be suppressing, or at the very least ignori ng these inspiring inventions?

A Few Speculators Dominate Vast Market for Oil Trading 2008-08-21, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/20/AR20080820038... Regulators had long classified a private Swiss energy conglomerate called Vitol as a trader that primarily helped industrial firms that needed oil to run their

businesses. But when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission examined Vitol's b ooks last month, it found that the firm was in fact more of a speculator, holdin g oil contracts as a profit-making investment rather than a means of lining up t he actual delivery of fuel. Even more surprising to the commodities markets was the massive size of Vitol's portfolio -- at one point in July, the firm held 11 percent of all the oil contracts on the regulated New York Mercantile Exchange. The discovery revealed how an individual financial player had gained enormous sw ay over the oil market without the knowledge of regulators. Other CFTC data show ed that a significant amount of trading activity was concentrated in the hands o f just a few speculators. The CFTC ... now reports that financial firms speculat ing for their clients or for themselves account for about 81 percent of the oil contracts on NYMEX, a far bigger share than had previously been stated by the ag ency. That figure may rise in coming weeks as the CFTC checks the status of othe r big traders. Some lawmakers have blamed these firms for the volatility of oil prices, including the tremendous run-up that peaked earlier in the summer. "It i s now evident that speculators in the energy futures markets play a much larger role than previously thought, and it is now even harder to accept the agency's l aughable assertion that excessive speculation has not contributed to rising ener gy prices," said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.).

Investors' Growing Appetite for Oil Evades Market Limits 2008-06-06, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/05/AR20080605043... Hedge funds and big Wall Street banks are taking advantage of loopholes in feder al trading limits to buy massive amounts of oil contracts, ... helping to push o il prices to record highs. The federal agency that oversees oil trading, the Com modity Futures Trading Commission, has exempted these firms from rules that limi t speculative buying. The CFTC has also waived regulations over the past decade on U.S. investors who trade commodities on some overseas markets, freeing those investors to accumulate large quantities of the future oil supply by making purc hases on lightly regulated foreign exchanges. Over the past five years, investor s have become such a force on commodity markets that their appetite for oil cont racts has been equal to China's increase in demand over the same period, said Mi chael Masters, a hedge fund manager who testified before Congress on the subject last month. The commodity markets, he added, were never intended for such large financial players. Commodities have become especially enticing to investors as the credit crisis has roiled other investment opportunities such as stocks and d ebt-related securities. The recent flood of investment money has transformed the markets for oil, as well as uranium, wheat, cotton and other goods, into a vola tile realm that some insiders call the Wild West of Wall Street. Michael Greenbe rger, a professor at the University of Maryland and former CFTC commissioner, sa id there were loopholes the agency could close without much effort. "There's smo ke here, and the CFTC hasn't wanted to look if there's a fire," he said. "But th ese are dark markets. They don't even know who's doing the trading." Note: For revealing reports on financial corruption and criminality from major m edia sources, click here.

Cars that make hybrids look like gas guzzlers 2007-03-04, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/04/ING44OD4AS1.DTL Toyota Prius owners tend to be a proud lot since they drive the fuel-efficient h ybrid gas-electric car that's ... one of the hottest-selling vehicles in America . A few, however, felt that good was not good enough. They've made "improvements

" even though the modifications voided parts of their warranties. Why? Five word s: one hundred miles per gallon. "We took the hybrid car to its logical conclusi on," [Felix] Kramer says, by adding more batteries and the ability to recharge b y plugging into a regular electrical socket at night. Compared with the Prius' f uel efficiency of 50 mpg, plug-in hybrids use half as much gasoline by running m ore on cleaner, cheaper, domestic electricity. These trendsetters monkeyed with the car ... to make a point: If they could make a plug-in hybrid, the major car companies could, too. Kramer ... and a cadre of volunteers formed the California Cars Initiative (online at calcars.org). They added inexpensive lead-acid batte ries ... giving the car over 100 mpg in local driving and 50 to 80 mpg on the hi ghway. The cost of conversion is about $5,000 for a do-it-yourselfer. Several sm all companies like EnergyCS ... started doing small numbers of conversions for f leets and government agencies using longer-lasting, more energy-dense lithium-io n batteries. Kramer hired EnergyCS to convert his Prius and reported on a typica l day of driving. Compared with driving his Prius before the conversion, he ... spewed out two-thirds less greenhouse gases at a total cost of $1.76 for electri city and gasoline, instead of the $3.17 it would have required on gasoline alone . People want plug-in hybrids but can't get them. Dealers don't sell them yet, a nd the few conversion services cater to fleets. Note: For a video and educational package to guide those who want to build a 100 mpg car, see www.eaa-phev.org. For why the car companies with their massive bud gets haven't developed cars like this, click here.

Cheap solar power poised to undercut oil and gas by half 2007-02-18, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/02/19/ccview19.xml Within five years, solar power will be cheap enough to compete with carbon-gener ated electricity. In a decade, the cost may have fallen so dramatically that sol ar cells could undercut oil, gas, coal and nuclear power by up to half. Anil Set hi, the chief executive of the Swiss start-up company Flisom, says he looks forw ard to the day - not so far off - when entire cities in America and Europe gener ate their heating, lighting and air-conditioning needs from solar films on build ings with enough left over to feed a surplus back into the grid. The secret? A p iece of dark polymer foil, as thin a sheet of paper. It is so light it can be st uck to the sides of buildings. It can be mass-produced in cheap rolls like packa ging - in any colour. The "tipping point" will arrive when the capital cost of s olar power falls below $1 (51p) per watt, roughly the cost of carbon power. The best options today vary from $3 to $4 per watt - down from $100 in the late 1970 s. Mr Sethi believes his product will cut the cost to 80 cents per watt within f ive years, and 50 cents in a decade. "We don't need subsidies, we just need gove rnments to get out of the way and do no harm," he said. Solar use [has] increase d dramatically in Japan and above all Germany, where Berlin's green energy law p assed in 2004 forces the grid to buy surplus electricity from households at a fa t premium. The tipping point in Germany and Japan came once households [understo od] that they could undercut their unloved utilities. Credit Lyonnais believes t he rest of the world will soon join the stampede. Needless to say, electricity u tilities are watching the solar revolution with horror. Note: Why is this inspiring, important news getting so little press coverage? An d why not more solar subsidies? For a possible answer, click here. And for an am azing new energy source not yet reported in the major media which could make eve n solar energy obsolete, click here.

Coming in out of the cold: Cold fusion, for real

2005-06-06, Christian Science Monitor http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2005/0606/p25s01-stss.html A very reputable, very careful group of scientists at the University of Los Ange les ... has initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that's not muc h bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room temperature. This time, it l ooks like the real thing. The whole trick with fusion is you've got to get proto ns close enough together for the strong force to overcome their electrical repul sion and merge them together into a nucleus. Instead of using high temperatures and incredible densities to ram protons together, the scientists at UCLA cleverl y used the structure of an unusual crystal. Crystals are fascinating things; the atoms inside are all lined up in a tightly ordered lattice, which creates the b eautiful structure we associate with crystals. Stressing the bonds between the a toms of some crystals causes electrons to build up on one side, creating a charg e difference over the body of the crystal. Instead of using intense heat or pres sure to get nuclei close enough together to fuse, this new experiment used a ver y powerful electric field to slam atoms together. This experiment has been repea ted successfully and other scientists have reviewed the results. For the time be ing, don't expect fusion to become a readily available energy option. The curren t cold fusion apparatus still takes much more energy to start up than you get ba ck out. But it really may not be long until we have the first nuclear fusion-pow ered devices in common use. Note: If the above link fails, click here. Why wasn't this widely reported? For a possible answer, click here.

Fans of GM Electric Car Fight the Crusher 2005-03-10, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21991-2005Mar9 What's at stake, they say, is no less than the future of automotive technology, a practical solution for driving fast and fun with no direct pollution whatsoeve r. GM agrees that the car in question, called the EV1, was a rousing feat of eng ineering that could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in under eight seconds wit h no harmful emissions. The market just wasn't big enough, the company says, for a car that traveled 140 miles or less on a charge before you had to plug it in like a toaster. Some 800 drivers once leased EV1s, mostly in California. After t he last lease ran out in August, GM reclaimed every one of the cars, donating a few to universities and car museums but crushing many of the rest. Enthusiasts d iscovered a stash of about 77 surviving EV1s behind a GM training center in Burb ank and last month decided to take a stand. Mobilized through Internet sites and word of mouth, nearly 100 people pledged $24,000 each for a chance to buy the c ars from GM. On Feb. 16 the group set up a street-side outpost of folding chairs that they have staffed ever since in rotating shifts, through long nights and t orrential rains, trying to draw attention to their cause. GM refuses to budge. T oyota is aware of a growing fad among do-it-yourselfers who put a new battery in their Prius so it can be plugged in at home and then travel about 20 miles on e lectric power alone. Note: Why would GM simply crush cars for which people are willing to pay $24,000 ? For a possible answer to this important question, click here. To learn how to convert a Toyota Prius to get 100 mpg, click here.

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons 2004-10-04, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL

The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie "mirror" of ordinary matter -- in future weapons. The most powerful potential energy source presently thoug ht to be available to humanity, antimatter is a term normally heard in science-f iction films. But antimatter itself isn't fiction. During the Cold War, the Air Force funded numerous scientific studies of the basic physics of antimatter. Fol lowing an initial inquiry from The Chronicle this summer, the Air Force forbade its employees from publicly discussing the antimatter research program. Still, d etails on the program appear in numerous Air Force documents distributed over th e Internet prior to the ban. It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive fo rce available in a speck of antimatter. One millionth of a gram of positrons con tain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to t he explosion ... in Oklahoma City in 1995. Officials at Eglin Air Force Base ini tially agreed enthusiastically to try to arrange an interview with ... Kenneth E dwards, director of the "revolutionary munitions" team at the Munitions Director ate at Eglin. "We're all very excited about this technology," spokesman Rex Swen son [said] in late July. But Swenson backed out in August after he was overruled by higher officials in the Air Force and Pentagon. Reached by phone in late Sep tember, Edwards repeatedly declined to be interviewed. His superiors gave him "s trict instructions not to give any interviews personally. "I'm sorry about that -- this (antimatter) project is sort of my grandchild."

A Battle to Preserve a Visionary s Bold Failure 2009-05-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tesla.html In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to rel ay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbe known to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all. It was the inventor s biggest project, and his most audacious. The first tower ro se on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. Tesla, wh o lived from 1856 to 1943, made bitter enemies who dismissed some of his claims as exaggerated, helping tarnish his reputation in his lifetime. Today, his work tends to be poorly known among scientists, though some call him an intuitive gen ius far ahead of his peers. He was widely celebrated for his inventions of motor s and power distribution systems that used the form of electricity known as alte rnating current, which beat out direct current (and Thomas Edison) to electrify the world. Around 1900 ... inventors around the world were racing for what was c onsidered the next big thing wireless communication. [Tesla's] own plan was to t urn alternating current into electromagnetic waves that flashed from antennas to distant receivers. The scale of his vision was gargantuan. Investors, given Tes la s electrical achievements, paid heed. The biggest was J. Pierpont Morgan, a top financier. He sank $150,000 (today more than $3 million) into Tesla s global wire less venture. But Morgan was [eventually] disenchanted. Margaret Cheney, a Tesla biographer, observed that Tesla had seriously misjudged his wealthy patron, a m an deeply committed to the profit motive. The prospect of beaming electricity to penniless Zulus or Pygmies, she wrote, must have left the financier less than ent husiastic. Note: This article underplays a number of things about Tesla. Morgan stopped fun ding him primarily because he eventually realized that there would be no way to charge for the electricity Tesla was generating. If successful, electricity woul d be available virtually for free to those supplied by his tower. Tesla was then shunned by the power elite and his rightful claim as inventor of the radio (not Marconi) was erased in the history books. As stated on the PBS website, "It was n't until 1943 a few months after Tesla's death that the U.S. Supreme Court uphe

ld Tesla's radio patent number 645,576." For more on this amazing man, click her e and here.

Torture tests say battery power's hardly nerdy 2009-03-30, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/03/30/torture_tests_s... Bill Dub gets giddy when he talks about batteries and speed. After all, his 500-h orsepower Killacycle electric motorcycle goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in und er a second. He claims it is the fastest electric vehicle on the planet. In Octo ber, the Killacycle traveled a quarter mile in 7.89 seconds, topping out at 174 mph, a record. Dub, 56, an engineer and Rhode Island native whose day job is desi gning air chemistry instruments at the University of Colorado, is the bike's des igner, owner, and builder. He is out to prove that electric vehicles do not have to be "nerd-mobiles." At the heart of electric vehicles like the Killacycle are the batteries. A123 Systems Inc., based in Watertown, sponsors the Killacycle a nd provides its battery. Dub read about A123's lithium-ion battery technology in 2003 and decided to approach company officials. He thought drag racing was a gre at way to torture-test the company's innovative battery cells. "I told them I'll take the battery cells out to the drag strip and set a world record," he said. Electric-vehicle racing hit the start line about 15 years ago, when pioneers lik e Dub began building the machines. "Bill is quite amazing and does pretty good pr omoting electric-vehicle racing in general," said Mike Willmon, president of the National Electric Drag Racing Association, based in Santa Rosa, Calif. The miss ion of the group, whose membership stands at 100, is to increase public awarenes s about the performance side of electric vehicles. Note: Why such a weak title for this amazing bike? Why not a title like "Electri c motorcycle goes 0 to 60 in one second"? Could it be the media doesn't want us to know things like this? For lots more suggesting this may be the case, click h ere. And for more on this amazing motorcyle and an unassuming electric car that does the quarter mile in under 12 seconds, click here.

Legislators taking hard look at oil trading 2008-11-26, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/26/BU70149LTD.DTL For a few months this summer, the oil market speculator ... helped push oil pric es steadily higher, shattering records that had lasted for decades. As oil toppe d $145 per barrel, Congress started looking for ways to rein the speculators in. Then oil prices plunged, and interest in the issue fizzled. But that may soon c hange. "This will remain an issue," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who introduc ed oil market legislation this year. "Because when the price of oil has gone fro m $50 to $147 and back, it's clear to me and everyone else that this has nothing to do with supply and demand. It has to do with speculation." Among possible ch anges, Congress may try to assert more authority over unregulated oil swaps that don't take place on any formal market. Many factors helped shove prices higher, including the growth of China's economy and the decline of the American dollar. But oil kept rising even as gasoline sales fell in the United States, the world 's largest oil consumer. That wouldn't have happened if supply and demand really were driving the market, many analysts say. "The entire move from $70 (per barr el) to $147 was people fleeing the dollar and looking at oil as an asset class," said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy research fellow at Rice University's Baker Inst itute. "It was speculators, so when they exited the market, we went right back t o $70." Speculators are investors who trade in oil or other commodities strictly as a financial investment. They include hedge funds and investment banks as wel

l as retirement funds. Note: For lots more reports on corporate corruption from reliable sources, click here.

Students increase fuel-efficiency 2008-06-22, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/20/MTTF114KJO.DTL What we drive in the future may not be designed in Detroit, or Tokyo or Stuttgar t, but on the college campuses of North America. Teams of students from 17 colle ges and universities in the United States and Canada have spent the last three y ears taking apart models of a Chevrolet Equinox, and re-designing and re-fitting the crossover SUV to get better fuel efficiency than the engineers and designer s at General Motors have been able to achieve. It's called Challenge X. So what did these college teams come up with? They came up with bio-diesel, ethanol, hyd rogen, hybrid electric, plug-in electric - with most of the teams using two of t hese energy sources together. The team from Penn State created an Equinox that r uns on three fuels: bio-diesel, hydrogen and electric hybrid power. "The way it' s designed, it's always burning hydrogen and bio-diesel together, and the hybrid motor turns on and off," explained Nate Simmons. The team from San Diego State created a bio-diesel electric hybrid, and transformed the transmission from auto matic to manual for even better gas mileage. They were able to boost the EPA rat ing for the conventional Equinox from a rating of 23 miles per gallon highway up into the low 30s. "We set out to produce the most powerful vehicle in the compe tition," said faculty advisor James Burns. This year's winner was Mississippi St ate University, for its bio-diesel hybrid electric design. The MSU vehicle is po wered by a 1.9-liter GM direct injection turbo-diesel engine, fueled by bio-dies el (B20). It won for achieving a whopping 38 percent increase in fuel economy ov er the production-model Equinox. Note: College and even high school students have been beating car manufacturers for years, yet the media seem to largely ignore this. For striking examples, cli ck here and here.

Turning physics on its ear 2008-02-04, Toronto Star (Toronto's leading newspaper) http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/300042 Thane Heins is nervous and hopeful. In four days the Ottawa-area native will tra vel to Boston where he'll demonstrate an invention that appears ... to operate a s a perpetual motion machine. The audience, esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Markus Zahn, could either deflate Heins' heretical claims o r add momentum to a 20-year obsession. Zahn is a leading expert on electromagnet ic and electronic systems. In a rare move for any reputable academic, he has agr eed to give Heins' creation an open-minded look rather than greet it with outrig ht dismissal. The invention ... could moderately improve the efficiency of induc tion motors, used in everything from electric cars to ceiling fans. At best it m eans a way of tapping the mysterious powers of electromagnetic fields to produce more work out of less effort, seemingly creating electricity from nothing. Hein s has modified his test so the effects observed are difficult to deny. He holds a permanent magnet a few centimetres away from the driveshaft of an electric mot or, and the magnetic field it creates causes the motor to accelerate. Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn't cause acceleration. "It's an unusual phenomenon I wou ldn't have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It's real. To my mind this is une

xpected and new," he [said]. "There are an infinite number of induction machines in people's homes and everywhere around the world. If you could make them more efficient, cumulatively, it could make a big difference." Note: For a treasure trove of reports on new energy breakthroughs from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

A way to squeeze oil and gas from just about anything 2007-12-00, Popular Science magazine http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/innovator_2.html Everything that goes into Frank Pringle s recycling machine a piece of tire, a roc k, a plastic cup turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. I ve been told the oil companies might try to assassinate me, Pringle says without sarcasm. The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyd ay objects. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto w aste tires, plastic, vinyl into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running). Pringle crea ted the machine about 10 years ago after he drove by a massive tire fire and tho ught about the energy being released. He went home and threw bits of a tire in a microwave emitter he d been working with for another project. It turned to what l ooked like ash, but a few hours later, he returned and found a black puddle on t he floor of the unheated workshop. Somehow, he d struck oil. Or rather, he had ext racted it. Petroleum is composed of strings of hydrocarbon molecules. When micro waves hit the tire, they crack the molecular chains and break it into its compon ent parts: carbon black (an ash-like raw material) and hydrocarbon gases, which can be burned or condensed into liquid fuel. If the process worked on tires, he thought, it should work on anything with hydrocarbons. The trick was in finding the optimum microwave frequency for each material. In 2004 he teamed up with eng ineer pal Hawk Hogan to take the machine commercial. Their first order is under construction in Rockford, Illinois. It s a $5.1-million microwave machine the size of small bus called the Hawk, bound for an auto-recycler in Long Island, New Yo rk. Oil companies are looking to the machines to gasify petroleum trapped in sha le. Note: For many exciting breakthroughs in new energy technologies, click here.

The 50% MPG Gain That Detroit Won't Touch 2007-08-26, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR20070823016... Gerald Rowley keeps his dreams in his garage. There ... he stores an aging Mazda 626 sedan [specially outfitted with a] one-gallon steel box in the trunk connec ted to fuel lines leading to a gasoline vaporizing device under the hood. The st eel box holds one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. The device beneath the ho od is called the VFS, Vaporizing Fuel System. I came here to drive Rowley's VFSequipped car. For years, I had spurned the invitations of homespun inventors wor ldwide to travel to distant points to witness first-hand machines that could del iver 100 miles per gallon or 200 miles per gallon. The claims sounded too incred ible to believe -- ridiculous, in fact. If such devices really worked, really di d what their inventors said they did, why would they still be sitting on shelves in anonymous workshops -- ignored by the driving public and all of the vehicle manufacturers who serve them? What automobile manufacturer in its right mind, es pecially with rising concerns about future oil availability and with gasoline pr ices escalating worldwide, would not jump at the opportunity to acquire a device that delivered 100 miles per gallon? Rowley's patented device is nothing new. I

t's just the latest iteration of an idea already developed by others -- the noti on that you could get more miles per gallon out of a traditional gasoline engine if you pre-heated the fuel to about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, thus turning it int o a vapor before it enters the combustion chamber. Vaporized fuel, when properly mixed with air, burns more efficiently, saves fuel and emits fewer tailpipe pol lutants than traditional fuel-air mixtures in which gasoline is sprayed into a c ombustion chamber in tiny droplets and then mixed with air before burning. All c ar companies know this. Note: Why won't the car manufacturers develop this amazing, proven technology? F or a possible answer, click here. And for a treasure trove of exciting reports o n new energy developments, click here.

Bribes offered to scientists 2007-02-03, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/bribes-offered-to-scientists/2007/02/0... Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine the UN climate change report. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute, an ExxonMobil-funded think tank with close links to the Bush Administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of the report. Travel expenses and add itional payments were also offered. The institute has received more than $1.6 mi llion from ExxonMobil - which yesterday announced a $50 billion annual profit, t he biggest ever by a US company - and more than 20 of its staff have worked as c onsultants to the Bush Administration. A former head of ExxonMobil, Lee Raymond, is the vice-chairman of the institute's board of trustees. Note: Why wasn't this important story covered by any major media in the U.S.? Fo r an answer, click here.

Vehicle mileage estimates get real 2006-12-12, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fuel12dec12,0,1026595.story That 55-mile-per-gallon hybrid car you've been eyeing may end up being a 44-mpg hybrid. The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced a new system Monda y for evaluating fuel economy that will lower mileage estimates for most vehicle s. On average, vehicles rated under the 2008 method will post a 12% drop in city gasoline mileage and an 8% decline in highway mileage. With the new testing req uirements, the EPA is attempting to come up with estimates that more closely ref lect the real-world mileage motorists can expect when they purchase a vehicle. U nder the current system ... actual mileage is often far lower than the posted EP A ratings. Hybrids will be hit harder because the new test eliminates some of th e all-electric driving that helped them produce impressive results. A recent stu dy ... found that the average mileage for passenger cars and light trucks was ab out 14% less than EPA estimates. The mileage for gas-electric hybrids probably w ill be 20% to 30% lower than present estimates for city driving and 10% to 20% l ower on the highway. These vehicles quickly lose their all-electric advantage wh en operated in cold weather or quickly accelerated. The new EPA mileage estimate s won't harm automakers' ability to meet federal rules requiring an industrywide average fuel economy of 27.5 miles per gallon for cars and 21 mpg for sport uti lity vehicles, pickup trucks and vans. Note: The government could easily mandate higher gas mileage, but has not signif icantly raised the bar in almost 20 years. Why? The current average mileage for

all cars is less than the mileage of the 1908 Model T. With all of the incredibl y technological advances in other fields, how is this possible? For more on this vital topic, click here and here. Toyota came out with a hybrid that got 100 mp g in 2002. For what happened to it, click here. And to learn how a Toyota Prius can be converted to get 100 miles per gallon, click here.

Advanced vehicles demonstrate zero oil-consumption, reduced emissions 2005-05-18, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/cars/news/2005/may/0518_tourdesol.html Carmakers such as Toyota and Honda can't seem to make hybrid vehicles fast enoug h to keep up with public interest. Interest in this new technology is growing, a nd one group is highlighting these technical marvels in a yearly event called th e Tour de Sol. Top prize for the Monte-Carlo Rally went to a modified Honda Insi ght driven by Brian Hardegen, of Pepperell, who broke the 100-mile-per-gallon ba rrier over a 150-mile range. The car actually got 107 miles-per gallon. St. Mark 's High School in Southboro, and North Haven Community School, North Haven, ME, demonstrated true zero-oil consumption and true zero climate-change emissions wi th their modified electric Ford pick-up and Volkswagen bus. More than 60 hybrid, electric and biofueled vehicles from throughout the US and Canada demonstrated that we have the technology today to power our transportation system with zero-o il consumption and zero climate-change emissions. Note: If the above link fails, click here. If high school students can do it, wh y aren't the car companies seriously developing these technologies? And why are car manufacturers not able to keep up with demand on hybrid vehicles? For more, click here.

Halliburton operates in Iran despite sanctions 2005-03-07, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7119752 in January, Halliburton won a contract to drill at a huge Iranian gas field call ed Pars, which an Iranian government spokesman said "served the interests" of Ir an. "I am baffled that any American company would want to have employees operati ng in Iran," says Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. "I would think they'd be ashamed. " Halliburton says the operation videotaped by NBC News is entirely legal. It's run by a subsidiary called "Halliburton Products and Services Limited," based ou tside the U.S. In fact, the law allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to do business in Iran under strict conditions. Other U.S. oil services compani es, like Weatherford and Baker Hughes, also are in Iran. And foreign subsidiarie s of NBC's parent company, General Electric, have sold equipment to Iran. For Ha lliburton to have done this legally, the foreign subsidiary operating in Iran mu st be independent of the main operation in Texas. Yet, when an NBC producer appr oached managers in Iran, he was sent to company officials in Dubai. But they sai d only Halliburton headquarters in Houston could talk about operations in Iran.

Warming Up to Cold Fusion 2004-11-21, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov16.html Peter Hagelstein is trying to revive hope for a future of clean, inexhaustible, inexpensive energy. Fifteen years after the scientific embarrassment of the cent ury ... a panel of scientists gathered. The panel's charge was simple: to determ

ine whether [cold fusion] had even a prayer of a chance at working. The Departme nt of Energy went to great lengths to cloak the meeting from public view. No ann ouncement, no reporters. None of the names of the people attending that day was disclosed. Since 1989, hundreds of scientists working in dozens of labs around t he world have claimed ... results. Supporters point to the written literature -more than 3,000 papers -- as proof of the effect. But the most credible cold fu sion advocates concede that the vast majority of those papers are of poor qualit y. "Brilliant," "genius" and "reclusive" were words used to describe [SRI scient ist Peter] Hagelstein 20 years ago, when he rose to prominence as one of the you ng scientists behind President Ronald Reagan's plans to build a missile shield i n outer space. Hagelstein [now] describes the mainstream scientific community as "mafias" that promote and publish their friends' work, unwilling to accept new ideas. As Hagelstein explains it, leading physicists came out swiftly and premat urely against cold fusion. Hagelstein says his acceptance of cold fusion was by no means immediate. It took several years before he was convinced. [Now] Hagelst ein says, he has seen enough cold fusion data to convince him that the science i s clearly real. The field's acceptance, he maintains, will be simply a matter of the scientific community's looking at the improved experimental results in the future and coming to understand them. Note: If the above link fails, click here. Why all the secrecy around this impor tant topic? To learn why the power elite don't want cheap energy, click here.

Tsunami bomb - NZ's devastating war secret 1999-09-25, New Zealand Herald (New Zealand's leading newspaper) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=14727 Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfe ct a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal. United States defence chiefs sa id that if the project had been completed before the end of the war it could hav e played a role as effective as that of the atom bomb. Details of the tsunami bo mb, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53-year-old documents released by th e Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Papers stamped "top secret" show the US and British military were eager for Seal to be developed in the post-war years too. The experiments involved laying a pattern of explosives underwater to creat e a tsunami. It is unclear what happened to Project Seal once the final report w as forwarded to Wellington Defence Headquarters late in the 1940s. The bomb was never tested on a full scale. "Whether it could ever be resurrected ... Under so me circumstances I think it could be devastating."

Could This Lump Power the Planet? 2009-11-14, Newsweek magazine http://www.newsweek.com/id/222792 When I meet [Edward] Moses [at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory], the 60-year-old scientist ... shows me a tiny pellet ... and swears it will provide an endless supply of safe, clean energy. The pellet Moses holds is a model, but the real version will contain a few milligrams of deuterium and tritium, isotope s of hydrogen that can be extracted from water. If you blast the pellet with a p owerful laser, you can create a reaction like the one that takes place at the ce nter of the sun. Harness that reaction, and you've created a star on earth, and with the heat from that star you can generate electricity without creating any p ollution. Forget about nuke plants, coal, oil, or wind and solar. "This is the r eal solar power," says Moses. What Moses is talking about is controlled nuclear fusion. Instead of splitting the nucleus of an atom, you're trying to force a de uterium nucleus to merge, or fuse, with a tritium nucleus. When that happens, yo

u produce helium and throw off energy. Scientists have been trying to produce en ergy with fusion for decades. So far, they keep failing. The joke is that fusion energy is only 40 years away, and will always be only 40 years away. Moses beli eves, however, that his lab, which is called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, has cracked the problem. The big challenge fusion has faced is lack of powe r. NIF's laser ... can produce 60 times more energy than any other laser ever bu ilt. Right now it's still being tested. But next year Moses and his scientists w ill fire it up with a full load of deuterium-tritium fuel, and Moses feels confi dent it will achieve "ignition," meaning a controlled burn in which you get out more energy than you put in. Note: For many reports from reliable sources of promising new energy development s, click here and here.

Chrysler drops three electric vehicles despite having touted them to get billion s in government bailout cash 2009-11-09, USA Today http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2009/11/620001133/1 If you believed all the talk from Chrysler about how our tax dollars would help finance its fast-track electric-vehicle future, you're in for a big disappointme nt. Chrysler has disbanded the engineering team that was trying to bring three e lectric models to market as a rush job. Chrysler [had] cited its devotion to ele ctric vehicles as one of the key reasons why the Obama administration and Congre ss needed to give it $12.5 billion in bailout money. The change of heart on elec tric vehicles has come under Fiat. At a marathon presentation of Chrysler's five -year strategy, CEO Sergio Marchionne talked about just about everything on Chry sler's plate ... except its earlier electric-car plans. With the group's disband ing, Chrysler's electric plans will be melded into Fiat's. Marchionne is apparen tly no fan of electric power. He says electrics will only make up 1% or 2% of Fi at sales by 2014 and that he doesn't put a lot of faith in the technology until battery developments are pushed forward. As a result, Chrysler won't have an ele ctric car on sale as soon as next year, such as the Dodge Circuit sports car con cept it had unveiled. The change has come so fast that Chrysler's website has be en still featuring pictures of the electric vehicles. As late as August, Chrysle r took $70 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a tes t fleet of 220 hybrid pickup trucks and minivans, vehicles now scrapped in the s weeping turnaround plan for Chrysler. Note: For reports from reliable sources on promising new developments in electri c automobile technologies, click here.

Energy crisis is postponed as new gas rescues the world 2009-10-11, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6299291/Ene... Advances in technology for extracting [natural] gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than a lmost anybody expected. Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivale nt, enough for 60 years' supply and rising fast. "There has been a revolution in the gas fields of North America. Reserve estimates are rising sharply as techno logy unlocks unconventional resources," he said. The breakthrough has been to co mbine 3-D seismic imaging with new technologies to free "tight gas" by smashing rocks, known as hydro-fracturing or "fracking" in the trade. The US is leading t he charge. Texas A&M University said US methods could increase global gas reserv

es by nine times to 16,000 TCF (trillion cubic feet). Shale gas is undoubtedly m essy. Millions of gallons of water mixed with sand, hydrochloric acid and toxic chemicals are blasted at rocks. This is supposed to happen below the water basin s but accidents have been common. Pennsylvania's [environmental authorities] hav e shut down a Cabot Oil & Gas operation after 8,000 gallons of chemicals spilled into a stream. The claims of BP ... are so extraordinary that we may need to re write the geo-strategy textbooks for the next half century. Note: For more on the risks associated with fracking, click here. For lots more from reliable sources on new energy developments, click here.

Have a Nice Day 2009-09-16, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16friedman.html Applied Materials is one of the most important U.S. companies you ve probably neve r heard of. It makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your c omputer. The chip business, though, is volatile, so in 2004 Mike Splinter, Appli ed Materials s C.E.O., decided to add a new business line to take advantage of the company s nanotechnology capabilities making the machines that make solar panels. The other day, Splinter gave me a tour of the company s Silicon Valley facility, culminating with a visit to its war room, where Applied maintains a real-time glob al interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it s built around the world in th e last two years. Not a single one is in America. Let s see: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. The reason that all these other countries a re building solar-panel industries today is because most of their governments ha ve put in place the three prerequisites for growing a renewable energy industry: 1) any business or homeowner can generate solar energy; 2) if they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid; and 3) the utility has t o buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a no-brainer good de al for the family or business putting the solar panels on their rooftop. Regulat ory, price and connectivity certainty, that is what Germany put in place, and th at explains why Germany now generates almost half the solar power in the world t oday and, as a byproduct, is making itself the world-center for solar research, engineering, manufacturing and installation. With more than 50,000 new jobs, the renewable energy industry in Germany is now second only to its auto industry. Note: For lots more from reliable sources on promising new energy developments, click here.

A climate solution that's out of this world 2009-05-14, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/05/14/14greenwire-a-climate-solution-thats-... One of the newest energy lobbyists claims he has the answer to climate change: s paceships. The government has in its possession "extraterrestrial vehicles," lob byist Stephen Bassett said. As in flying saucers. Imagine the power source, he s aid, behind a 30-foot wide saucer that weighs the same as a tractor-trailer yet hurtles through galaxies at 20,000 miles per hour. "What is the energy system op erating that craft?" Bassett said. "They're not burning kerosene." Bassett ... i s working for free as a lobbyist, representing the Hawaii-based Exopolitics Inst itute, an educational organization which describes itself as "dedicated to study ing the key actors, institutions and political processes associated with extrate rrestrial life." Bassett said he is less lobbyist and more political activist. " The UFO phenomenon is real," Bassett said. "The E.T. extraterrestrial presence i

s real." Bassett's been lobbying about seven months, targeting the science and t echnology, and defense and aviation angles. He added energy to his portfolio in a Senate filing last week. He has spoken to lawmakers in the past, Bassett said, but he's writing off lobbying Congress for now, calling the extraterrestrial is sue "the third rail" of politics. Besides, he and other believers have a bigger name on their list. "Knowing that Congress could not act," Bassett said, "what w e did was focus on the executive branch, the White House." Those who believe the truth is out there have been waiting for someone like President Obama to come c lean about the government hiding information on extraterrestrials, Bassett said. Note: What's highly unusual about this article is that there is not a note of ri dicule. This may be a first for a UFO article in the New York Times. For lots mo re eye-opening, reliable information on this topic, including a Times article in which a former CIA chief describes a UFO cover-up, click here and here.

Navy scientist announces possible cold fusion reactions 2009-03-23, Houston Chronicle (Houston's leading newspaper) http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6333164.html A U.S. Navy researcher announced today that her lab has produced significant new r esults that indicate cold fusion-like reactions. If the work by analytical chemi st Pamela Mosier-Boss and her colleagues is confirmed, it could open the door to a cheap, near-limitless reservoir of energy. Devising a fusion-based source of energy on Earth has long been a clean-energy holy grail of physicists. A small gro up of scientists has [tried] to produce fusion reactions at low temperatures. If such experiments did produce fusion reactions, they would generate highly energ etic neutrons as a byproduct. These are what Mosier-Boss says her San Diego-base d group has found. If you have fusion going on, then you have to have neutrons, sh e said. But we do not know if fusion is actually occurring. It could be some othe r nuclear reaction. Today s announcement is based partly on research published by M osier-Boss group last year in the journal Naturwissenschaften. The announcement m ay turn heads, given its stage at the American Chemical Society s big meeting and the fact that the organization promoted it to science journalists in advance. It s big, said Steven Krivit, founder of the New Energy Times publication, which has t racked cold fusion developments for two decades. What we re talking about may be mo re than anybody actually expected, he said. We re talking about a new field of scien ce that s a hybrid between chemistry and physics. Note: For a powerful documentary showing a major cover-up around cold fusion, cl ick here. Many highly esteemed scientists have repeatedly demonstrated the reali ty of cold fusion, only to have their research sometimes ruthlessly shut down. F or many hopeful reports from reliable sources on the array of new energy develop ments currently underway, click here.

Oil producers running out of storage space 2009-03-03, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29495753 Supertankers that once raced around the world to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for oil are now parked offshore, fully loaded, anchors down, their crews killing time. In the United States, vast storage farms for oil are almost out of room. As demand for crude has plummeted, the world suddenly finds itself awash in oil that has nowhere to go. It s been less than a year since oil prices hit record hig hs. But now producers and traders are struggling with the new reality: The world wants less oil, not more. And turning off the spigot is about as easy as turnin g around one of those tankers. So oil companies and investors are stashing crude

, waiting for demand to rise and the bear market to end so they can turn a profi t later. Meanwhile, oil-producing countries such as Iran have pumped millions of barrels of their own crude into idle tankers, effectively taking crude off the market to halt declining prices that are devastating their economies. Traders ha ve always played a game of store and sell, bringing oil to market when it can fe tch the best price. They say this time is different because of how fast the bott om fell out of the oil market. Nobody expected this, said Antoine Halff, an analys t with Newedge. The majority of people out there thought the market would keep ri sing to $200, even $250, a barrel. They were tripping over each other to pick a higher forecast. Now the strategy is storage. Anyone who can buy cheap oil and st ore it might be able to sell it at a premium later, when the global economy ramp s up again.

Exxon Mobil sets record with $45.2 billion profit 2009-01-30, Miami Herald/Associated Press http://www.miamiherald.com/business/nation/story/879748.html Exxon Mobil Corp. ... reported a profit of $45.2 billion for 2008, breaking its own record for a U.S. company. The previous record for annual profit was $40.6 b illion, which the world's largest publicly traded oil company set in 2007. The e xtraordinary full-year profit wasn't a surprise given crude's triple-digit price for much of 2008, peaking near an unheard of $150 a barrel in July. Since then, however, prices have fallen roughly 70 percent amid a deepening global economic crisis. In the fourth quarter alone crude tumbled 60 percent, prompting spendin g and job cuts in an industry that was reporting robust, often record, profits a s recently as last summer. Irving, Texas-based Exxon said net income slid sharpl y to $7.8 billion, or $1.55 a share, in the October-December period. That compar ed with $11.7 billion, or $2.13 a share, in the same period a year ago, when Exx on set a U.S. record for quarterly profit. It has since topped that mark twice, first in last year's second quarter and then with earnings of $14.83 billion in the third quarter. Revenue in the most-recent quarter fell 27 percent to $84.7 b illion. The industry went into retrenchment toward the end of the year with dema nd falling. The company, which produces about 3 percent of the world's oil, said overall output fell 3 percent in the most-recent period. For the full year, Exx on Mobil's massive profit amounted to $8.69 a share, versus $7.28 a share a year ago. Note: How can it be said that this record-breaking profit "wasn't a surprise," w hen ethically we would all expect the oil companies not to gouge consumers world -wide at the time when oil prices were artificially driven to record highs? Why should the oil companies be allowed to rake in huge profits causing the vast maj ority of us to suffer even greater losses at the gas pump? This is generally cal led gross profiteering. Shouldn't these "windfall profits" be taxed away?

The 65 mpg Ford the U.S. Can't Have 2008-09-01, Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b4099060491065.htm If ever there was a car made for the times, this would seem to be it: a sporty s ubcompact that seats five, offers a navigation system, and gets a whopping 65 mi les to the gallon. Oh yes, and the car is made by Ford Motors, known widely for lumbering gas hogs. Ford's 2009 Fiesta ECOnetic goes on sale in November. But he re's the catch: Despite the car's potential to transform Ford's image and help i t compete with Toyota Motor and Honda Motor in its home market, the company will sell the little fuel sipper only in Europe. "We know it's an awesome vehicle," says Ford America President Mark Fields. "But there are business reasons why we

can't sell it in the U.S." The main one: The Fiesta ECOnetic runs on diesel. Aut omakers such as Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz have predicted for years that a tec hnology called "clean diesel" would overcome many Americans' antipathy to a fuel still often thought of as the smelly stuff that powers tractor trailers. Diesel vehicles now hitting the market with pollution-fighting technology are as clean or cleaner than gasoline and at least 30% more fuel-efficient. Yet while half o f all cars sold in Europe last year ran on diesel, the U.S. market remains relat ively unfriendly to the fuel.

Michigan solar car team wins 2,400-mile race 2008-07-25, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/07/25/michigan.solar.car In the world of higher education, summer is usually the off-season. But for some students, this summer was the culmination of years of hard work in a 2,400-mile solar car race from Plano, Texas to Calgary, Alberta. Fifteen teams of students drove photovoltaic-powered cars across the North American Solar Challenge finis h line in Calgary Tuesday, led by the University of Michigan Solar Car Team and its vehicle, Continuum. Michigan's victory, which took about 51 hours and 42 min utes on the road, is its fifth NASC championship. The school also won the last N ASC, in 2005. Jeff Ferman, the race manager for Michigan, talked about how rewar ding it was to enter Calgary and be greeted by 40,000 people."The streets were l ined with people," he said. "There were people on overpasses with tripods taking pictures." The Michigan team led almost the entire race from Texas, trailing on ly on the first day of driving when it had to stop to fix a minor electrical pro blem. But that 20-minute stop was the only time it had to pull over to make repa irs, which team members said was one reason they did so well. Note: If you do the math, this amazing solar powered car built by college studen ts averaged 46.5 mph over a 2,400 mile course! Why didn't this make news headlin es? Try doing a Google search on "Solar Challenge" (the annual solar car race). You will find that almost no major media cover this amazing event at all. The fe w who have (including this CNN article) usually fail to mention anything about t he speeds attained by these cars. Why is the media not giving better coverage to these incredible breakthroughs? For a possible answer, click here.

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol 2008-06-14, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece Ten years ago I could never have imagined I d be doing this, says Greg Pal, 33, a fo rmer software executive. I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But ... this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into. He means bugs. To be more pr ecise: the genetic alteration of bugs very, very small ones so that when they fe ed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something ext raordinary. They excrete crude oil. Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. M r Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be pou red into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up o n what he calls renewable petroleum . After that, he grins, it s a brave new world . Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Val ley that have ... embarked ... on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oi l (70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. All of us here everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency, Mr Pal says. What is most remarkable abo ut what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global econom y as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel they are trying to m

ake a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this Oil 2.0 will not only be renewable but also carbon negative meaning that the carbon i t emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials f rom which it is made. Note: For a treasure trove of exciting reports on new energy inventions, click h ere.

Petrol pricey? Japanese invent car that runs on water 2008-06-13, Reuters News http://in.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idINSP7366720080613 Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water. Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka, saying that a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water -- rain, river or sea -- was all you need ed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km (50 miles). "Th e car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time," Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo. "It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars," he added. Once the water is p oured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and u ses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said. Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers in the future. Most bi g automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen and emit -- not consume -- water. Note: To watch a Reuters video clip on this amazing car, click here.

Algae: 'The ultimate in renewable energy' 2008-04-01, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/01/algae.oil/ Texas may be best known for "Big Oil." But the oil that could some day make a de nt in the country's use of fossil fuels is small. Microscopic, in fact: algae. L iterally and figuratively, this is green fuel. "Algae is the ultimate in renewab le energy," Glen Kertz, president and CEO of Valcent Products, told CNN while co nducting a tour of his algae greenhouse on the outskirts of El Paso. "We are a g iant solar collecting system. We get the bulk of our energy from the sunshine," said Kertz. Algae are among the fastest growing plants in the world, and about 5 0 percent of their weight is oil. That lipid oil can be used to make biodiesel f or cars, trucks, and airplanes. Most people know algae as "pond scum." And until recently, most energy research and development projects used ponds to grow it. But instead of ponds, Valcent uses a closed, vertical system, growing the algae in long rows of moving plastic bags. The patented system is called Vertigro, a j oint venture with Canadian alternative energy company Global Green Solutions. Th e companies have invested about $5 million in the Texas facility. "A pond has a limited amount of surface area for solar absorption," said Kertz. "By going vert ical, you can get a lot more surface area to expose cells to the sunlight. It ke eps the algae hanging in the sunlight just long enough to pick up the solar ener gy they need to produce, to go through photosynthesis," he said. Kertz said he c an produce about 100,000 gallons of algae oil a year per acre, compared to about 30 gallons per acre from corn; 50 gallons from soybeans. Valcent research scien tist Aga Pinowska said there are about 65,000 known algae species, with perhaps hundreds of thousands more still to be identified. A big part of the research at

the west Texas facility involves determining what type of algae produces what t ype of fuel. Note: For many exciting reports of new energy inventions, click here.

'Eco-Patent Commons' hopes to improve environmental innovation 2008-01-14, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/14/BU6IUDVBM.DTL IBM Corp., Nokia, Sony and Pitney Bowes are expected to announce Monday that the y have put 31 inventions into an "Eco-Patent Commons" designed to make these Ear th-friendly manufacturing and waste-reduction processes more widely available. " This is an open source effort along the lines of the Creative Commons," said IBM assistant general counsel David Kappos, who is responsible for the company's in tellectual property. The open source movement, symbolized by the free Linux oper ating system, believes that innovation occurs more quickly when new ideas and pr ocesses are open to the public for anyone to troubleshoot and improve. The Eco-P atent Commons adopts this activist tactic in certain fields - like waste reducti on - where the participating firms have decided that the societal benefit of hav ing every willing manufacturer adopt these cleaner processes outweighs any poten tial advantage they might gain by keeping the idea close to the vest. One of the newly freed eco-patents is an IBM invention for using a specially folded piece of corrugated cardboard to cushion electronic components against shock during sh ipping - replacing the Styrofoam products that can easily become an environmenta l headache. Likewise, Nokia is giving away a patent designed to help safely disp ose of mobile phones by reusing their components in other gadgets such as digita l cameras. Kappos said the Eco-Patent Commons would be run by an independent, no nprofit group, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and expre ssed hope that other companies would follow the lead and add real clout to what is more a symbolic than substantive effort to make global business a little gree ner.

E-dragsters go for gas-powered records 2007-07-29, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20024352 Straddling a 619-pound motorcycle, Scotty Pollacheck tucks in his knees and lowe rs his head as he waits for the green light. When he revs the engine, there's no roar. The bike moves so fast that within seconds all that's visible is a faint red taillight melting in the distance. Pollacheck crosses the quarter-mile marke r doing 156 mph; he's traveled 1,320 feet in 8.22 seconds, faster than any of th e gas-powered cars, trucks or motorcycles that have raced in the drag sprints on this weekend at Portland International Raceway. It's particularly impressive gi ven Pollacheck is riding a vehicle that uses no gasoline and is powered entirely by lithium-ion batteries. Pollacheck and his bike dubbed the KillaCycle are par t of a growing movement that's exploiting breakthroughs in battery technology an d could soon challenge the world's fastest-accelerating vehicles in the $1 billi on drag-racing industry. "In professional drag racing I expect to see the electr ics eventually pass up the fuel dragsters," said Dick Brown, president of AeroBa tteries, which sponsors White Zombie, the world's quickest-accelerating street-l egal electric car a 1972 white Datsun 1200. "Electric gives you instant torque w hereas gasoline you have to build up," Brown said. The KillaCycle runs on 990 li thium-ion battery cells that feed two direct current motors, generating 350 hors epower. The bike accelerates from zero to 60 mph in just under a second faster t han many professional gas-powered drag motorcycles and within striking distance of the quickest bikes that run on nitromethane. With that hyper-potent racing fu

el, riders can get to 60 mph in 0.7 seconds. Note: For more on this amazing motorcyle and an unassuming electric car that doe s the quarter mile in under 12 seconds, click here.

Fla. Man Invents Machine To Turn Water Into Fire 2007-05-24, WPFB-TV (ABC affiliate in Palm Beach, FL) http://www.wpbf.com/news/13383827/detail.html A Florida man may have accidentally invented a machine that could solve the gaso line and energy crisis plaguing the U.S.. [John] Kanzius, 63, invented a machine that emits radio waves in an attempt to kill cancerous cells while leaving norm al cells intact. While testing his machine, he noticed that his invention had ot her unexpected abilities. Filling a test tube with salt water from a canal in hi s back yard, Kanzius placed the tube and a paper towel in the machine and turned it on. Suddenly, the paper towel ignited. Kanzius performed the experiment with out the paper towel and got the same result -- the saltwater was actually burnin g. [He] said he showed the experiment to a handful of scientists across the coun try who claim they are baffled at watching salt water ignite. Kanzius said the f lame created from his machine reaches a temperature of around 3,000 [F]. He said a chemist told him that the immense heat created from the machine breaks down th e hydrogen-oxygen bond in the water, igniting the hydrogen. "You could take plai n salt water out of the sea, put it in containers and produce a violent flame th at could heat generators that make electricity, or provide other forms of energy ," Kanzius said. He said engineers are currently experimenting with him in Erie, Pa. in an attempt to harness the energy. They've built an engine that, when pla ced on top of the flame, chugged along for two minutes. Kanzius admits all the e xcitement surrounding a new possible energy source was a stroke of luck. Someone who witnessed his work on the cancer front asked him if perhaps the machine cou ld be used for desalinization. "This was an experiment to see if I could heat sa lt water, and instead of heat, I got fire," Kanzius said. Note: Why aren't millions of dollars being channeled to explore this exciting fi eld further? To watch a video clip of this exciting machine igniting sea water, click here.

Gas-sipping vehicle gets 1,900 mpg 2007-04-21, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-garagebriefs21apr21,1,5317797.story We couldn't pass up mention of the winner of last week's Eco-marathon Americas, a fuel-economy challenge sponsored by Shell Oil Co. A team from Cal Poly San Lui s Obispo won the $10,000 grand prize by achieving the equivalent of 1,902.7 mile s per gallon on regular gasoline in a student-built vehicle. Granted, the studen ts didn't win in someone's mom's Dodge minivan. Their "car" is a one-occupant st reamliner built of carbon fiber composite. At a measly 98 pounds, it weighed les s than the driver. And that was 98 pounds including the car's 50-cubic-centimete r Honda engine. "The main reason we do this is because it's a way to encourage s tudents to focus on technical innovation for potential future careers," said Dav id Sexton, president of Shell Oil Products. But there is a practical side to the competition, said Cal Poly team manager Tom Heckel, a junior mechanical enginee ring major. "Any publicity we can get makes people aware that the 20 mpg or so t hey're averaging in their cars can be improved on a lot." The event, held April 14 at the California Speedway in Fontana, was the first time that Shell had brou ght its 25-year-old Eco-marathon competition to the U.S. The event drew 20 unive rsity, college and high school teams from around the U.S. and Canada. Rules call

ed for each vehicle to complete seven 1.45-mile laps around the speedway's inner track, averaging at least 15 mph. Fuel consumption was measured after each atte mpt and adjusted for ambient temperature and other factors in a complex formula that ends up giving an extrapolation of miles per gallon. Note: Why would the president of Shell Oil Products state the main reason for th is competition is about careers and not finding ways to improve gas mileage? The world record is over 10,000 mpg. How is it that the average car gets only 22 mp g when the Ford Model T got 25 mpg almost 100 years ago? For more, click here.

Feds miss energy standards by up to 15 years 2007-03-01, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17403743 The government for decades has failed to meet legal deadlines for tougher energy efficiency standards for appliances and other equipment, costing consumers and industry tens of billions of dollars in electric costs, a congressional study sa id Thursday. The Government Accountability Office reported that over several dec ades the Energy Department has "missed all 34 congressional deadlines for settin g efficiency standards," with delays ranging from several months to as long as 1 5 years. The standards approved by Congress seek to reduce energy use from a bro ad range of products from refrigerators and home heating systems to electricity grid transformers and electric motors in factories. If the deadlines had been me t on only four widely used consumer products - refrigerators, freezers, central air conditioners and heat pumps - consumers would have saved $28 billion in accu mulated energy costs by 2030 - because more energy efficient products would have been on the market sooner. Andy Karsner, the department's assistant secretary i n charge of energy efficiency programs, acknowledged the department has had "a s imply abysmal" record on meeting efficiency standard deadlines set by Congress. Note: Could it be that the powerful energy lobby didn't want these policies inst ituted? For more, click here.

Exxon's 'outlandish' earnings spark furor 2007-02-02, Globe and Mail (One of Canada's Leading Newspapers) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070202.EXXON02/TPStory The world's largest publicly owned oil company announced yesterday the largest c orporate profit ever, but news of its near $40-billion (U.S.) windfall in 2006 s parked an angry backlash, coming on the eve of a major report blaming the use of fossil fuels for wreaking devastation on the planet. Exxon shares have risen by about 20 per cent in the past year. Exxon wasn't alone in unprecedented oil ear nings. Royal Dutch Shell PLC, an Anglo-Dutch company, and U.S.-run Marathon Oil and Valero Energy, also posted best-ever annual results yesterday. And ConocoPhi llips Co., also American, last week posted its highest profits. Profits at the f ive companies together totalled $91.1-billion -- in a year when drivers paid rec ord prices for gasoline. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress have also urged Exxon to end its funding of organizations that deny the existence of -- or minimize the seriousness of -- human-made global warming. Scientists yest erday accused the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which receives fun ding from Exxon, of offering scientists up to $10,000 for articles that undercut a report to be released today from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chang e. Last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists ... said that Exxon has spent $ 16-million over the past 10 years financing organizations that deny the seriousn ess of climate change. Alden Meyer, a strategist with the group, compared Exxon' s efforts to discredit the science of global warming to the tobacco companies' e

fforts to sow doubts about the link between smoking and lung cancer in order to protect their profits. Note: Compare this Canadian article with the New York Times reporting of this re cord profit, or that of any other major U.S. newspaper. The U.S. press barely me ntions that oil company gouging which took dollars from your pocket is what led to record profits. To understand why the U.S. press behaves in this way, click h ere.

8 technologies for a green future 2007-01-26, CNN http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/02/01/8398988... The planet's most pressing environmental problems ... may seem just too big to b e solved with today's technology. But don't despair: A lot of bright minds are w orking on futuristic projects that promise to make the world greener. It's savethe-world stuff like toxic-waste-eating trees, smart electricity grids, oceangoi ng robots, and floating environmental sensors. This technology may seem far out - but it will probably be here a lot sooner than you think. 1. Try a solar-power ed hydrogen fueling station in your garage. It's about the size of a filing cabi net and runs on electricity generated by standard-issue rooftop solar panels. Th e first version of the home fueling station is expected to produce enough hydrog en to give your runabout a range of some 100 miles without emitting a molecule o f planet-warming greenhouse gas. 2. Environmental sensor networks [provide] real -time data on a variety of phenomena that affect the economy and society - clima te change, hurricanes, air and water pollution. 3. Toxin-eating trees ... a tech nology that uses vegetation to absorb hazardous waste from industrial plants and other polluters. 4. Nuclear waste neutralizer ... a chemical technology called Urex+ that extracts reusable uranium and separates out cesium, allowing four tim es as much waste to be packed into nuclear burial grounds. 5. Autonomous ocean r obots. 6. Sonic water purifier ... a sci-fi solution for an age-old problem that leaves 1.1 billion people without access to clean water: 7. Endangered-species tracker. 8. The interactive, renewable smart power grid ... the electricity grid of the future ... will look more like the Internet - distributed, interactive, open-source - than the dumb, one-way network of today. Note: For many other exciting discoveries of new energy sources, click here.

Oil industry denies price manipulation 2006-11-26, BusinessWeek/Associated Press http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8LKSUQO0.htm An Associated Press analysis suggests that big oil companies have been crimping supplies ... across the country for years. The analysis, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, indicates that the industry slacked off supplying oil and gasoline during the prolonged price boom between early 1999 an d last summer, when prices began to fall. The findings support a conclusion alre ady reached by many motorists. Fifty-five percent of Americans believe gas price s are high because [of] oil companies. Though set back temporarily by the [9/11] attacks, the oil business has profited handsomely since then. The biggest six r efiners ... rang up $400 billion in profits since 2001. Though reserves have kep t pretty steady, the oil industry taps those resources to varying degrees from y ear to year. The industry has shelved an average of 21 percent more unrefined oi l from the start of 2004 through last June. Last spring, stocks of shelved crude reached their highest level in eight years, despite the fabulous riches at hand in high prices then. The industry also protected profits by not building any ne

w refineries. [And] thanks to mergers, the top 10 companies now control three-qu arters of national refining capacity, up from half in the early 1990s. A 2001 st udy by the Federal Trade Commission reported that some firms were deciding to "m aximize their profits" by crimping supply. One executive told regulators "he wou ld rather sell less gasoline and earn a higher margin on each gallon sold." Howe ver upsetting to drivers, such tactics are usually viewed as legal. "A decision to limit supply does not violate the antitrust laws," regulators wrote in one FT C report.

The 100-mpg car is coming 2006-07-19, MSN http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/SaveonaCar/The100mpgCarIsC... Though the 100 mpg car sounds like a myth, it turns out that such vehicles do ex ist -- only they're built in your neighbor's garage, not a giant production plan t. Known as plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles ... they re basically Priuses or simi lar hybrids that have been equipped with extra batteries, so that they rarely us e their gasoline engines at all. "People are salivating for plug-ins," says Brad ley Berman, editor of the site HybridCars.com. A hybrid vehicle today like a Pri us has both a gasoline engine and a battery, which is fed by the braking energy produced by the car. It can t be plugged in. A plug-in hybrid keeps those componen ts, but essentially gets an extra fuel tank, in the form of an added battery ban k ... that allows the car to run exclusively off battery power for most driving. Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of high-efficiency, low-emission cars, owns the first consumer plug-in in North America. Not surprisingly, he loves it. "Many days I use no ga soline, because I go at neighborhood speeds for under 30 miles, and I m just all-e lectric all day," he says. And the mileage? "At highway speeds, you can easily g et over 100 mpg." Other plug-in owners offer up similar results. "I used to fill up every 400 miles or so," he says ... "and now I fill up every 800 miles or so ." Advocates estimate that it costs less than $1 per gallon to replenish a plugin hybrid. "Our goal is to have a $3,000 kit," CalCars' Kramer says. (That numbe r, coincidentally, is also what many plug-in evangelists think that the technolo gy would cost for Toyota to add to its hybrids.) Note: If people are doing this in their garage, why aren't the auto makers alrea dy producing them? In fact, a similar vehicle was produced to be marketed in 200 2, but then pulled off the market. To find why average car mileage has remained virtually unchanged for 100 years, click here.

Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Annual Profit for U.S. Company 2006-01-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/business/30cnd-exxon.html?ex=1296277200&en=... Exxon Mobil, the nation's largest energy company, today reported a 27 percent su rge in profits for the fourth quarter as elevated fuel prices gave rise to the m ost lucrative year ever for an American company. Exxon's profits are expected to generate new scrutiny of the company's operations in Washington, where legislat ors have recently expressed concern over Big Oil's good fortune as soaring oil a nd natural gas prices pressure consumers. Exxon said its profits climbed more th an 40 percent last year, while its tax bill rose only 14 percent. Exxon's revenu e last year allowed it to surpass Wal-Mart as the largest company in the United States. [The company's] revenue of $371 billion surpassed the gross domestic pro duct of $245 billion for Indonesia, an OPEC member and the world's fourth most p opulous country with 242 million people.

Note: This article fails to mention the huge profits reaped by oil companies as a result of gas price gouging immediately after Katrina.

Fossils From Animals And Plants Are Not Necessary For Crude Oil And Natural Gas, Swedish Researchers Find 2009-09-12, Science Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090910084259.htm Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have managed to prove that fossils from animals and plants are not necessary for crude oil a nd natural gas to be generated. The findings are revolutionary since this means, on the one hand, that it will be much easier to find these sources of energy an d, on the other hand, that they can be found all over the globe. Using our resear ch we can even say where oil could be found in Sweden, says Vladimir Kutcherov, a professor at the Division of Energy Technology at KTH. Together with two resear ch colleagues, Vladimir Kutcherov has simulated the process involving pressure a nd heat that occurs naturally in the inner layers of the earth, the process that generates hydrocarbon, the primary component in oil and natural gas. According to Vladimir Kutcherov, the findings are a clear indication that the oil supply i s not about to end, which researchers and experts in the field have long feared. He adds that there is no way that fossil oil, with the help of gravity or other forces, could have seeped down to a depth of 10.5 kilometers in the state of Te xas, for example, which is rich in oil deposits. As Vladimir Kutcherov sees it, this is further proof, alongside his own research findings, of the genesis of th ese energy sources that they can be created in other ways than via fossils. This has long been a matter of lively discussion among scientists. There is no doubt that our research proves that crude oil and natural gas are generated without th e involvement of fossils. All types of bedrock can serve as reservoirs of oil, sa ys Vladimir Kutcherov. Note: The research work of Kutcherov and others on this topic was recently publi shed in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience. For more reports from reliable sources on key new energy discoveries, click here.

Wauseon plant to open Monday for 110-mpg car engines 2009-05-30, Toledo Blade (Toledo, OH's leading newspaper) http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090530/BUSINESS03/905... The man who drove his 20-year-old Mustang from Napoleon, Ohio, to Las Vegas and back last year on 39 gallons of fuel will open his first manufacturing facility Monday to allow others to get 110 miles per gallon. Doug Pelmear, owner of Horse Power Sales.net Inc. and Hp2G LLC, will hold an open house ... in Wauseon to be gin manufacturing his revolutionary engine. The factory ... will be tooled to in itially turn out 20 of Mr. Pelmear's custom engines per day with one shift of 25 workers. A Decatur, Ind., specialty car company, Revenge Designs Inc., has cont racted with Mr. Pelmear to purchase 2,000 engines for use in a new vehicle it pl ans to unveil at the end of this year at the Los Angeles International Auto Show . The vehicle is to be called the Revenge Verde Super Car, which will use Mr. Pe lmear's 400-horsepower engine and its 500 foot-pounds of torque to travel up to 200 mph and get 110 mpg - though admittedly not at the same time. "The engine is going to be a really great partnership with the car," explained Emily Levault, a spokesman for Revenge Design. "The idea behind this was to give people what th ey want while putting people back in their jobs." Ms. Levault said the Verde wil l be introduced as both a left and right-hand drive, so that it can be marketed around the world. Mr. Pelmear has said that he employs more precise tolerances a nd manufacturing techniques to decrease heat and energy loss and increase the ef

ficiency of the internal combustion engine. He said he has more than quadrupled the industry average engine efficiency of about 8 percent. Note: For a treasure trove of reliable reports on breakthrough developments in a uto and new energy technologies, click here.

Electric motor polarizes opinion 2009-02-28, Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/News/Ontario/article/594471 Thane Heins ... has invented a technology that he says will put out more energy than it consumes. His invention, he boldly claims, offers a way to make electric cars that can travel hundreds of kilometres from the energy in a small, inexpen sive battery. The Star first profiled Heins and his controversial invention a ye ar ago. In a nutshell, he had figured out a way to eliminate the electromagnetic friction that typically limits the performance of an electrical generator an ef fect known as Back EMF. Not only that, but he also learned how to redirect that ma gnetic energy so that, instead of causing resistance, it gave an electrical moto r connected to the generator a significant boost. The result, as far as Heins wa s concerned, violated Lenz s law or what s often called the law of diminishing retur ns. For many, that equates to a perpetual motion machine, an impossible claim in the conventional field of physics. Within no time the story spread globally acr oss the Internet, became chatter on blogs, and triggered a flood of email to thi s reporter s inbox some praising Heins for his determination, others calling the S tar irresponsible for giving credibility to his claim. The story, love it or hat e it, was the second-most read article on TheStar.com in 2008. Much has happened over the past 12 months. Through his Ottawa-based company Potential Difference Inc., Heins has been in serious talks with a designer of small wind turbines in Montreal, a senior engineer from a large utility in Turkey, and a small manufact urer of electrical equipment in Toronto. Note: Read how an esteemed MIT professor was baffled by this invention in the or iginal Star article available here. For lots more on promising new energy invent ions and technologies from major media sources, click here.

Politicians fume as Exxon profits soar to U.S. record 2008-07-31, Houston Chronicle http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5918750.html Exxon Mobil Corp. jumped into the political fray Thursday as its $11.7 billion r ecord quarterly earnings and $8 billion in share buybacks raised hackles in Wash ington. "They tell us they want to do more domestic production," said Sen. Charl es Schumer, D-N.Y. "They tell us they need to drill offshore. They tell us that they can find oil on the mainland. And what do they do with their profits? They buy back stock, simply to increase their share price." Democrats argue that prod ucers already hold 68 million acres of federal lands on which they are not produ cing oil or gas. Irving-based Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, was the fourth major oil giant to release quarterly results. Hours earlier, Royal Du tch Shell, based in the Netherlands, announced a 33 percent increase in profit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips last week announced a 13 percent increase in net in come during a quarter in which oil prices rose from about $100 to $140 a barrel. London-based BP announced a 28 percent profit increase on Tuesday. Analysts ... focused less on Exxon Mobil's profits than on its 8 percent drop in production. The world's largest oil companies ... are benefiting from record-high oil price s. Exxon Mobil increased spending on capital and exploration projects by 38 perc ent in the quarter to $7 billion. It also spent $8 billion buying back its own s

hares and reported $39 billion in cash on hand. A Democratic analysis of the top five oil company's expenditures from 2004 through 2007 found that the majors pl owed about $181 billion into stock buybacks, nearly three times as much as they spent on U.S. production activity.

Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects 2008-06-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/us/27solar.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss... Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal gov ernment has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it st udies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years. The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to de termine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states. But the decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily ... has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry ... just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating. It doesn t make any sense, sa id Holly Gordon, vice president for ... a solar thermal energy company in Palo A lto, Calif. The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resourc es in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry. Much of the 119 million surface acres of federally administered land in the West is idea l for solar energy. Galvanized by the national demand for clean energy developme nt, solar companies have filed more than 130 proposals with the Bureau of Land M anagement since 2005. According to the bureau, the applications, which cover mor e than one million acres, are for projects that have the potential to power more than 20 million homes. Craig Cox, the executive director of the Interwest Energ y Alliance, a renewable energy trade group, said he worried that the freeze woul d throw a monkey wrench into the solar energy industry at precisely the wrong time . Note: For many encouraging stories on new energy developments, click here.

Powering the Future 2008-03-13, Newsweek Magazine http://www.newsweek.com/id/123021 Chances are you've heard of hybrids and biofuels, but what about oil-producing y east and turbinelike buoys that transform ocean waves into electricity? Those ar e just a couple of the alternative-energy sources that may power the future acco rding to Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund and coauthor, w ith Miriam Horn, of the new book Earth: The Sequel (Norton). "Everyone knows the current story of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, worsening hurricanes, dyi ng coral reefs," said Krupp. "'The Sequel' is the story of what happens next." N ewsweek's Katie Paul talked with Krupp about ... the next industrial revolution. Newsweek: You seem to be a big fan of solar energy. Why do you think there's so much promise to it? Fred Krupp: We have two chapters on solar energy at the beg inning of the book because we think there's tremendous potential there. Every ho ur, the sun provides the earth with as much energy as all of human civilization uses in an entire year. So, if you could capture just 10 percent of it on a ... 100-mile square piece of land, you could power the entire United States. With so lar thermal energy, capturing heat instead of immediately going to electricity, one advantage is that you can store hot water much more cheaply than you can sto re electricity. There is tremendous potential there, even before advanced batter ies are developed, and reason to think solar energy can compete. [Newsweek:] And besides solar? How are they addressing some of the negatives associated with bi ofuels? [Krupp:] I think we've come to understand that the current generation of

biofuels has problems and that we need a whole new generation. Note: For more exciting reports from major media sources on new energy technolog ies, click here.

Safeway's trucking fleet shifts to biodiesel 2008-01-19, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/19/BU63UHSMM.DTL Safeway grocery trucks no longer just deliver vegetables. In a sense, they now r un on vegetables, too. Safeway, the nation's third-largest grocery chain, said F riday that its entire nationwide trucking fleet now uses biodiesel, a renewable fuel that can be made from plant oils, used cooking grease or animal fat. In Saf eway's case, the biodiesel comes from soy oil or canola oil. It is blended with regular petroleum diesel before being pumped into the company's more than 1,000 trucks. The move is part of Safeway's broader effort to green its operations. Th e Pleasanton company buys much of its electricity from wind farms, has switched to energy-efficient refrigeration and lighting, and is installing solar panels o n 24 of its California stores. Biodiesel generally produces less air pollution t han diesel made from petroleum. And it helps rein in greenhouse gas emissions be cause the plants used to make it absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Safe way won't reveal how much fuel it's buying or the price it's paying. Biodiesel t ypically costs more than regular diesel. The price increased last year as some f armers switched from growing soybeans to growing corn, hoping to tap into the gr owing market for another alternative fuel - corn-based ethanol. Safeway estimate s that using the biodiesel blend will cut the company's carbon dioxide emissions by 75 million pounds each year, the equivalent of taking 7,500 cars off the roa d. Note: For a treasure trove of exciting reports of new energy technology breakthr oughs, click here.

Aptera's Super-MPG Electric Typ-1 e: Exclusive Video Test Drive 2007-12-21, Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4237853.html Three hundred miles per gallon and a Jetsons-style look are enough to get anyone excited. But ever since the word got out on it last month, Aptera s innovative Ty p-1 three-wheeler has been the target of relentless theorizing and conjecture ac ross the Web. Is it real? Does it have what it takes to be a practical vehicle f or daily transport? Is it stable enough to drive? Does it even actually drive? W ell we wondered some of those things, too, so we scouted out if a drivable proto type really exists. It does. This week we visited Aptera s headquarters in Carlsba d, Calif., and became the very first outside of the company to hit the street in the Typ-1 e. And, as you can see from the video of our 20-mile test drive above , we re impressed. Aptera has two innovative models that are almost production-rea dy at $30,000 and below: for next year, the all-electric, 120-mile-range Typ-1 e that we drove; and, by 2009, the range-extended series gasoline Typ-1 h, which Aptera says will hit 300 mpg. A more conventional third model, called Project X or perhaps Typ-2, is now in the design phase, with plans for a four-wheeled chassi s and seating up for to five passengers. For now, though, the Typ-1 will certain ly do. Check out a full gallery for the inside scoop on all the specs from the s hop and the street. Note: To watch the video of the test drive of this exciting new vehicle, click o n the article link above. For many exciting reports on new energy technologies a

nd innovative vehicle designs, click here.

Sun-powered desert race: The World Solar Challenge 2007-10-24, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/24/solar.race/index.html The [Panasonic World Solar] Challenge is the world's premier long-distance race for solar-powered vehicles, with competitors traveling 3000 kms [1,800 miles] al ong the Stuart Highway from Darwin in the far north of Australia to Adelaide in the south in cars powered solely by sunlight. In the process they ... send out a strong environmental message, pushing forward the boundaries of green technolog y and promoting the benefits of solar power as an alternative energy source. "It 's a great adventure," the race director Chris Selwood told CNN, "One that allow s the bright young people of the globe to come up with creative solutions to the problem of sustainable transport, while at the same time drawing attention to t he importance of lightening the environmental footprint of our personal transpor t needs." First run in 1987, the race was the brainchild of Danish adventurer an d environmental campaigner Hans Thostrup, who in 1982 designed and built "Quiet Achiever," the world's first ever solar-powered car. The inaugural competition f eatured 23 teams, with the winning vehicle -- the General Motors-sponsored Sunra ycer -- completing the distance at an average speed of 67 kilometers per hour (4 2 miles per hour). The average speed has shot up to 103 kph (64 mph) ... while t he competition has expanded to incorporate several different classes of vehicle: the Challenge and Adventure Classes for exclusively solar cars, and the Greenfl eet Technology Class for other types of environmentally friendly, low-emission v ehicles. Note: Cars running on nothing but solar power averaging more than 60 mph over 1, 800 miles? Why isn't this front page news? For lots more from reliable, verifiab le sources on promising new energy and auto designs, click here.

Old oil fears don't match 2007 reality 2007-07-15, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/15/INGHKQVEIO1.DTL Congress is debating action to address the nation's dependence on foreign oil. T his would seem to be good news. Not necessarily. While tightening requirements o n fuel efficiency is a good idea, many other envisioned policies aimed at "energ y independence" fix a problem that no longer exists, while moving in the wrong d irection with regard to today's actual energy challenges -- particularly those r elated to climate change. Rather than staying the course with energy priorities of the past, congressional leaders should declare independence from oil fears an d craft an energy policy relevant to the 21st century. Do you believe that the U nited States is dangerously vulnerable to oil supply disruptions? Then, ask your self: "When was the last time I saw clear evidence of this vulnerability?" If yo u're like most Americans, you'll think back to the Arab oil embargo of 1973, wit h its long gas lines and associated recession. There are three problems with usi ng 1973 as a point of reference: -- First, the long gas lines in 1973 were cause d by price controls imposed by President Richard Nixon in 1971, not embargoes of oil imposed by Arabs two years later. Without price controls, we would have had higher prices at the pump when supplies were reduced, not long lines. Unpleasan t, but not as memorable. -- Second, many studies of the era -- including a landm ark 1997 paper co-authored by current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke -- h ave found that monetary policy had more to do with the recessions of the '70s th an did oil price shocks. -- Third, 2007 is not 1973.

Here Comes the Sun 2007-03-02, CNN http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/11/01/8392039 Venture capitalists are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into [Silicon] V alley solar startups pursuing technological breakthroughs to make sun power as c heap as fossil fuel. Three of the largest tech IPOs of 2005 were for solar compa nies. The world's largest chip-equipment maker will begin producing machines to manufacture solar wafers, laying the groundwork for an industrial infrastructure that should lower the cost of producing solar cells. Solar energy has just the sort of oversize potential that the titans of tech saw in computing: a free and practically inexhaustible power source. California is also committing $3.2 billi on to fund a drive to install solar panels on a million rooftops by 2018, and a November ballot initiative ... would tax Big Oil to provide $4 billion in fundin g for alternative-energy research, programs, and startups. Perhaps no startup ha s benefited more from the solar gold rush than Nanosolar. The Palo Alto company ... has racked up more than $100 million in funding so far. Nanosolar is pursuin g a technology that produces solar cells on a film that's a 100th the thickness of conventional silicon wafers. Its ultimate goal: integrating thin-film cells d irectly into building materials. A skyscraper's glass windows, for instance, cou ld be embedded with thin-film cells, giving them energy-producing capabilities. Nanosolar plans to build a manufacturing facility next year ... that will eventu ally produce 430 megawatts' worth of solar cells per year. That would nearly tri ple the nation's manufacturing capacity and make Nanosolar one of the world's la rgest solar producers. Thanks to aggressive government subsidies, Germany and Ja pan are currently the global leaders in solar production. Note: With all of its talk about energy independence, why isn't the U.S. aggress ively supporting research into solar power like Japan and Germany? For reliable, verifiable information which answers this question, click here.

Green limo line at Oscars gets longer and sexier 2007-02-21, Washington Post/Reuters http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/21/AR20070221021... From a plug-in hybrid car to the sexy electric Tesla Roadster, celebrities wanti ng to make a green statement on the way to the red carpet of the Oscars will hav e plenty of environment-friendly rides. Global Green USA has lined up 30 cars to shuttle the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Davis Guggenheim, director of the Os car-nominated documentary on global warming "An Inconvenient Truth," to the star -studded ceremony in Hollywood. The environmental group began the green limousin e campaign five years ago at the Oscars to raise awareness among the tens of mil lions of viewers worldwide about alternative fuel cars, energy independence and solutions to global warming. On a Hollywood parking lot ahead of Wednesday's Glo bal Green USA celebrity party, Steve Schneider showed off his tiny $10,000 ZAP ( Zero Air Pollution) cars made in California. One was a mini pick-up and the othe r a three-wheeler. "It is the first time that common people can be introduced to this type of technology," said Schneider. "We are trying to have mass appeal. T his vehicle operates at a cost of a penny a mile." But it is the two-seat, scarl et-colored prototype of the Tesla Roadster, invented and financed in Silicon Val ley, that will be the coveted car pulling up to the red carpet. Already 330 cele brities, including George Clooney, have signed up to buy the electric car that g oes from 0 to 60 mph (0 to 100 kph) in four seconds. Production will begin later this year and the base price is $92,000, although the company also is working o n a sedan that will cost between $50,000 and $65,000.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. Why has the media given so little att ention to these breakthrough vehicles? For a possible answer, click here.

Pioneering U.S. renewable energy lab is neglected 2007-01-22, International Herald Tribune (Owned by New York Times) http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/22/business/lab.php Thirty years after it was founded by President Jimmy Carter, the National Renewa ble Energy Laboratory at the edge of the Rockies here still does not have a cafe teria. The hopes for this neglected lab brightened a bit just over a year ago wh en President George W. Bush made the first presidential call on the lab since Ca rter. But one year after the presidential visit, the money flowing into the prim ary national laboratory for developing renewable fuels is actually less than it was when the Bush Administration took office. "Our budget is nothing compared to the price of a B-2 bomber or an aircraft carrier," said Rob Farrington, manager of advanced vehicle systems at the lab. The problem is that, despite a lot of p romises, no one so far has wanted to pay the extra costs to make wind and solar more than a trivial energy source. Most of the money and attention is still focu sed on the dirty, but cheaper energy standbys: offshore oil, oil sands and coal. Companies can still deduct purchases of sport utility vehicles and utility bill s. Meanwhile, fuel efficiency standards for automobiles have changed only slight ly over the decades. Renewable energy today supplies only 6 percent of America's energy needs. Under current policies [renewables] would supply 7 percent of U.S . energy supplies by 2030 while coal would increase over the same period from 23 percent to 26 percent. While top energy companies are ... beginning to invest s ignificant amounts of money in wind, solar and biomass, those investments pale i n comparison with the resources they are pouring into making synthetic fuels out of oil sands, which emit significantly more carbon than conventional oil. Note: With all the talk about oil dependence and energy crisis, why wouldn't the government and industry want to put serious money into development of new energ y sources? For a startlingly clear answer, click here.

Science a la Joe Camel 2006-11-26, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR20061124007... At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every schoo l in the United States needed to see this movie. The producers of former vice pr esident Al Gore's film about global warming ... certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Sci ence Teachers Association (NSTA). It seemed like a no-brainer. In their e-mail r ejection, they expressed concern that ... they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its me mbers" in accepting the free DVDs. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is requi red viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden. But there was one more curiou s argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessa ry risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters ." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp. That's the sa me Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddl e public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers ... questioning the role of manmade emi ssions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific sk eptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is

drastically altering our atmosphere. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996. Exxon Mobil has a representative on the group's corporat e advisory board.

Fuelling debate 2006-07-10, Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... A poignant new documentary asks who killed GM's promising electric car project? A new documentary released June 28 in New York and Los Angeles, appropriately ti tled Who Killed The Electric Car? tries in Clue-like fashion to figure out why G M pulled the plug on its EV1 electric vehicle program, which by most accounts wa s approaching success when the first prototype was introduced in the mid-1990s. "It was a revolutionary, modern car, requiring no gas, no oil changes, no muffle rs, and rare brake maintenance," according to a synopsis of the film. In the 199 0s a strict clean-air mandate introduced in California that called for zero-emis sion vehicles was what led GM to introduce the EV1. Eventually that California m andate got watered down from "zero" to "low" emissions, and the automakers decid ed to literally blow up their EV programs. GM, which leased out the EV1 cars it produced, called them all back after California changed its policy. The cars wer e crushed and shredded. Who were the people leasing these vehicles? Tom Hanks, M el Gibson and Ted Danson, among others, many of whom appear in the movie and tal k favourably about their electric cars. If the implications of an advance means loss of future business to a paradigm, the key players of that paradigm will lob by to kill it. The paradigm? Big oil. Similarly, the auto industry has an intere st in perpetuating the manufacture of vehicles that require routine, costly main tenance. Note: For more information and showing times on the highly revealing Who Killed The Electric Car, visit www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com. For even deeper informa tion www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources

NASA engineer chasing dream to harness energy from ocean waves 2005-12-06, Houston Chronicle/Orlando Sentinel http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/space/3507969.html The son of [a] rocket scientist thinks he is close to perfecting...a machine tha t might make cheap, clean electricity from the ocean. "I believe it'll change th e world," said second-generation inventor Tom Woodbridge, a NASA engineer. In th eory, the idea is simple. Spinning copper wires through a stable magnetic field makes electricity lots of electrons jumping off the magnetic field and zooming t hrough a conductive metal. And since the ocean waves are already moving, why not cobble together a machine to harness that energy? Think Pogo Stick inside a flo ating drum. The rocking motion of the waves pushes a long cylinder of magnets up and down a copper coil. His small model generates 10 watts of power in a 6-inch wave chop. A full-scale version could generate 160 kilowatts. That one buoy is enough to power 160 houses, following the rule of thumb that the average U.S. ho me uses about 1,000 kilowatts of electricity each month. Note: The Houston Chronicle actually cut off part of the original article, inclu ding the last three sentences above. To read the entire article, click here. For lots more on new energy inventions, see click here.

Senate must look at tougher mileage rules

2005-09-06, Reuters http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2005-... Faced with a record-high national gasoline price of $3.07 per gallon, a senior R epublican senator said on Tuesday it was time for lawmakers to take another look at imposing stricter mileage standards on mini-vans and other vehicles. Most Re publicans and the White House oppose significantly higher mileage requirements b ecause of the potential impact on U.S. automakers and passenger safety. On Tuesd ay, the U.S. government reported that the average U.S. weekly retail gasoline pr ice rocketed to $3.07 cents per gallon, up nearly 46 cents from last week, becau se of Katrina's damage to refineries and pipelines. In June, the Senate voted to reject a Democratic amendment to the energy bill to require better mileage for new gas-guzzling sport utility and other vehicles. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin had proposed that the standards be revised to boost the fuel economy of passenger c ars to 40 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2016, and sport utility vehicles to 27.5 mpg . The proposal was defeated. Note: Why did no major media pick up on this crucial story from one of the most watched news services in the world? Why, with all of the talk about getting off of our dependence on oil, wouldn't lawmakers want our cars to get better car mil eage? For possible answers, click here.

Energy-beam weapons still missing from action 2005-08-12, MSNBC/Associated Press http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8516353 For years, the U.S. military has explored a new kind of firepower that is instan taneous, precise and virtually inexhaustible: beams of electromagnetic energy. " Directed-energy" pulses can be throttled up or down depending on the situation, much like the phasers on "Star Trek" could be set to kill or merely stun. Such w eapons are now nearing fruition. The hallmark of all directed-energy weapons is that the target -- whether a human or a mechanical object -- has no chance to av oid the shot because it moves at the speed of light. At some frequencies, it can penetrate walls. "When you're dealing with people whose full intent is to die, you can't give people a choice of whether to comply," said George Gibbs, a syste ms engineer for the Marine Expeditionary Rifle Squad Program who oversees direct ed-energy projects. "What I'm looking for is a way to shoot everybody, and they' re all OK." Among the simplest forms are inexpensive, handheld lasers that fill people's field of vision, inducing a temporary blindness to ensure they stop at a checkpoint, for example. Some of these already are used in Iraq. A separate br anch of directed-energy research involves bigger, badder beams: lasers that coul d obliterate targets tens of miles away from ships or planes. Such a strike woul d be so surgical that, as some designers put it at a recent conference here, the military could plausibly deny responsibility. The directed-energy component in the project is the Active Denial System, developed by Air Force researchers and built by Raytheon Co. It produces a millimeter-wavelength burst of energy that p enetrates 1/64 of an inch into a person's skin, agitating water molecules to pro duce heat. The sensation is certain to get people to halt whatever they are doin g.

1908 Ford Model T: 25 MPG, 2004 EPA Average All Cars: 21 MPG 2005-07-11, Detroit News/Newsweek/More http://www.WantToKnow.info/050711carmileageaveragempg "Consumers and regulators are putting more pressure on the auto industry to enha nce fuel economy, which was stagnant at an average 20.8 miles per gallon among a

ll 2004 models and below the 1988 high of 22.1 mpg." -- Detroit News, 4/11/05 "The Prius is the first significant departure from the combustion engine to make any major inroads in the auto industry since Henry Ford invented the Model T in 1908." -- Newsweek, 9/20/04 "Ford's Model T, which went 25 miles on a gallon of gasoline, was more fuel effi cient than the current Ford Explorer sport-utility vehicle -- which manages just 16 miles per gallon." -- Detroit News, 6/4/03 Genius inventors for the past 100 years have made remarkable discoveries of new, more efficient energy sources, only to find their inventions either suppressed or not given the attention and funding needed to break us free of our dependence on archaic oil-based technologies. Read this article for more reliable informat ion on this vital topic.

Tapes Show Enron Arranged Plant Shutdown 2005-02-04, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/national/04energy.html?ex=1265259600&en=172... In the midst of the California energy troubles in early 2001, when power plants were under a federal order to deliver a full output of electricity, the Enron Co rporation arranged to take a plant off-line on the same day that California was hit by rolling blackouts, according to audiotapes of company traders. The tapes and memorandums were made public by a small public utility north of Seattle that is fighting Enron over a power contract. They also showed that Enron, as early as 1998, was creating artificial energy shortages and running up prices in Canad a in advance of California's larger experiment with deregulation. The tapes prov ide new details of market manipulation during the California energy crisis that produced blackouts and billions of dollars of surcharges to homes and businesses on the West Coast in 2000 and 2001. In one January 2001 telephone tape of an En ron trader the public utility identified as Bill Williams and a Las Vegas energy official identified only as Rich, an agreement was made to shut down a power pl ant providing energy to California. The shutdown was set for an afternoon of pea k energy demand. The next day, Jan. 17, 2001, as the plant was taken out of serv ice, the State of California called a power emergency, and rolling blackouts hit up to a half-million consumers, according to daily logs of the western power gr id. Officials with the Snohomish County Public Utility District in Washington St ate, which released the tapes, said they believed Enron officials had taken simi lar measures with other power plants. This tape, they said, was proof of what wa s going on. Note: For many key reports from reliable sources on corporate corruption, click here.

Cloudborn Electric Wavelets To Encircle the Globe 1904-03-27, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50716FB355F13718DDDAE0A94DB4... To gather in the latent electricity in the clouds and with the globe itself as a medium of transmission to convey telegraphic messages, power for commercial pur poses, or even the sound of the human voice to the utmost confines of the earth is the latest dream of Nikola Tesla. The transmitting station is an octagonal to wer, pyramidal in shape, and some 187 feet in height. J. Pierpont Morgan [was] i nterested in his odd enterprise and furnished him with financial assistance. Tes

la's transmitting tower as it stands in lonely grandeur and boldly silhouetted a gainst the sky ... is a source or great satisfaction and of some mystification. No instruments have been installed as yet in the transmitter, nor has Mr. Tesla given any description of what they will be like. But in his article he announces that he will transmit from the tower an electric wave of a total maximum activi ty of ten million horse power. This, he says, will be possible with a plant of b ut 100 horse power, by the use of a magnifying transmitter of his own invention. What he expects to accomplish is summed up in the closing paragraph as follows: "When the great truth, accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed, is f ully recognized, that this planet ... is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by virtue of this fact many possibilities ... a re rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment; when the first plant is inaugurat ed and it is shown that a telegraphic message ... can be transmitted to any terr estrial distance, ... the energy of a waterfall made available for supplying lig ht, heat or motive power, anywhere ... humanity will be like an ant heap stirred up with a stick." Note: If the above link fails, click here Claimed by some to be greater than Tho mas Edison, Nikola Tesla was a brilliant inventor whose name and inventions were long suppressed after J.P. Morgan and others realized Tesla's inventions could give the public free energy, thereby taking away a major source of income for th e elite. For a PBS tribute to Tesla, click here. For lots more on this energy ge nius, click here. For more on the energy cover-up, click here.

Taking Charge Taking Charge 2009-08-08, Sydney Morning Herald (One of Australia's leading newspapers) http://www.smh.com.au/news/motoring/news/taking-charge-taking-charge/2009/08/... Once upon a time, you needed a crystal ball to see the future. Now all you need is a powerpoint. This week in Japan, Nissan unveiled the future of motoring, the production-ready, plug-in, electric family car. Called the Leaf, this spacious five-door hatch promises to usher in a new paradigm of motoring. Its name was ch osen to indicate clean air, or, as the company said, because it "purifies air by taking emissions out of the driving experience." It's not a far-off dream of en gineers, either. The Leaf will be on the roads in Japan and the US next year. An d Nissan has two more EVs (electric vehicles) that are "imminent," as one senior company executive [said]. Simple in concept yet sophisticated in its execution, the car plugs into regular powerpoints to charge its onboard batteries. Unlike hybrids such as Toyota's Prius, Honda's Insight and the forthcoming Holden Volt, the Leaf doesn't require any petrol. It's 100 per cent electric. So far, Nissan , in its alliance with Renault (the two companies share the one chief executive but have separate boards), has signed understandings or agreements with 27 gover nments around the world to bring in electric cars. For consumers, though, the bi ggest hurdle will be its price. Rival Mitsubishi has its first all-electric car, the iMiEV, on the cusp of entering Japanese showrooms but, contrary to its dimi nutive size, it carries a big price tag there -- nearly $60,000 [Australian]. Bu t Nissan is working on the financing details of the Leaf so it costs less to own and run than a comparable petrol car. It's Nissan's EV strategy to take the tec hnology to the masses. Note: For more reports from reliable sources on exciting new automotive technolo gy and energy developments, click here.

China Vies to Be World s Leader in Electric Cars 2009-04-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/business/global/02electric.html?partner=rss...

Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and m aking it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that. The goal, which radiates from the very top of the Chinese government, suggests that Detroit s Big Three, already struggling to stay alive, will face even stiffer foreign competi tion on the next field of automotive technology than they do today. To some exte nt, China is making a virtue of a liability. It is behind the United States, Jap an and other countries when it comes to making gas-powered vehicles, but by skip ping the current technology, China hopes to get a jump on the next. The United S tates has been a laggard in alternative vehicles. G.M. s plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt is scheduled to go on sale next year, and will be assembled in Michigan usi ng rechargeable batteries imported from LG in South Korea. China s intention, in a ddition to creating a world-leading industry that will produce jobs and exports, is to reduce urban pollution and decrease its dependence on oil, which comes fr om the Mideast and travels over sea routes controlled by the United States Navy. Beyond manufacturing, subsidies of up to $8,800 are being offered to taxi fleet s and local government agencies in 13 Chinese cities for each hybrid or all-elec tric vehicle they purchase. China wants to raise its annual production capacity to 500,000 hybrid or all-electric cars and buses by the end of 2011, from 2,100 last year. Note: For lots more on new developments in auto and energy technologies from rel iable sources, click here.

Cooking with the power of the sun 2009-03-13, KSL-TV (Salt Lake City NBC affiliate) http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=5845295 People are looking for ways to trim budgets and cut down on energy use. There's a product heating up in Utah that does just that. It even helps a good cause. Do n't underestimate the power of cooking with the sun. LaRue Howells first bought a Global Sun Oven a year ago to be prepared for an emergency, but now she uses i t a few times a week, all-year round and shares her knowledge with members of he r church. Howells said, "I can grab the solar oven and some food and take off if I needed to, and it's wonderful to have." She baked bread for us. The temperatu re outside was in the low 40s. "We baked bread when it was 17 degrees outside," she said. "The temperature outside isn't the issue, it's the sun." To control th e heat of the oven, you adjust the angle of the oven to the sun. If you want to reduce the heat, you angle it away from the sun. One-third of the Sun Ovens sold in the U.S. are sold in Utah. Joe Crane, with Kitchen Kneads, said, "Just being prepared, self-sufficient brings a lot of peace of mind to people." Crane start ed to sell them nearly a year ago. "Temperature makes no difference," he said. " I've cooked at 5 below to 90 degrees in the summer time." All you need is sun, a nd cook times aren't much longer than with a conventional oven. As useful as we might find them, Sun Ovens are life sustaining in developing countries looking f or solutions to deforestation and energy deficiency. Domestic sales help pay for ovens in Afghanistan, Nepal and South Africa. They cost around $300. Sun Ovens [use] no electricity and [burn] no fuels, meaning no emissions. Note: For more on this fascinating development, https://www.sunoven.com. See als o http://solarcookers.org

No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Passive Houses 2008-12-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html?partner=rss&emc=r...

From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District. But these houses are part of a revolut ion in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling u nder blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace. In Bert hold Kaufmann s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in t he living room but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germa ny, Mr. Kaufmann s new passive house and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer. You don t think about temperature the house just adjusts, said Mr. Kaufmann. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents home of roughly the same size, he said. The concept of the passive house, pioneered in t his city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the [energy efficiency] challe nge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and wi ndows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that bare ly any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even fr om occupants bodies. And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percen t more to build than conventional houses. New passive houses use an ingenious ce ntral ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency. Note: For lots more on new energy technologies from reliable sources, click here .

Survey: Oil May Lose Top Rank as Cheapest Energy 2008-12-10, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=6432204 Over the next 20 years or so, oil and natural gas will lose top ranking as the w orld's most affordable energy sources, according to a survey of energy executive s. Deeper wells in more inhospitable places, both political and geological, have altered presumptions of doing business in the oil patch. Nearly three out of fo ur executives and managers surveyed last month by Deloitte LLP said oil and gas are the cheapest available energy sources for now, though only 23 percent believ e that will be the case in 25 years. The sampling revealed a growing concern abo ut the sustainability of oil and natural gas in the coming years. Future sources of fossil fuels, the cost of producing them and the price consumers will pay ar e some of the biggest uncertainties facing the industry. "Clearly, the oil and g as professionals involved in our survey are starting to think about the nation's transition to renewable energy and other alternative fuels," said Gary Adams, v ice chairman of Deloitte's oil and gas practice. Of the executives interviewed b y Deloitte, 53 percent said they think the U.S. could run out of reasonably pric ed oil within the next quarter century, and 56 percent said the world is likely to face the same scenario in the next 50 years. Three out of four said shifting away from the nation's reliance on fossil fuels for transportation needs is an a ppropriate goal for the country, yet most think the best alternative right now i s natural gas. About 30 percent said electric plug-in vehicles are the most prom ising alternative. Note: For a treasure trove of exciting reports of new developments in energy pro duction, click here.

The 10 big energy myths 2008-11-27, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/27/renewableenergy-energy

There has never been a more important time to invest in green technologies, yet many of us believe these efforts are doomed to failure. What nonsense. Myth 1: s olar power is too expensive to be of much use. In reality, today's bulky and exp ensive solar panels capture only 10% or so of the sun's energy, but rapid innova tion in the US means that the next generation of panels will be much thinner, ca pture far more of the energy in the sun's light and cost a fraction of what they do today. Myth 2: wind power is too unreliable. Actually, during some periods e arlier this year the wind provided almost 40% of Spanish power. Parts of norther n Germany generate more electricity from wind than they actually need. Northern Scotland, blessed with some of the best wind speeds in Europe, could easily gene rate 10% or even 15% of the UK's electricity needs at a cost that would comforta bly match today's fossil fuel prices. Myth 3: marine energy is a dead-end. This year we have seen the installation of the first tidal turbine to be successfully connected to the UK electricity grid in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, and the first group of large-scale wave power generators 5km off the coast of Portu gal, constructed by a Scottish company. Note: The remaining energy myths treated in this article are: Myth 4: nuclear po wer is cheaper than other low-carbon sources of electricity. Myth 5: electric ca rs are slow and ugly. Myth 6: biofuels are always destructive to the environment . Myth 7: climate change means we need more organic agriculture. Myth 8: zero ca rbon homes are the best way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from buildi ngs. Myth 9: the most efficient power stations are big. Myth 10: all proposed so lutions to climate change need to be hi-tech. For lots more on exciting new ener gy technology developments from reliable sources, click here.

Talkin' 'bout my generation 2008-09-01, Ode Magazine http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/56/talkin-bout-my-generation In the 1920s, millions of rural Americans got their energy the same way they got their butter they made it themselves. Off-grid when off-grid wasn t cool, they used some 600,000 windmills to run radios and power, maintaining sputtering lights w ith an electric current that ebbed, flowed and sometimes simply disappeared with the prairie wind. Fully 90 percent of those windmills disappeared within a gene ration, as even the most isolated farmers eagerly plugged in to the new centrali zed power system. But today the same technologies that help iPod-bedecked colleg e students steal music are reviving the model of microgeneration clean, decentrali zed power that people make themselves by linking homes into a vast network that ke eps buzzing even when the wind stops blowing. Microgeneration, meet the YouTube g eneration. We re talking about a new meaning of power to the people, raves Jeremy Rifk in, alternative energy activist and adviser to the European Union and many Europ ean governments. Forget about wind farms and solar plants run by conventional ut ility companies, he says. In the new energy regime, the people are the utilities and their houses are the power plants. The cornerstone of this new grid is buildi ngs that produce, rather than just consume, energy. These homes and office build ings convert wind, solar and biomass into electricity, which they use, store for later as hydrogen and upload onto the grid. Note: This inspiring article comes from what may be the most inspiring news sour ce in our world today, Ode Magazine. For more on this excellent magazine "for in telligent optimists," see http://www.odemagazine.com.

Aiming to put fuel cells to work 2008-03-31, Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/03/31/aiming_to_put_f... A powerful winter storm swept across northeastern Ohio in early January, knockin g out power for nearly 60,000 customers. But in an isolated one-story building, tucked among the trees and fields of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the lights s tayed on. So did the computers. The power source: two fuel cells, each about the size of a refrigerator. "It worked seamlessly," said Tom Toledo, maintenance op erations supervisor at the park. "We didn't even realize there was a power outag e." The performance of these fuel cells, a demonstration project for fuel cell m aker Acumentrics Corp. of Westwood, is an example of a technology whose time may be approaching. Unlike traditional technologies, which burn fuels like oil, coa l, and natural gas to make power, fuel cells rely on chemical reactions to produ ce electricity and heat. Fuel cells are most frequently imagined as an advanced engine for automobiles. But as Acumentrics' success in Ohio demonstrates, on-sit e generation represents another application, one that specialists say will make it to market long before fuel cells replace the internal combustion engine. Acum entrics, in fact, is moving toward commercial production of a compact fuel cell system to power and heat homes. Working with the Italian heating products compan y Merloni TermoSanitari, Acumentrics hopes to get these household units, small e nough to hang on a wall, into European markets by 2010. Estimated price: $5,200. "This is a new way of making electricity," said Gary Simon, Acumentrics chief e xecutive. "It's like going from vacuum tubes to microchips." Acumentrics is one of about 40 Massachusetts firms developing fuel cell technology that someday may power everything from military outposts to cellphones. Note: For many exciting reports of new energy inventions, click here.

Energy Traders Avoid Scrutiny 2007-10-21, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/20/AR20071020012... One year ago, a 32-year-old trader at a giant hedge fund named Amaranth held hug e sway over the price the country paid for natural gas. Trading on unregulated c ommodity exchanges, he made risky bets that led to the fund's collapse -- and, a ccording to a congressional investigation, higher gas bills for homeowners. But as another winter approaches, lawmakers and federal regulators have yet to set u p a system to prevent another big fund from cornering a vital commodity market. Called by some insiders the Wild West of Wall Street, commodity trading is a wor ld where many goods that are key to national security or public consumption, suc h as oil, pork bellies or uranium, are traded with almost no oversight. Part of the problem is that the regulator, the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commiss ion, has had a hard time keeping up with the sector it oversees. Commodity tradi ng has exploded in complexity and popularity, growing six-fold in trading volume since 2000 -- the year that a handful of giant energy companies, including Enro n, successfully lobbied to get Congress to exempt energy markets from government regulation. Meanwhile CFTC's staffing has dropped to its lowest level in the ag ency's 33-year history. Its computer systems that monitor trades are outdated. I ts leadership has seen frequent turnover. "We are facing flat budgets and expone ntial growth in the industry," said CFTC Acting Chairman Walter Lukken. "Over th e long term this type of budgetary situation is not sustainable." Commodities ma rkets also have become complex with many trading futures contracts as well as fi nancial tools called derivatives and swaps, whose value is based on the risk of futures contracts. Gathering data on these products has been a challenge for the CFTC. The evolution of the markets has led to some tension between the CFTC and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Note: For more revealing major media reports of unregulated financial corruption and its impact, click here.

Possible Energy Source: Burning Seawater 2007-09-10, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/10/tech/main3246430.shtml An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science disco very in a century. John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to t reat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the rad io frequencies it would burn. The discovery has scientists excited by the prospe ct of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel. Rustum R oy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State Colleg e lab to confirm his own observations. The radio frequencies act to weaken the b onds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy s aid. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the freque ncies, he said. The discovery is "the most remarkable in water science in 100 ye ars," Roy said. "This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywher e," Roy said. "Seeing it burn gives me the chills." Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding. The scientists want to find out whether the energy out put from the burning hydrogen - which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit - would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery. "We will g et our ideas together and check this out and see where it leads," Roy said. "The potential is huge." Note: For an exciting survey of major media reports of new energy inventions, cl ick here.

Green-tech startup says battery's time has passed 2007-09-04, Associated Press http://www.dailybreeze.com/business/articles/9556542.html Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Pa tent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the fili ng that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine. An Austin -based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electroch emical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and d rive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline. By contras t, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their c ars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 50 miles of gasoline-free commut e. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuel s. "It's a paradigm shift," said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor's invention. "The Achilles' heel to th e electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary." Clifford's company bought rights to EE Stor's technology in August 2005 and expects EEStor to start shipping the batter y replacement later this year for use in ZENN Motor's short-range, low-speed veh icles. The technology could also help invigorate the renewable-energy sector by providing efficient, lightning-fast storage for solar power, or, on a small scal e, a flash-charge for cell phones and laptops. EEStor's secret ingredient is a m aterial sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series o f foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles st ick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor's proprietary material. T he result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases e nergy quickly.

Note: For many exciting articles about new, efficient and clean energy invention s, click here.

The Greenest Green Fuel 2007-07-01, Popular Science magazine http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/ee6d4d4329703110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd... Algae seems a strange contender for the mantle of World s Next Great Fuel, but the green goop has several qualities in its favor. Algae, made up of simple aquatic organisms that capture light energy through photosynthesis, produces vegetable oil. Vegetable oil, in turn, can be transformed into biodiesel, which can be use d to power just about any diesel engine. Algae has some important advantages ove r other oil-producing crops, like canola and soybeans. It can be grown in almost any enclosed space, it multiplies like gangbusters, and it requires very few in puts to flourish mainly just sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. Because algae has a high surface-area-to-volume ratio, it can absorb nutrients very quickly, [Jim] Sears says. Its small size is what makes it mighty. The proof is in the numbers. A bout 140 billion gallons of biodiesel would be needed every year to replace all petroleum-based transportation fuel in the U.S. It would take nearly three billi on acres of fertile land to produce that amount with soybeans, and more than one billion acres to produce it with canola. Unfortunately, there are only 434 mill ion acres of cropland in the entire country, and we probably want to reserve som e of that to grow food. But because of its ability to propagate almost virally i n a small space, algae could do the job in just 95 million acres of land. What s m ore, it doesn t need fertile soil to thrive. It grows in ponds, bags or tanks that can be just as easily set up in the desert or next to a carbon-dioxide-spewing po wer plant as in the country s breadbasket. Sears claims that these efficiencies will allow Solix Biofuels, the company he founded, to create algae-based biodiesel t hat costs about the same as gasoline. Note: For many other innovative ideas to develop cheap, renewable energy sources , click here.

Water into fuel? 2007-05-22, WKYC (NBC affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio) http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=68227 Retired TV station owner and broadcast engineer, John Kanzius, wasn't looking fo r an answer to the energy crisis. He was looking for a cure for cancer. Four yea rs ago, inspiration struck in the middle of the night. Kanzius decided to try us ing radio waves to kill the cancer cells. His wife Marianne heard the noise and found her husband inventing a radio frequency generator with her pie pans. "I go t up immediately, and thought he had lost it." Here are the basics of John's ide a: Radio-waves will heat certain metals. Tiny bits of certain metal are injected into a cancer patient. Those nano-particals are attracted to the abnormalities of the cancer cells and ignore the healthy cells. The patient is then exposed to radio waves and only the bad cells heat up and die. But John also came across y et another extrordinary breakthrough. His machine could actually make saltwater burn. John Kanzius discovered that his radio frequency generator could release t he oxygen and hydrogen from saltwater and create an incredibly intense flame. "I f that was in a car cylinder you could see the amount of fire that would be in t he cylinder." The APV Company Laboratory in Akron has checked out John's ... inv ention. They were amazed. "That could be a steam engine, a steam turbine. That c ould be a car engine if you wanted it to be." Imagine the possibilities. Saltwat er as the ultimate clean fuel. A happy byproduct of one man searching for the cu

re for cancer. Note: Though this exciting breakthrough was reported in dozens of local media, n ot one major news outlet found it worthy of mention. To verify this yourself, cl ick here.

Electricity from the sea 2007-03-10, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wave11mar11,0,2922563.story Off the western coast of Scotland, on the Isle of Islay, science teacher Ray Hus thwaite turns on the light in his classroom. The electricity comes from a power cable that runs to the mainland. But it also comes from the ocean. A few miles f rom the school, wave action compresses and decompresses air in a chamber. The mo ving air powers a turbine, which generates electricity. "It is pleasant ... to s it beside the gray, concrete structure and listen to the rising and falling of t he waves, driving air through the turbines like the breath of a great sea monste r," Husthwaite said. "It seems insane to me to be investing in nuclear power sta tions and gas turbines when there are endless, free energy resources in the rive rs, oceans and the wind." Ocean power gradually is joining the ranks of wind and solar power as a source of renewable energy. Islay's wave-power converter, the Limpet 500, has been operating since 2000. In Hawaii, the Navy has been churning up electrons with the help of a floating buoy. And in Portugal, engineers are i nstalling snakelike tubes designed to convert the sea's motion into electricity. Some designs, like the Limpet, use waves to push air through a column. Others c onvert the sea's up-and-down motion into mechanical energy. One wave-power compa ny executive told a congressional committee last year that several hundred squar e miles off the California coast could supply the electrical needs of all of the homes in the state. Note: To learn about an abundance of other new energy technologies which could r eplace oil, click here.

2 Ex-Enron Traders Get Probation 2007-02-14, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/14/business/main2479660.shtml Two of three former Enron Corp. traders accused of driving up energy prices duri ng California's power crisis were each sentenced Wednesday to two years of court -supervised release in federal court. Timothy Belden ... was sentenced after ple ading guilty in October 2002 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Be lden's plea was the first prosecution of anyone related to the West's energy cri sis in 2000 and 2001. He had faced up to five years in prison, and must forfeit $2.1 million. The second defendant, Jeffrey Richter, was a lower-level trading m anager ... who also pleaded guilty to two counts related to manipulating energy prices. He had faced up to five years and agreed to pay a $410,000 fine. Interna l company memos describe how Belden's trading unit took power out of California at a time of rolling blackouts and shortages and sold it out of state to elude p rice caps. Enron bought California power at cheap, capped prices, routed it outs ide the state, then sold it back into California at vastly inflated prices. The crisis played a role in Pacific Gas & Electric Co.'s bankruptcy and will leave C alifornia consumers paying abnormally high electricity prices for years. Transcr ipts of Enron energy traders showed them openly discussing manipulating Californ ia's power market during profanity-laced telephone conversations in which they m errily gloated about ripping off those poor grandmothers during the energy crunch. On the calls, other traders openly and gleefully discussed creating congestion

on transmission lines and taking generating units off-line to pump up electricit y prices. Note: So while California taxpayers cough up hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of Enron's scheming and thousands of employees across the U.S. lost the ir entire pensions, the result of the first prosecution of anyone related to the Enron scam is probation? For lots more on this, click here.

Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head 2005-11-04, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.html It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs vi rtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical eng ineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a protot ype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fu el. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills s ays that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in inves tment lined up to bring the idea to market. What has much of the physics world u p in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the s implest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts o f energy. According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mech anics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent vali dation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran i nto this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. Note: Hundreds of respected scientists, including a genius friend of ours with 1 2 patents to his name, have developed devices which produce energy for a very lo w price, only to have their inventions either bought and shelved or destroyed sy stematically by those with vested interests. Our friend's $7 million company was taken over by vested oil interests after first both his home and office were ra nsacked and than a bullet-hole was put through his office window. For lots more on this, see our New Energy Information Center.

Solar Challenge Finishes in Calgary 2005-07-28, Detroit News/CBS/Open Source Energy Network http://pesn.com/2005/07/28/9600141_Solar_Challenge_results/ U of Michigan takes prize, finishing the 2500-mile course in 54 hours. Fourteen of the twenty entrants completed the race. The last to cross the finish line (Ka nsas State U) came in 12.5 hours after the winner. The ten-day solar car race fr om Austin to Calgary came to a successful finish yesterday. The University of Mi chigan's Momentum placed first, completing a few seconds under 54 hours. They al so set a record by averaging 46.2 mph in this, the world's longest solar car rac e. The University of Minnesota's Borealis III came in second, trailing by 12 min utes. MIT's Tesseract came in third. Canada's leading team, the University of Wa terloo, came in fifth with their Midnight Sun. Fourteen cars went all the way to the finish line, with the last to cross being Kansas State University's Paragon on its maiden race, at 87.5 hours, a little over 12 hours after the winner. Note: A solar powered car averaged 46.2 mph in over a 2,500 mile course! Why isn 't this making mainstream news headlines? I invite you to do a Google news searc h on "Solar Challenge" (the annual solar car race). You will find that almost no

major media cover this event at all. The few who do somehow fail to mention any thing about the speeds attained by these cars. Why is the media not covering the se incredible breakthroughs?

Israelis unleash Scream at protest 2005-06-06, Toronto Star (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.torstarreports.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout... The knees buckle, the brain aches, the stomach turns. And suddenly, nobody feels like protesting anymore. Witnesses describe a minute-long blast of sound emanat ing from a white Israeli military vehicle. Within seconds, protestors began fall ing to their knees, unable to maintain their balance. An Israeli military source , speaking on the customary condition of anonymity, confirmed the existence of t he Scream. "The intention is to disperse crowds with sound pulses that create na usea and dizziness," the Israel Defence Force spokesperson told the Toronto Star . The IDF is saying little about the science behind the Scream, citing classifie d information. But the technology is believed to be similar to the LRAD Long-Ran ge Acoustic Device used by U.S. forces in Iraq as a means of crowd control. Hill el Pratt, a professor of neurobiology ... likens the effect of such technologies to simulated seasickness. "It doesn't necessarily have to be a loud sound. The combination of low frequencies at high intensities, for example, can create disc repancies in the inputs to the brain," said Pratt. Arik Asherman, a leader of Ra bbis For Human Rights, was cautiously optimistic the Scream could make a positiv e difference. But Asherman said Israeli officials would be wise to use the Screa m sparingly. "We need to remind ourselves the problem is not the demonstrations, but what the demonstrations are about," he said. "If this makes it any more dif ficult for Palestinians to express themselves in a non-violent way, that is prob lematic. The best way to disperse demonstrations is to deal with the actual issu es. Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Obsession: Mr. Singh's Search for the Holy Grail 2004-10-01, Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/popsci/futurecar/19b09aa138b84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrc... [Somender Singh] claims that his invention makes an engine cleaner, quieter and colder...while using up to 20 percent less gas. So far, all Singh s invention has earned him is a few polite rejection letters from presidents, professors and aut o manufacturers. I am...no man with letters after his name or fancy institutions, and what I have invented is really very simple, he admits. Remember that the int ernal combustion engine is itself hardly rocket science. The internal combustion engine (ICE) has been with us for about 200 years. The basic concept the boom tha t turns a crank has not really changed at all. The efficiency of that bang had sta lled out at around 28 percent. The vast majority of the fuel was dissipated as e ngine heat or exhaust. Singh knew that...the combustion chamber [was where] fuel was turned to bang. He modified a motorcycle, then a two-stroke, then a four-st roke, then a car, then 50 cars. Singh applied for a patent in January 1999, and the U.S. Patent Office issued him No. 6237579 in May 2001. Finally he was allowe d to bring his engines and hook them to a Benz EC-70 dynamometer with a five-gas analyzer and a Benz gravimetric fuel-measuring device. At between 2,000 and 2,8 00 rpm, Singh s modified engine used between 10 and 42 percent less fuel than its unmodified twin, with no appreciable losses in torque or power. Note: After posting a message on a group of high-school students who achieved dr amatic improvements in car engine efficiency two weeks ago, we received emails f

rom more than ten people claiming to have made or know of similar inventions. Th e above article was sent as evidence in one case. Dozens of other cases that cou ld be real. For Mr. Singh's website, see http://www.somender-singh.com. For lots more, click here.

Schwarzenegger electricity plan fuels fears of another debacle 2003-10-11, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/11/MN20927.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/11/MN20927.DTL Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing a push to deregulate the state's e lectricity markets -- a move embraced by business leaders and some energy analys ts but criticized by many Democrats and consumer advocates as a return to the fa iled policies that sparked California's energy crisis. "Deregulation has already cost the state $50 billion, give or take," said Mike Florio, senior attorney fo r The Utility Reform Network. "Why on earth anyone would want to do that again i s mystifying to us." Florio also said he was suspicious of Schwarzenegger's idea because former Enron Corp. Chairman and CEO Ken Lay met with the actor and othe rs in the spring of 2001, when Lay was pushing deregulation in California. Schwa rzenegger has said he doesn't remember details of the meeting. Note: What was Schwarzenegger doing meeting with the CEO of Enron well over two years before the recall vote which gave him the governorship of California? Coul d it be big business had plans for him?

Take water and potash, add electricity and get - a mystery 2003-05-18, Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/05/18/ncell18.xml&s... British researchers believe that they have made a groundbreaking scientific disc overy after apparently managing to "create" energy from hydrogen atoms. In resul ts independently verified at Bristol University, a team from Gardner Watts - an environmental technology company - show a "thermal energy cell" which appears to produce hundreds of times more energy than that put into it. If the findings ar e correct and can be reproduced on a commercial scale, the thermal energy cell c ould become a feature of every home, heating water for a fraction of the cost an d cutting fuel bills by at least 90 per cent. The makers of the cell, which pass es an electric current through a liquid between two electrodes, admit that they cannot explain precisely how the invention works. "What we are saying is that th e device seems to tap into another, previously unrecognised source of energy." T he cell is the product of research into the fundamental properties of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. Hydrogen can exist in a so-called metas table state that harbours a potential source of extra energy. [Quantum] theory s uggests that if electricity were passed into a mixture of water and a chemical c atalyst, the extra energy would be released in the form of heat. After some expe rimentation, the team found that a small amount of electricity passed through a mixture of water and potassium carbonate - potash - released an astonishing amou nt of energy. "It generates a lot of heat in a very small volume," said Christop her Eccles, the chief scientist at Gardner Watts. The findings of the Gardner Wa tts team were tested by Dr Jason Riley of Bristol University, who found energy g ains of between three and 26 times what had been put in. Note: For an abundance of reliable reports on amazing new energy developments, c lick here.

A lesson for Detroit - Tata Nano 2009-03-31, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/30/EDTK16PF19.DTL Don't dismiss the Nano as a small, poor man's car that will cause a mere ripple on the world market. The Nano is a radical innovation, with the potential to rev olutionize automobile manufacturing and distribution. The tiny Nano incorporates three innovations, which together make it huge. First, the Nano uses a modular design that enables a knowledgeable mechanic to assemble the car in a workshop. Thus, Tata can outsource assembly to independent workshops that can then assembl e the car on buyers' orders. This innovation not only removes costly labor from the manufacturer's side but also allows for distributed entrepreneurship on the dealer's side. Second, the low cost of the Nano comes from a combination of its no-frills design and its use of numerous lighter components, from simple door ha ndles and bulbs to the transmission and engine parts. The lighter vehicle enable s a more energy-efficient engine that gets 67 miles to the gallon. Third, at jus t 122 inches long, the Nano is one of the shortest four-passenger cars on the ma rket, yet it allows for ample interior space. These innovations have enabled Tat a to introduce the Nano at a base price of $2,000. The low price has triggered w orldwide interest in the car and a surge of orders, even in a struggling auto ma rket. The Nano has the potential of flourishing despite the recession or softeni ng its sting because of its extraordinary low price. It's a radical innovation p recisely because it is a poor man's car. Note: For a treasure trove of inspiring developments in new energy and automotiv e technologies, click here.

Nuclear Ambitions: Amateur Scientists Get a Reaction From Fusion 2008-08-18, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121901740078248225.html In the garage of his house, Frank Sanns spends nights tinkering with one of his prized possessions: a working nuclear-fusion reactor. Mr. Sanns, 51 years old, i s part of a small subculture of gearheads, amateur physicists and science-fictio n fans who are trying to build fusion reactors in their basements, backyards and home laboratories. Mr. Sanns ... believes he's on track to make fusion a viable power source. "I'm a dreamer," he says. Many of these hobbyists call themselves "fusioneers," and have formed a loosely knit community that numbers more than 1 00 world-wide. Getting into their elite "Neutron Club" requires building a table top reactor that successfully fuses hydrogen isotopes and glows like a miniature star. Only 42 have qualified; some have T-shirts that read "Fusion -- been ther e...done that." Called fusors and based on a 1960s design first developed by Phi lo T. Farnsworth, an inventor of television, the reactors are typically small st eel spheres with wires and tubes sticking out and a glass window for looking ins ide. But they won't be powering homes anytime soon -- for now, fusors use far mo re energy than they produce. But the allure is strong. A fusion power plant woul d likely be fueled by deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen that are in plentiful supply. Fusion advocates say reactors would be relatively clean, ge nerating virtually no air pollution and little long-lived radioactive waste. Tod ay's nuclear power plants, in contrast, are fission-based, meaning they split at oms and create a highly radioactive waste that can take millennia to decompose. Note: How strange that this article seems to accept table-top nuclear fusion as a fact, when mainstream science supposedly debunked this possibility two decades ago. For lots more on infinite energy posibilities, click here.

U.S. Advised Iraqi Ministry on Oil Deals 2008-06-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/world/middleeast/30contract.html?partner=rs... A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an inte gral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major We stern oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American offi cials say. The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts announcement, is th e first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals t o open Iraq s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism. In t heir role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said . At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with som e of the world s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rar e prize to the industry. The contracts are expected to be awarded Monday to Exxo n Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, as well as to several smaller oil compani es. The deals have been criticized by opponents of the Iraq war, who accuse the Bush administration of working behind the scenes to ensure Western access to Ira qi oil fields even as most other oil-exporting countries have been sharply limit ing the roles of international oil companies in development. Though enriched by high prices, the companies are starved for new oil fields. American military off icials say the pipelines [in Iraq] now have excess capacity, waiting for output to increase at the fields. Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the real reasons behin d the war in Iraq, click here.

5 electric cars you can buy now 2008-06-08, CNN Money http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/autos/0806/gallery.electric_cars_now/inde... The Tesla Roadster, which recently entered production, is probably the best know n electric car in America. The company's president has called it "the only produ ction electric car for sale in the United States." There are several other elect ric car companies that would differ with him on that point, but those other vehi cles are either limited to speeds below 25 miles per hour or have fewer than fou r wheels, making their status as "cars" somewhat debatable. With a full set of w heels and a claimed top speed of 125 mph, there's no question this two-seat conv ertible is a real car. Tesla also boasts an amazing 220-mile range on a full cha rge as measured in EPA fuel economy tests. Meanwhile, the charging time claimed by Tesla is less than half that of other electric vehicles, thanks to advanced l ithium-ion batteries -- which do account for much of the car's high cost. But ev en gasoline-powered two-seat soft-tops are luxury toys, not daily drivers. Tesla promises it is working hard on a more moderately priced four-door model for dri ving's other half. The GEM car, from Chrysler's Global Electric Motorcars divisi on, is more typical of what's available to today's average consumer. It's a smal l, lightweight vehicle that can go up to 25 mph. It can go just a little faster on a downhill grade, but the electric motor automatically steps in to slow it do wn. The 25 mph top speed is a matter of law, not engineering. "Low Speed Vehicle s" (LSVs) like the GEM don't have to meet the same safety requirements as faster cars. But 25 mph is still adequate for many daily commutes and around-the-town errands. Note: For many exciting reports on new automotive and energy developments, click here.

PG+E embraces solar thermal power technology 2007-11-05, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/05/BUBTT5KM2.DTL As California utilities scramble to buy more renewable energy, Pacific Gas and E lectric Co. and a Palo Alto startup will announce plans today to build a solar p ower plant big enough to light more than 132,000 homes. Ausra Inc. will design a nd build the plant, which will be located on the Carrizo Plain of eastern San Lu is Obispo County and could begin operating as soon as 2010. San Francisco's PG&E has agreed to buy the plant's power for 20 years. Like the rest of California's big utilities, PG&E faces a state-imposed deadline to derive 20 percent of its power from certain renewable sources by the end of 2010. So the company is turni ng to solar thermal power plants, which can generate large amounts of energy on a reliable basis. In July, the company agreed to buy power from a solar plant pl anned for the Southern California desert, which will generate 553 megawatts, eno ugh for more than 414,000 homes. PG&E plans to buy 1,000 megawatts of solar ther mal energy within the next five years. "Solar works best when it's really hot, a nd that's when we need a lot of power," said Peter Darbee, the utility's chief e xecutive officer. "So solar is something we're exploring more." Solar thermal pl ants do not use the solar cells that more Californians are bolting to their roof tops. Instead, they use the sun's energy to heat liquids that turn turbines and generate power. Ausra's technology uses flat mirrors that focus sunlight on tube s carrying water, which then turns to steam. The plants can produce far more ele ctricity than silicon solar cells provide and at a far lower price. Ralph Cavana gh, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he's pleased to see the rec ent attention on solar thermal plants. "They're a very good idea for California, and they're also a really good idea for the world," said Cavanagh, director of the environmental group's energy program. "This is one of the scalable solutions that can make a big difference." Note: For more inspiring reports of new renewable energy developments, click her e.

Papers Detail Industry's Role in Cheney's Energy Report 2007-07-18, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/17/AR20070717019... At 10 a.m. on April 4, 2001, representatives of 13 environmental groups were bro ught into the Old Executive Office Building for a long-anticipated meeting. Sinc e late January, a task force headed by Vice President Cheney had been busy drawi ng up a new national energy policy, and the groups were getting their one chance to be heard. A confidential list prepared by the Bush administration shows that Cheney and his aides had already held at least 40 meetings with interest groups , most of them from energy-producing industries. By the time of the meeting with environmental groups, according to a former White House official who provided t he list to The Washington Post, the initial draft of the task force was substant ially complete and President Bush had been briefed on its progress. In all, abou t 300 groups and individuals met with staff members of the energy task force, in cluding a handful who saw Cheney himself, according to the list, which was compi led in the summer of 2001. For six years, those names have been a closely guarde d secret, thanks to a fierce legal battle waged by the White House. Some names h ave leaked out over the years, but most have remained hidden because of a 2004 S upreme Court ruling that agreed that the administration's internal deliberations ought to be shielded from outside scrutiny. The list of participants' names and when they met with administration officials provides a clearer picture of the t ask force's priorities and bolsters previous reports that the review leaned heav

ily on oil and gas companies and on trade groups -- many of them big contributor s to the Bush campaign and the Republican Party. It clears up much of the linger ing uncertainty about who was granted access to present energy policy views to C heney's staff.

Clean energy claim: Aluminum in your car tank 2007-05-23, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18700750 A Purdue University engineer and National Medal of Technology winner says he's r eady and able to start a revolution in clean energy. Professor Jerry Woodall and students have invented a way to use an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water a process that he thinks could replace gasoline as well as its pollutants and emissions tied to global warming. But Woodall says there's one big hitch: "E gos" at the U.S. Department of Energy, a key funding source for energy research, "are holding up the revolution. The hydrogen is generated on demand, so you onl y produce as much as you need when you need it," he said in a statement released by Purdue this week. So instead of having to fill up at a station, hydrogen wou ld be made inside vehicles in tanks about the same size as today's gasoline tank s. An internal reaction in those tanks would create hydrogen from water and 350 pounds worth of special pellets. The hydrogen would then power an internal combu stion engine or a fuel cell stack. "It's a simple matter to convert ordinary int ernal combustion engines to run on hydrogen," Woodall said. "All you have to do is replace the gasoline fuel injector with a hydrogen injector." "The egos of pr ogram managers at DOE are holding up the revolution," he told MSNBC.com. "Rememb er that Einstein was a patent examiner and had no funding for his 1905 miracle y ear," Woodall added. "He did it on his own time. If he had been a professor at a university in the U.S. today and put in a proposal to develop the theory of spe cial relativity it would have been summarily rejected." Note: For a treasure trove of reliable information on clean, new energy sources, click here.

The Air Car 2007-05-19, BusinessWeek http://www.businessweek.com/autos/content/mar2007/bw20070319_949435.htm Many respected engineers have been trying for years to bring a compressed air ca r to market, believing strongly that compressed air can power a viable "zero pol lution" car. Now the first commercial compressed air car is on the verge of prod uction and beginning to attract a lot of attention, and with a recently signed p artnership with Tata, India's largest automotive manufacturer, the prospects of very cost-effective mass production are now a distinct possibility. The MiniC.A. T is a simple, light urban car. How does it work? 90m3 of compressed air is stor ed in fibre tanks. The expansion of this air pushes the pistons and creates move ment. It is incredibly cost-efficient to run according to the designers, it cost s less than one Euro per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car). Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or 10 hou rs of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km. The car has a top speed of 68 mph. Refilling the car will ... take place at adapted petrol stations to administer compressed air. In two or three minutes, and at a cost of approximately [US$2] the car wil l be ready to go another 200-300 kilometres. As a viable alternative, the car ca rries a small compressor which can ... refill the tank in 3-4 hours. At the mome nt, four models have been made: a car, a taxi (5 passengers), a Pick-Up truck an d a van. The final selling price will be approximately [US$11,000]. "Moteur Deve

lopment International" (MDI) ... has researched and developed the Air Car over 1 0 years. Note: Why aren't U.S. automakers interested in this breakthrough technology? For abundance of reliable information on the exciting new developments in auto desi gn for super-efficient mileage, click here.

Physics promises wireless power 2006-11-15, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6129460.stm The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets cou ld soon be a thing of the past. US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 play ers without wires. The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres. Although the team has not built and tested a system, c omputer models and mathematics suggest it will work. "Resonance" [is] a phenomen on that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applie d. "When you have two resonant objects of the same frequency they tend to couple very strongly," Professor Soljacic [explained]. Resonance can be seen in musica l instruments. "When you play a tune on one, then another instrument with the sa me acoustic resonance will pick up that tune, it will visibly vibrate," he said. Instead of using acoustic vibrations, the team's system exploits the resonance of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic radiation includes radio waves, infrar ed and X-rays. The team from MIT is not the first group to suggest wireless ener gy transfer. Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wireless energy transfer, but his most ambitious attempt - the 29m [it was actually 187 feet] high aerial known as Wardenclyffe Tower, in New Y ork - failed when he ran out of money. A UK company called Splashpower has also designed wireless recharging pads onto which gadget lovers can directly place th eir phones and MP3 players to recharge them. Note: What the article fails to mention is that Tesla's experiments previous to the 1903 Wardenclyffe tower were quite successful, so much so that J.P. Morgan w as willing to pour huge amounts into the tower. When he learned, however, that T esla's intention was to make energy available free to the public, he pulled the plug on the project and many of Tesla's amazing inventions were buried and erase d from the history books. For verification, click here and here. For lots more o n suppressed energy inventions, click here.

E.P.A. Holds Back Report on Car Fuel Efficiency 2005-07-28, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/business/28fuel.html?ex=1280203200&en=da4fa... With Congress poised for a final vote on the energy bill, the Environmental Prot ection Agency made an 11th-hour decision Tuesday to delay the planned release of an annual report on fuel economy. But a copy of the report, embargoed for publi cation Wednesday, was sent to The New York Times by a member of the E.P.A. commu nications staff just minutes before the decision was made to delay it until next week. The contents of the report show that loopholes in American fuel economy r egulations have allowed automakers to produce cars and trucks that are significa ntly less fuel-efficient, on average, than they were in the late 1980's. The ave rage 2004 model car or truck got 20.8 miles per gallon, about 6 percent less tha n the 22.1 m.p.g. of the average new vehicle sold in the late 1980's, according to the report. Releasing the report this week would have been inopportune for th e Bush administration, its critics said, because it would have come on the eve o

f a final vote in Congress on energy legislation six years in the making. The bi ll, as it stands, largely ignores auto mileage regulations. Note: For more, see our New Energy Information Center.

The doctor many believe can cure cancer 2004-08-09, MSN of Australia http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/stories/1744.asp Over a period of 30 years, highly qualified Perth-based surgeon Dr John Holt has had some startling successes with a radio-wave therapy treatment for cancer pat ients. Dr Holt's controversial treatment works, in layperson's terms, by giving the patient an injection of a glucose-blocking agent. He then shines "radio wave s" into the body at a specific frequency. Dr Holt doesn't guarantee it will cure every cancer, but it's not expensive and there's no quackery about it. Born in Bristol 80 years ago and a member of the Royal Colleges, Dr Holt has 26 medical letters after his name. For more than a decade he was in charge of Western Austr alia's main cancer institute, until the late '70s, when he was blacklisted by hi s medical colleagues and politicians. The polarisation of the medical and scient ific community in Perth over Dr Holt's treatment has been evident since the mid'70s. While the medical community continues to argue the merits of Dr Holt's uno rthodox measures, the families of his successes feel they owe everything to this gentle man. After two brain tumours and a tumour on her spine, Sophia Rosa was sent by pre-eminent brain surgeon Dr Charlie Teo for the radical treatment. Two years later, the only sign Sophia had cancer are the side-effects from the massi ve doses of chemotherapy given in Sydney. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For more on Dr. Holt's work, click he re. For the story of Royal Rife, another famed scientist who suffered dearly for finding a cure for cancer, click here.

Ocean currents can power the world, say scientists 2008-11-29, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-current... A revolutionary device that can harness energy from slow-moving rivers and ocean currents could provide enough power for the entire world, scientists claim. The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe. Existing technologies which use water power, relying on the action of waves, tides or faster currents created by dams, are far more l imited in where they can be used, and also cause greater obstructions when they are built in rivers or the sea. Turbines and water mills need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots. The new device, which has been inspired by the way fish swim, consists of a system of cylinders positioned [horizontally] to the w ater flow and attached to springs. As water flows past, the cylinder creates vor tices, which push and pull the cylinder up and down. The mechanical energy in th e vibrations is then converted into electricity. The scientists behind the techn ology, which has been developed in research funded by the US government, say ... the technology would require up to 50 times less ocean acreage than wave power generation. The system, conceived by scientists at the University of Michigan, i s called Vivace, or "vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy". Note: For lots more on new energy technology developments, click here.

Aptera's 3-wheeler looks as if it could soar 2008-04-16, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/15/HOP1103V8S.DTL An airplane-inspired car that costs $10,000 less than a basic Volvo and gets 300 miles per gallon? Not quite yet, but San Diego robot-builder Steve Fambro may b e onto something with the Aptera ("wingless" in Greek) vehicle. Fambro was inspi red to build the vehicle when his wife deemed a kit airplane he was building was too dangerous. The vehicle pictured was designed by Jason Hill and his firm "11 " for Fambro. The three-wheeled, 1,500-pound prototype has 2 1/2 seats, and when the vehicle goes into production in October, Fambro expects that it will have a n acceleration rate of zero to 60 mph in 11 seconds (a second slower than the Pr ius) and retail for less than $30,000. The Aptera will come in two versions: an all-electric that is expected to go 120 miles on a charge and a hybrid that will have a 600-mile range on a full charge and full tank. Unlike other three-wheele d cars that are technically motorcycles (thus skirting a lot of safety criteria) , the Aptera's airplane-wide wheel base makes it stable. The fiberglass shell is reinforced with steel and aluminum, and there will be air bags in the seat belt s. What's not to like, unless, of course, you're the passenger in the half seat. Note: For a fascinating video clip of this car on a local ABC news affiliate, cl ick here. Why aren't other major media picking up this exciting story?

Berkeley going solar - city pays up front, recoups over 20 years 2007-10-26, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/26/MNAIT0DQO.DTL Berkeley [Cal.] is set to become the first city in the nation to help thousands of its residents generate solar power without having to put money up front - att empting to surmount one of the biggest hurdles for people who don't have enough cash to go green. The City Council will vote Nov. 6 on a plan for the city to fi nance the cost of solar panels for property owners who agree to pay it back with a 20-year assessment on their property. Over two decades, the taxes would be th e same or less than what property owners would save on their electric bills, off icials say. "This plan could be our most important contribution to fighting glob al warming," Mayor Tom Bates said. "We've already seen interest from all over th e U.S. People really think this plan can go." The idea is sparking interest from city and state leaders who are mindful of California's goals to reduce greenhou se gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Officials in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica and several state agencies have contacted Berkeley about the detail s of its plan. "If this works, we'd want to look at this for other cities statew ide," said Ken Alex, California deputy attorney general. "We think it's a very c reative way to eliminate the barriers to getting solar panels, and it's fantasti c that Berkeley's going ahead with this." This is how Berkeley's program would w ork: A property owner would hire a city-approved solar installer, who would dete rmine the best solar system for the property, depending on energy use. Most resi dential solar panel systems in the city cost from $15,000 to $20,000. The city w ould pay the contractor for the system and its installation ... and would add an assessment to the property owner's tax bill to pay for the system. The property owner would save money on monthly Pacific Gas & Electric bill because electrici ty generated by the solar panels would partly replace electricity delivered by t he utility. Note: For many other innovative ideas to develop cheap, renewable energy sources , click here.

Danish Island Is Energy Self-Sufficient 2007-03-08, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/08/eveningnews/main2549273.shtml It's a two-hour ferry ride to the Danish island of Samso. To visit Samso is to s ee the future. Samso is an area about 40 square miles long with a permanent popu lation of about 4,000 all of them living a green dream. Take farmer Erik Anderse n. His tractor runs on oil from rape seed, which he grows. His hot water and pow er come from his solar panels or wind turbines. There's not a fossil fuel in sig ht. "It's a very good feeling because the island is a renewable energy island," Anderson says. Ten years ago, Andersen and the people of Samso accepted a challe nge from Denmark's government: Could they run their farms; could they power thei r businesses; could they lead their lives in an entirely energy self-sufficient and carbon-neutral way? Now they have the answer. They can. "Because it's a good idea for the environment," Andersen explains. To harness the wind, of which the y have plenty, they built wind turbines. To provide heat, they burn locally grow n straw in central plants that produce super hot water and pump it through under ground pipes into peoples' homes. It's not only more efficient than running indi vidual furnaces, it's carbon neutral. The net greenhouse gas emissions from thes e plants? Zero. It's a system that just recycles itself, says Jens Peter Nielson with the Samso Energy Authority. Even after a freezing cold night, the days sho rt and cloudy, the solar-heated hot water is still hot. The Samso scheme has bec ome so successful that the island has installed a string of turbines offshore to make surplus power to sell to the mainland. Note: For further inspiring examples of developments in new energy technologies, click here.

Home Hydrogen Fueling Station 2007-01-26, CNN http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0701/gallery.8greentechs/index.html What could be greener than a hydrogen car in your driveway? Try a solar-powered hydrogen fueling station in your garage. Australian scientists have developed a prototype of such a device. It's about the size of a filing cabinet and runs on electricity generated by rooftop solar panels. The first version is expected to produce enough hydrogen to give your runabout a range of some 100 miles without emitting a molecule of planet-warming greenhouse gas. Road trips are out of the question, but it's enough juice for running errands or powering fleets of delive ry trucks. Tests of the home fueling system began early this year with commercia l trials two years off.

Nonlethal weapons touted for use on citizens 2006-09-12, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14806772/ Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on America n citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday. The object is basically public relations. Dom estic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible saf ety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne. "If we're not willing to use i t here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people i f they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy

pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices. Note: The government has been developing potentially lethal "non-lethal weapons" for decades, as evidenced by released FOIA government documents. Don't miss our excellent summary on this critical topic available at http://www.WantToKnow.inf o/mindcontrol10pg#nonlethal and the in-depth Washington Post article on psycholo gical manipulations available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/060123psyops.

UCLA Engineers Pioneer Affordable Alternative Energy Resource 2005-10-10, UCLA News/ABC News http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6518 Solar Energy Cells Made of Everyday Plastic. In research published today in Natu re Materials magazine, [several researchers] showcase their work on an innovativ e new plastic (or polymer) solar cell they hope eventually can be produced at a mere 10 percent to 20 percent of the current cost of traditional cells, making t he technology more widely available. The price for quality traditional solar mod ules typically is around three to four times more expensive than fossil fuel. In dependent tests on the UCLA solar cell already have received high marks. The nat ion's only authoritative certification organization for solar technology, the Na tional Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), located in Golden, Colo., has helped the UCLA team ensure the accuracy of their efficiency numbers. The plastic solar cell is still a few years away from being available to consumers, but the UCLA team is working diligently to get it to market. Note: Why is it that ABC was the only one of the mainstream media to pick up thi s important article, and even ABC's report appears to belittle the development a s much as it gives an optimistic outlook. And why isn't the government pouring f unding into this most worthy project?

Magnetic energy? Perhaps 2005-09-07, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/07/BUG9NEJD3L1.DTL Goldes, 73, is chief executive of a small company called Magnetic Power Inc., wh ich has spent years researching ways to, yes, generate power using magnets. With in a few months, he says, he might just have a breakthrough to report that could revolutionize where people get fuel. "All we know is that we're seeing more ene rgy output than input. Does Goldes realize what's he's saying -- that he's perha ps discovered a clean, inexhaustible energy source? "That's exactly what it appe ars to be," he answered. What Goldes believes he's done is produce power from wh at physicists call zero-point energy. In simple terms, zero-point energy results from the infinitesimal motion of molecules even when seemingly at rest. Normall y, I dismiss such pie-in-the-sky pronouncements. But Goldes isn't so easy to shr ug off. That's because he's also come up with technology called the UltraConduct or. The research was funded in part by the Department of Defense, which invested $600,000 in the project. A handful of other companies worldwide are believed al so to be pursuing zero-point energy via magnetic systems. One of them, InterStel lar Technologies, is run by a former scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laborato ry in Pasadena. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, the Pent agon and at least two large aerospace companies are actively researching zero-po int energy as a means of propulsion.

Maxing Your Mileage

2005-08-16, Fox News Chicago http://www.foxchicago.com/_ezpost/data/23255.shtml Denny Klein has just patented his process of converting H2O to HHO, producing a gas that combines the atomic power of hydrogen with the chemical stability of wa ter. "It turns right back to water; in fact, you can see the H2O running off the sheet metal." Klein originally designed his water-burning engine for cutting me tal. He thought his invention could replace acetylene in welding factories. "No other gas will do this." Then one day as he drove to his laboratory, he thought of another way to burn his HHO gas. "On a 100-mile trip, we use about four ounce s of water." Klein says his prototype 1994 Ford Escort can travel exclusively on water -- though he currently has it rigged to run as a water and gasoline hybri d. "Simply speaking, our plan is to end our dependence on fossil fuels." Pete Do meneci is helping Klein take his hydrogen technology patents from a two-room off ice to consumer markets around the world. The duo is already in negotiations wit h one U.S. automaker and the U.S. government. Members of Congress recently invit ed Denny Klein to Washington to demonstrate his technology and his company is cu rrently developing a Hummer for the U.S. military that can run on both water and gasoline. So far, his water-powered engines have passed all performance safety inspections. Note: Why didn't this get major media coverage? To see the amazing three-minute Fox News report, click here. To visit the website describing this invention, cli ck here.

Nanotechnology could turn rooftops into a sea of power-generating stations 2005-07-11, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/11/BUG7IDL1AF1.DTL Both inventors and investors are betting that flexible sheets of tiny solar cell s used to harness the sun's strength will ultimately provide a cheaper, more eff icient source of energy than the current smorgasbord of alternative and fossil f uels. Nanosys and Nanosolar in Palo Alto -- along with Konarka in Lowell, Mass. -- say their research will result in thin rolls of highly efficient light-collec ting plastics spread across rooftops or built into building materials. These rol ls, the companies say, will be able to provide energy for prices as low as the e lectricity currently provided by utilities, which averages $1 per watt. The comp anies also say that the printed rolls of solar cells would be lighter, more resi lient and flexible than silicon photovoltaics. Solar energy could furnish much o f the nation's electricity if available residential and commercial rooftops were fully utilized. According to the Energy Foundation, using available rooftop spa ce could provide 710,000 megawatts across the United States, whose current elect rical capacity is 950,000 megawatts. Atluru of Draper Fisher Jurvetson [explains ] "Our view is that government can cause big problems, and it is the entrepreneu rs who will make the big changes." Current cost of solar energy, per watt: $4-$5 . Average cost of energy from traditional fossil fuel sources, per watt: $1. Est imated cost of energy from nanotech solar panels, per watt: $2. Total energy-gen erating capacity of the United States: 950,000 megawatts. Potential total roofto p solar energy capacity in the United States: 710, 000 megawatts.

'Magnetic electricity' discovered 2009-10-14, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8307804.stm Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magneti c charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones. The work is the fir

st to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice. Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to for m a "magnetic current" like electricity. The phenomenon, dubbed "magnetricity", could be used in magnetic storage or in computing. Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist over a century ago, as a perfect analogue to electric charge s. In September this year, two research groups independently reported the existe nce of monopoles - "particles" which carry an overall magnetic charge. But they exist only in the spin ice crystals. These crystals are made up of pyramids of c harged atoms, or ions, arranged in such a way that when cooled to exceptionally low temperatures, the materials show tiny, discrete packets of magnetic charge. Now one of those teams has gone on to show that these "quasi-particles" of magne tic charge can move together, forming a magnetic current just like the electric current formed by moving electrons. The team ... showed that when the spin ice w as placed in a magnetic field, the monopoles piled up on one side - just like el ectrons would pile up when placed in an electric field.

Solar Industry: No Breakthroughs Needed 2009-08-03, MIT Technology Review http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23108 The federal government is behind the times when it comes to making decisions abo ut advancing the solar industry, according to several solar-industry experts. Th is has led, they argue, to a misplaced emphasis on research into futuristic new technologies, rather than support for scaling up existing ones. That was the pre vailing opinion at a symposium last week put together by the National Academies in Washington, DC, on the topic of scaling up the solar industry. The meeting wa s attended by numerous experts from the photovoltaic industry and academia. And many complained that the emphasis on finding new technologies is misplaced. "Thi s is such a fast-moving field," said Ken Zweibel, director of the Solar Institut e at George Washington University. "To some degree, we're fighting the last war. We're answering the questions from 5, 10, 15 years ago in a world where things have really changed." Industry experts at the Washington symposium argued that n ew technologies will take decades to come to market, judging from how long comme rcialization of other solar technologies has taken. Meanwhile, says Zweibel, con ventional technologies "have made the kind of progress that we were hoping futur istic technologies could make." For example, researchers have sought to bring th e cost of solar power to under $1 per watt, and as of the first quarter of this year one company, First Solar, has done this. These cost reductions have made so lar power cheaper than the natural-gas-powered plants used to produce extra elec tricity to meet demand on hot summer days. Note: Interesting that MIT has reported this story, but none of the major media picked it up. Solar energy will very likely be cheaper than oil-generated energy in under 10 years. For more on the current state of solar, click here.

Portugal opens pioneer commercial wave power plant 2008-09-23, Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSLN48037420080923 The world's first commercial power plant converting the energy of sea waves into electricity [has] started working off Portugal's coast ... in a project that sh ould be expanded nearly 10-fold over the next few years. Three articulated steel "sea-snakes" moored to the seabed three miles off Portugal's northern coast, ea ch about the length of a nuclear submarine, generate a total of 2.25 megawatts, enough to supply 1,500 households with electricity. "It's logged into the nation al grid, which makes it the world's first commercial wave power project," said A

nthony Kennaway, a spokesman for Babcock and Brown investment firm which runs th e Agucadoura project in northern Portugal. "We hope that in 15 years wave power will be where wind is now, that is extremely competitive. Portugal could be for wave power what Denmark was for wind," Kennaway said. Renewable energy, includin g water dams, accounts for 40 percent of power consumption in Portugal. Some exp erts say wave energy could meet up to 20 percent of the country's needs in the f uture. A total of 25 semi-submerged "sea-snakes" should be installed in the next few years, boosting the ... capacity to 21 MW, Kennaway said. The machines, eac h 140 meters (yards) long and 3.5 meters in diameter, are positioned head-on tow ards the waves so that its sections move with the waves. Each joint ... contains a hydraulic pump, which pumps high-pressure liquid through motors that in their turn drive power generators. The energy is then transmitted to a substation on shore via subsea cables. Note: For lots more on new energy inventions from reliable sources, click here.

Intel gets into the wireless electricity game 2008-08-22, Scientific American http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=intel-gets-into-the-w... Are we closing in on laptops that can recharge without those annoying power cord s? Yesterday Intel, the world's largest chip manufacturer, demonstrated a form o f wireless energy transfer by lighting a 60-watt bulb from a power source three feet away, in an effect they referred to as WREL (wireless resonant energy link) . If the trick sounds familiar, that's because researchers from the Massachusett s Institute of Technology (MIT) reported the same thing last year under the moni ker WiTricity. Two years ago, MIT researcher Marin Soljacic figured out a way to transmit electricity via the magnetic field surrounding a charged loop of wire. A similar loop wired up to a light bulb or another electrical device would draw power from that magnetic field no wires attached. Soljacic and his colleagues rep orted a year later in Science they could transfer energy to a 60-watt bulb with 50 percent efficiency from six feet away and 90 percent efficiency from three fe et. Intel announced they had achieved 75 percent efficiency from two to three fe et away. An Intel researcher contacted the MIT group with some technical questio ns after the study came out, says Andre Kurs, an MIT PhD candidate and first aut hor on the Science paper. Note: Yet no mention is made of the fact that genius inventor Nikola Tesla may h ave developed wireless electricity over a century ago. Click here for informatio n on this. Some claim Tesla was largely written out of history books because he threatened the establishment with the possibility of nearly free electricity for all people. For more on this, click here.

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back 2008-06-19, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html?partner=rssuse... Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil conces sions to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power. Exxon Mobil, Shell, To tal and BP the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company along with Chevro n and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq s largest fields. The deals, expected to be anno unced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentia lly lucrative country for their operations. The no-bid contracts are unusual for

the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, i ncluding companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts [would] give the co mpanies an advantage in bidding on future contracts. There was suspicion among m any in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United Sta tes had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts s eek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to c ombat terrorism. Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the w ar and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior official s of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be ident ified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry. Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the real reasons behin d the war in Iraq, click here.

Israel backs Palo Alto man's electric car plan 2008-06-17, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/17/MN1F112F1P.DTL Shai Agassi, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, pledges that he can beat the spirali ng cost of gasoline with the world's first mass-produced electric car. In Januar y, Israel's government endorsed the Palo Alto businessman's ambitious joint vent ure between his startup company - Project Better Place - and Renault-Nissan. Aga ssi says he raised $200 million to get the $500 million dollar project, which wi ll include a network of charging and battery-exchange stations by 2010, off the ground. Project Better Place also has signed an agreement with Denmark to begin a similar operation by 2011. In Denmark, a pioneer in developing wind power, bat teries are expected to be recharged using wind-powered turbines. Agassi is banki ng on his electric-powered sedan revolutionizing life on the roads, cleaning up the environment and reducing dependence on oil. The cars are expected to have a range of up to 140 miles per charge and a top speed of 68 mph - the speed limit in Israel. Last month, he invited reporters to test-drive a prototype that looks a lot like the Renault Megane, a four-door sedan. The car is noticeably quiet a nd has no exhaust pipe, an electric socket in place of a gas cap and a dashboard gauge that measures the charge of the vehicle's 450-pound lithium-ion battery. In the United States, Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle has said she is interested in her state becoming the first to embrace the electric-car network. Mayor Gavin Newso m also has reportedly expressed interest in making San Francisco the first U.S. metropolis to place electric cars on city roads. Note: For reports of many exciting breakthroughs in energy development and autom otive design, click here.

Scientists unlock frozen natural gas 2008-04-16, Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/415215 A remote drilling rig high in the Mackenzie Delta has become the site of a break through that could one day revolutionize the world's energy supply. For the firs t time, Canadian and Japanese researchers have managed to efficiently produce a constant stream of natural gas from ice-like gas hydrates that, worldwide, dwarf all known fossil fuel deposits combined. "We were able to sustain flow," said S cott Dallimore, the Geological Survey of Canada researcher in charge of the remo te Mallik drilling program. "It worked." For a decade now, Dallimore and scienti sts from a half-dozen other countries have been returning to a site on Richards Island on the very northwestern tip of the Northwest Territories to study methan e gas hydrates. A hydrate is created when a molecule of gas in this case, methan

e or natural gas is trapped by high pressures and low temperatures inside a cage of water molecules. The result is almost but not quite ice. It's more like a dr y, white slush suffusing the sand and gravel 1,000 metres beneath the Mallik rig . Heat or unsqueeze the hydrate and gas is released. Hold a core sample to your ear and it hisses. More significant is the fact that gas hydrates concentrate 16 4 times the energy of the same amount of natural gas. And gas hydrate fields are found in abundance under the coastal waters of every continent. Calculations su ggest there's more energy in gas hydrates than in coal, oil and conventional gas combined. Last month, the Mallik team became the first to use that method to ge t a steady, consistent flow. "That went really well," said Dallimore. "We defini tely demonstrated that these hydrates are responsive enough that you can sustain flow. We were able to take conventional technologies, modify them, and produce. That's a big step forward." Note: For lots more information on new energy developments, click here.

'Eco-towns' target doubled by PM 2007-09-24, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7010888.stm Gordon Brown has promised to double the number of "eco-towns" to be built across the UK from five to ten. The prime minister told the Labour conference in Bourn emouth that a positive response to the project had encouraged him to expand it. This showed "imagination", he said, adding that eco-towns would help the governm ent meet housebuilding targets. In May, Mr Brown promised [that] communities of up to 100,000 low-carbon and carbon-neutral homes would be built. Mr Brown told the Labour conference: "For the first time in nearly half a century we will show the imagination to build new towns - eco-towns with low and zero-carbon homes. And today, because of the responses we have received, we are announcing that ins tead of just five new eco-towns we will now aim for ten - building thousands of new homes in every region of the country." This would help boost housebuilding t o 240,000 homes a year, he said. The eco-town idea was the first major policy an nouncement made by Mr Brown as he began his campaign to succeed Tony Blair as pr ime minister earlier this year. Constructed on old industrial sites, they will b e powered by locally generated energy from sustainable sources. The government s aid that, with a month to go until the deadline, there had been about 30 express ions of interest in building eco-towns from councils, developers and others.

Practical Fusion, or Just a Bubble? 2007-02-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/science/27fusion.html A few small companies and maverick university laboratories, including ... one at U.C.L.A. run by Seth Putterman, a professor of physics, are pursuing quixotic s olutions for future energy, trying to tap the power of the Sun hot nuclear fusio n in devices that fit on a tabletop. Dr. Putterman s approach is to use sound wave s, called sonofusion or bubble fusion, to expand and collapse tiny bubbles, gene rating ultrahot temperatures. At temperatures hot enough, atoms can literally fu se and release even more energy than when they split in nuclear fission, now use d in nuclear power plants and weapons. Furthermore, fusion is clean in that it d oes not produce long-lived nuclear waste. Dr. Putterman has not achieved fusion in his experiments. He and other scientists form a small but devoted cadre inter ested in turning small-scale desktop fusion into usable systems. Although succes s is far away, the principles seem sound. Achieving nuclear fusion, even in a de sktop device, is not particularly difficult. But building a fusion reactor that generates more energy than it consumes is far more challenging. Impulse Devices,

a small company in the small town of Grass Valley, Calif., is exploring the sam e sound-driven fusion as Dr. Putterman, pushing forward with venture capital fin ancing. Its president, Ross Tessien, concedes that Impulse is a high-risk invest ment, but the potential payoffs would be many. You solve the world s pollution prob lems, Mr. Tessien said. You eliminate the need for wars. You eliminate scarcity of fuel. And it happens to be a very valuable market. So from a commercial point o f view, there s every incentive. From a moral point of view, there s every incentive . And it s fun and it s exciting work. Note: To read about a wide array of revolutionary energy technologies, click her e.

Oil refiners' golden age of profits 2006-04-27, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/27/MNG52IG4LV1.DTL High crude oil prices aren't the only reason you're paying $3.15 for a gallon of regular. For America's giant gasoline refiners...this is a golden age. By Calif ornia state estimates, refinery profit margins have more than doubled in 2006, t hough that figure doesn't take into account some key expenses. Meanwhile, oil pr ices have risen by 14 percent. Oil industry critics hunting for proof of price g ouging point to refineries' expanding profit margins as evidence. Critics say th e companies deliberately closed many U.S. refineries years ago as a way to drive up their margins. The country now has 144 refineries, down from 324 in 1981. "T he refining business used to be pretty lousy, but they took very aggressive acti ons to correct that," said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at the P ublic Citizen watchdog group. "They're choosing not to build new refineries beca use it's not in their economic interest." Exact profit margins for the industry are difficult to track, because the companies involved don't reveal financial de tails. The California Energy Commission publishes a loose weekly estimate, measu ring the difference between what the state's 21 refineries pay for crude oil and what they charge for their products. Since the start of the year, that figure h as jumped 130 percent, from 30 cents for each gallon of finished gasoline to 69 cents last week. During the same time, the price refiners pay for crude oil has increased 14 percent.

The Oil Sands Of Alberta 2006-01-22, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/20/60minutes/main1225184.shtml There s an oil boom going on right now. Not in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or any of th ose places, but...in Alberta, Canada. The oilmen up there are...digging up dirt -- dirt that is saturated with oil. They re called oil sands, and if you ve never he ard of them then you re in for a big surprise because the reserves are so vast in the province of Alberta that they will help solve America s energy needs for the n ext century. Within a few years, the oil sands are likely to become more importa nt to the United States than all the oil that comes to us from Saudi Arabia. The re are 175 billion barrels of proven oil reserves here. That s second to Saudi Ara bia s 260 billion but it s only what companies can get with today s technology. The es timate of how many more barrels of oil are buried deeper underground is staggeri ng. "We know there s much, much more there. The total estimates could be two trill ion or even higher," says Clive Mather, Shell's Canada chief. "This is a very, v ery big resource." Very big? That s eight times the amount of reserves in Saudi Ar abia. Note: For those who fear oil shortages and an energy crisis, here's yet another

example of huge, untapped energy reserves. For many other, cleaner options, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergyinformation

Forecaster leaves job to pursue weather theories 2005-09-23, Idaho State Journal http://www.journalnet.com/articles/2005/09/23/news/local/news05.txt Scott Stevens is...the face of the weather at KPVI News Channel 6. The Pocatello native made his final Channel 6 forecast Thursday night, leaving a job he's hel d for nine years in order to pursue his weather theories on a full-time basis. S ince Katrina, Stevens has been in newspapers across the country. On Wednesday, S tevens was interviewed by Fox News firebrand Bill O'Reilly. Stevens said he rece ived 30 requests to do radio interviews on Thursday alone. Although the theories espoused by Stevens - scalar weapons, global dimming - are definitely on the sc ientific fringe today, there are thousands of Web sites that mention such phenom ena. "The Soviets boasted of their geoengineering capabilities; these impressive accomplishments must be taken at face value simply because we are observing wea ther events that simply have never occurred before, never!" Stevens wrote on his Web site. To learn more about Stevens and his thoughts on manipulated weather, check out his Web site at www.weatherwars.info, or go to www.journalnet.com/arti cles/2005/03/06/opinion/opinion04.txt.

Cold-war device used to cause Katrina? 2005-09-20, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2005-09-20-wacky-weatherman_x.htm An Idaho weatherman says Japan's Yakuza mafia used a Russian-made electromagneti c generator to cause Hurricane Katrina in a bid to avenge itself for the Hiroshi ma atom bomb attack. Meteorologist Scott Stevens, a nine-year veteran of KPVI-TV in Pocatello, said he was struggling to forecast weather patterns starting in 1 998 when he discovered the theory on the Internet. It's now detailed on Stevens' website, www.weatherwars.info. Stevens...says a little-known oversight in physi cal laws makes it possible to create and control storms -- especially if you're armed with the Cold War-era weapon said to have been made by the Russians in 197 6. Stevens' bosses at KPVI-TV say their employee can think and say what he wants as long as he keeps the station out of the debate and acknowledges that his vie ws are his own opinion. Bill Fouch, KPVI's general manager, said. "He's very kno wledgeable about weather, and he's very popular." Note: Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen in a 1997 news briefing stated: "Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can a lter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of ele ctromagnetic waves." To verify this quote on the U.S. Department of Defense webs ite, click here. If terrorist organizations have the capability to set off earth quakes and other major natural disasters, do you think huge military research la boratories might have some of the same capabilities? For more, click here and he re.

Freezing gas prices 2005-05-25, NBC Oklahoma City http://www.kfor.com/Global/story.asp?s=3390503 There is a man who fills up his tank once every two months. One tank of gas, lit erally, lasts him two months. He is freezing the price of gas by freezing someth

ing else. David Hutchison is a Cryogenics expert. He built this Cryo-Process him self. A few years ago he began an experiment on his hybrid Honda, freezing the e ngine components. The results were a fuel-efficiency dream. A hybrid Honda typic ally gets really great gas mileage anyway, around 50 miles to the gallon, but Da vid Hutchison's cryogenically tempered engine has been known to get close to 120 miles a gallon. Racers have picked up on David's trick of cryogenically freezin g car parts. It is now widely accepted among NASCAR and Indy-car racers. Note: Why isn't this front-page headlines with rapid development for use by us a ll?

100 MPG Car Heralded by London Times in 2002 - Where is it now? 2004-12-02, WantToKnow.info/London Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/carmileage Note: The Toyota Eco Spirit was the talk of the fuel economy car industry in 200 2. At over 100 MPG and with the lowest exhaust emissions and a very reasonable s ticker price, the Eco Spirit's debut was widely anticipated (see London Times ar ticle). Now, over two years later, what happened to it? If you do an Internet se arch, you will find that Toyota decided not to be move forward with it. Why in t hese times of soaring oil prices would they not rush this car into mass producti on?

Midwest Oil fined for selling gas too cheaply 2006-02-24, Star Tribune (Leading newspaper of Minneapolis-St. Paul) http://www.startribune.com/535/story/267143.html The Minnesota Commerce Department on Thursday announced plans to fine a gas stat ion chain $140,000 for repeatedly selling gas below the state's legal minimum pr ice. The fine against Midwest Oil of Minnesota is twice as large as any imposed on a company since 2001, when the state established a formula based on wholesale prices, fees and taxes to determine a daily floor for gas prices. The price law was intended to prevent large oil companies from driving smaller competitors ou t of business, but some critics argue it fails to protect consumers. According t o the Commerce Department, the Midwest-owned stations in Anoka, Oakdale and Albe rt Lea sold gas below the minimum price on 293 days in 2005. Kevin Murphy, deput y commissioner of the department, called the violations "willful, continuing, an d egregious and warrant a substantial penalty."

Zenn and the art of small, electric vehicles 2008-08-15, MSNBC/Forbes Autos http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26140663 It might sound surprising, but all-electric vehicles are already on American roa ds. They just haven't quite made it to the highway yet. A growing cottage indust ry of Neighborhood Electric Vehicle [NEV] manufacturers is spurring the developm ent of cars like the Zenn, which has reached a state of vehicular enlightenment so advanced it doesn't even need a tail pipe. "We saw this car in May of '06, an d all of us were just freaking out: 'Finally, a car!'" said Steve Mayeda, sales manager at Seattle-based MC Electric Vehicles, which sells 30 percent of Zenn's U.S. inventory, in addition to electric vehicles made by Columbia, Canadian EV, E-Ride and Miles. "Zenn was the first neighborhood electric car that actually lo oked and felt and drove like a real car. Everything else before that was either a converted golf cart or a car that was built from the ground up." NEVs are sile

nt, have no tailpipe emissions (or tailpipes, for that matter) and plug into ele ctrical outlets like vacuum cleaners. They come in two varieties: Low-Speed Elec tric Vehicles, which have a top speed of about 25 miles per hour and are restric ted to roads where the speed limit is 35 miles per hour or less; and Medium-Spee d Electric Vehicles, which reach 35 mph and are allowed on roads with a posted s peed of up to 45 mph. They're exempt from federal safety regulations that mandat e impact-absorbing bumpers and airbags. But to be street legal, NEVs must have t hree-point seat belts, windshields with wipers, headlights, brake lights, rearvi ew mirrors and turn signals. Note: Note: For a fun, six-minute video demonstration of the Zenn, click here.

Dealer ... says tactics used by Shell are unfair to operators 2007-05-10, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/05/10/MNGUKPOGKJ1.DTL At Bob Oyster's Shell station ... putting the price way up over $4 a gallon isn' t about making a profit. It's about making a statement to a multinational corpor ation. After Shell forced him to pay higher prices for gas in San Francisco and jacked up his rent, Oyster says, he decided to fight back. Far from making a hug e profit, Oyster is going out of business. He has operated the Shell station at Sixth and Harrison for 22 years, but he's walking away from it at the end of the month. "I'm getting nothing for the station,'' he says. At a time when the oil companies are posting record profits, the little guys are struggling to stay in business. And many, like Oyster, are giving up the fight. "The dealer can no lon ger be competitive,'' says Dennis DeCota, executive director of the California S ervice Station and Automotive Repair Association. "The companies are squeezing t hese guys out. It's just wrong.'' Oyster says his rent has gone up exponentially . Fifteen years ago it was $1,000 a month. Then it went to $6,000, then $8,000. This year Shell came back with a demand of $13,000. DeCota and Oyster see [a] si nister motive: If the dealers like them leave, a company like Shell can run its stations with its own employees and set its own pump prices. "That way they real ly are controlling it from the well head to the gas pump,'' says DeCota. While t he price per gallon gets all the attention, Oyster says the little secret of ind ependent dealers is that, like movie theater operators, they make their profit o n the extras -- snacks, drinks and other items. Note: When the big oil boys supposedly believe in the "trickle down" theory, why are they not sharing any of their huge profits with their dealers? And why is t here so little reporting on the arbitrary raising of gas prices?

Fastest Train in the World Hits France 2007-04-03, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3004116 France's famous high-speed train, the TGV, broke its 17-year-old world speed rec ord today when it hit a top speed of 357.2 mph. Another French train held the pr evious rail train record, set in 1990, of 320.2 mph. Normal TGV trains have a cr uising speed of 186 mph. Japan holds the absolute speed record for a train, with its magnetically levitated Maglev train that floats over a guideway on a magnet ic field without ever touching the track. The Maglev set a record of 361 mph in 2003. Note: A CNN report states that the fastest train in the U.S. is the Acela, with a top speed of 150 mph. The same report notes "the top speed for most passenger trains outside the Northeast Corridor ... is 79 mph." Another CNN article commen

ts "Japan's Shinkansen trains, introduced just before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, r egularly hit 186 mph." Why are American trains so backward compared to the rest of the world? Could it have anything to do with oil? For more, click here.

Exxon Mobil Posts New Record for Profit 2005-10-27, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=1255549 Exxon Mobil Corp. had a quarter for the record books. The world's largest public ly traded oil company said Thursday high oil and natural-gas prices helped its t hird-quarter profit surge almost 75 percent to $9.92 billion, the largest quarte rly profit for a U.S. company ever, and it was the first to ring up more than $1 00 billion in quarterly sales. The hurricanes slashed Exxon Mobil's U.S. product ion volumes by 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, down nearly 5 percent y ear-over-year, costing the company $45 million before taxes. The company said to tal daily production slipped to 2.45 million barrels of oil equivalent from 2.51 million barrels. Note: Isn't it amazing that though oil production fell, and though we all are pa ying much higher gas prices, Exxon Mobil earned the largest profits ever in the same quarter as Hurricane Katrina? Wouldn't it be nice if during a national cata strophe the oil companies were willing to drop their prices and suffer a little with the rest of us?

Can the Military Find the Answer to Alternative Energy? 2009-07-23, BusinessWeek magazine http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_31/b4141032537895.htm The big drive to create a viable alternative-energy future by Detroit, multinati onals such as IBM and BP, and Silicon Valley startups is well-known. But there's another serious player in this sphere: the U.S. military, and especially DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. Created at the height of the Co ld War to bolster U.S. military technology following the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite launch, the agency has a long history of innovation. Most famously, DA RPA's researchers first linked together computers at four locations in the early 1960s to form the ARPANET, a computer network for researchers that was the core of what eventually grew into the Internet. Other breakthroughs have helped lead to the commercial development of semiconductors, GPS, and UNIX, the widely used computer operating system. Can DARPA now score another double success by changi ng how both the military and civilian worlds consume and produce energy? DARPA's first goal is always to magnify the might of the U.S. armed forces. That's why Arlington (Va.)-based DARPA is devoting an estimated $100 million of its $3 bill ion annual budget to alternative energy. DARPA describes itself as an incubator of long-shot technologies too risky for almost anyone else to take on. The agenc y operates by issuing challenges to companies that are so tough they are called "DARPA-hard." Typically, DARPA requires contractors to come up with solutions th at are orders of magnitude superior to current technology. In addition to spurri ng the development of palm-size fuel cells, DARPA has contracted with companies to miniaturize solar cells that would supplant the need for generators.

Bid to classify cloud formation 2009-06-02, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/8077787.stm

A cloudspotter from Somerset believes he has identified a new type of cloud. Gav in Pretor-Pinney, from Somerton, who also founded the Cloud Appreciation Society , wants recognition for what he has named the asperatus cloud. He said: "It look s quite violent - as if you are looking up from underneath the turbulent surface of the sea." Weather forecaster Michael Fish told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he thinks it is caused by a mixing of two air masses or the bottom of a storm c loud. Mr Pretor-Pinney, who wrote the Cloudspotter's Guide ... asked his cousin - who is a Latin teacher - for a word that means choppy or turbulent that is use d to describe the sea to name the cloud after. "Asperatus comes from the Latin v erb aspero meaning 'to roughen up' or 'agitate'," he said. "It was used by the p oet Virgil to describe the surface of a choppy sea." Mr Fish said he was "quite amazed" by pictures showing clouds fitting Mr Pretor-Pinney's asperatus descript ion. There has been no change to the classifications of clouds since 1953 and may be this should be considered now. I can offer two explanations - they are either the mixing of two air masses - very warm humid air and and very cold dry air an d it is like oil and water - it doesn't mix. These clouds could be formed at the boundary of these two air masses. Or ... they could be the turbulent underbelly of one of the huge thunder clouds." Mr Pretor-Pinney said the pictures were sen t in by cloud society members from all over the world and some of them said ther e was no storm activity or heavy precipitation in the area at the time. Note: How strange that a new type of cloud is now appearing. What changes could be causing this new formation? For more photos of these most unusual new clouds, click here. Or visit the Cloud Appreciation Society, founded by Mr. Pretor-Pinn ey.

New virus-built battery could power cars, electronic devices 2009-04-02, MIT News http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/virus-battery-0402.html For the first time, MIT researchers have shown they can genetically engineer vir uses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion b attery. The new virus-produced batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being considered to powe r plug-in hybrid cars, and they could also be used to power a range of personal electronic devices, said Angela Belcher, the MIT materials scientist who led the research team. The new batteries ... could be manufactured with a cheap and env ironmentally benign process: The synthesis takes place at and below room tempera ture and requires no harmful organic solvents, and the materials that go into th e battery are non-toxic. In a traditional lithium-ion battery, lithium ions flow between a negatively charged anode, usually graphite, and the positively charge d cathode, usually cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate. Three years ago, an M IT team led by Belcher reported that it had engineered viruses that could build an anode by coating themselves with cobalt oxide and gold and self-assembling to form a nanowire. In the latest work, the team focused on building a highly powe rful cathode to pair up with the anode. Cathodes are more difficult to build tha n anodes because they must be highly conducting to be a fast electrode. Most can didate materials for cathodes are highly insulating (non-conductive). To achieve that, the researchers ... genetically engineered viruses that first coat themse lves with iron phosphate, then grab hold of carbon nanotubes to create a network of highly conductive material. Note: For many reports from major media sources on promising new energy technolo gies, click here.

Electric car for the masses to be made in Southern California

2008-04-22, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-fi-think22apr22,1,4269330.... Norwegian automaker Think Global said Monday it planned to sell low-priced elect ric cars to the masses and will introduce its first models in the U.S. by the en d of next year. The battery-powered Think City will be able to travel up to 110 miles on a single charge, with a top speed of about 65 mph, the company said. It will be priced below $25,000. Oslo-based Think said venture capital firms RockP ort Capital Partners and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers had made investments to fund its entry into the U.S. under the auspices of Think North America. "Thi s is not a toy," said Wilber James, RockPort managing partner. "This is a seriou s car that we expect to sell." Although technology for electric cars has been ad vancing -- and consumer interest has been rising amid growing concern over gasol ine prices and greenhouse gases -- few vehicles have come to market. Last month, San Carlos, Calif.-based Tesla Motors began production of its Roadster, an elec tric vehicle that costs $100,000. The Think City "is a mass-market vehicle," sai d Kleiner managing partner Ray Lane, dismissing comparisons to the Roadster. Tes la's car is being produced in relatively small numbers, with roughly 300 expecte d by the end of this year. "Our desire is to be selling 30-40-50,000 of these ca rs in a couple of years." Think Chief Executive Jan-Olaf Willums said the compan y would bring test vehicles to the U.S. in the coming months. The Think City run s on sodium batteries, but future versions could use lithium ion batteries, Will ums said. The Think City, a two-seater that can be fitted with two additional se ats for children, has a mostly plastic exterior and is 95% recyclable. Willums s aid a convertible was in development. "Women want to buy it immediately," he sai d. Note: For many exciting reports on new auto and energy developments from major m edia sources, click here.

2008 Tata Nano Is the $2500 Car That Might Change the World 2008-01-10, Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4244226.html Fireworks blossomed on giant video screens, the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme reac hed its brassy peak, and the world s most affordable car the $2500 Tata Nano rolled ou t onto the stage. Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, parked and got out as hundreds of camera flashes speckled the darkened convention hall. Here at the 20 08 AutoExpo in India, the Nano s debut was about much more than a car. The Nano, m any tradeshow attendees seemed to believe, would transform the country and then, maybe, the world. The Nano looked underwhelming, [like] a golf cart crossed wit h a jelly bean. Its journey onto the stage and into history was powered by a 2-c ylinder, 33-hp engine, and the spec sheet is best given as what the car has not: no air conditioning, no radio, no power steering, no sun visors. But it carries four people, gets 50 mpg, and costs less than a trendy motor scooter. The Nano is no solution to the traffic problem in big [Indian] cities; a prominent Indian environmentalist called the prospect of these ultra-affordable vehicles floodin g the roads a nightmare. But the Nano represents both national pride about India s i ngenuity and the promise that the benefits of middle-class life will reach more people. What can you get for $2500 in the U.S.? a young man ... asked. You can t carr y your family for $2500 in a [new] car. But in India we have done this. His frien d, Rajesh Relia, agreed. He makes 6000 rupees a month, about $150. He doesn t own a car, and carries his family of four, dangerously and cumbersomely, on a motor scooter. The Nano is a car he can actually afford, and he said he will buy one a s soon as it becomes available in late 2008. This is my dream, he said, beaming to ward the stage. I am very happy today.

How this 12inch miracle tube could halve heating bills 2007-09-15, Daily Mail (U.K.) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_... It sounds too good to be true - not to mention the fact that it violates almost every known law of physics. But British scientists claim they have invented a re volutionary device that seems to 'create' energy from virtually nothing. Their s o-called thermal energy cell could soon be fitted into ordinary homes, halving d omestic heating bills and making a major contribution towards cutting carbon emi ssions. Even the makers of the device are at a loss to explain exactly how it wo rks - but sceptical independent scientists carried out their own tests and disco vered that the 12in x 2in tube really does produce far more heat energy than the electrical energy put in. The device seems to break the fundamental physical la w that energy cannot be created from nothing - but researchers believe it taps i nto a previously unrecognised source of energy, stored at a sub-atomic level wit hin the hydrogen atoms in water. The system - developed by scientists at a firm called Ecowatts [a holding of Gardner Watts] - involves passing an electrical cu rrent through a mixture of water, potassium carbonate [potash] and a secret liqu id catalyst, based on chrome. This creates a reaction that releases an incredibl e amount of energy compared to that put in. If the reaction takes place in a uni t surrounded by water, the liquid heats up, which could form the basis for a hou sehold heating system. If the technology can be developed on a domestic scale, i t means consumers will need much less energy for heating and hot water - creatin g smaller bills and fewer greenhouse gases. The device has taken ten years of pa instaking work by a small team at Ecowatts' ... laboratory, and bosses predict a household version of their device will be ready to go on sale within the next 1 8 months. Note: For an abundance of reliable reports on amazing new energy developments, c lick here.

Have you driven a Fjord lately? 2007-07-31, Business 2.0 magazine http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/08/01/1001388... Three pinstriped London investors stand outside an electric car factory in the g reen fields of the Norwegian countryside, waiting their turns to test-drive a st ylish two-seater called the Think City. But first, Think CEO Jan-Olaf Willums ta kes the wheel. [He] turns the ignition, and the stub-nosed coupe silently rolls toward an open stretch of pavement. Suddenly he punches the pedal, and the car t akes off like a shot, the AC motor instantaneously transferring power to the whe els. The only sound is the squealing of tires as Willums throws the little car i nto a tight turn and barrels back toward his startled guests. Did someone kill t he electric car? You wouldn't know it on this bright May morning in Scandinavia, where the idea of a mass-produced battery-powered vehicle is being resurrected and actual cars are scheduled to begin rolling off the production line by year's end. Shuttling between Oslo and California, Willums has raised $78 million from Silicon Valley and European investors captivated by [his] vision of a carbon-ne utral urban car. Willums's pitch is this: He's not just selling an electric car; he's upending a century-old automotive paradigm, aiming to change the way cars are made, sold, owned, and driven. Taking a cue from Dell, the company will sell cars online, built to order. It will forgo showrooms and seed the market throug h car-sharing services like Zipcar. Every car will be Internet-and Wi-Fi-enabled , becoming, according to Willums, a rolling computer that can communicate wirele ssly with its driver, other Think owners, and the power grid. "The timing is rig ht. We are on a path now toward electric cars, and there is no going back." says Ed Kjaer, an electric vehicle veteran who runs the EV program for Southern Cali

fornia Edison. Note: To read about the mysterious disappearing Toyota Eco Spirit, a proven car design capable of achieving 100 mpg, click here.

Richard Branson's Empire Keeps Growing 2007-07-29, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/26/sunday/main3099983.shtml Richard Branson is always reaching for something, whether it's setting records i n stratospheric balloon flights or racing across the Atlantic pursuits that have nearly killed him, more than once. But Branson has never done things the conven tional way. He is usually striving for something just beyond his grasp and, win or lose, he always comes up smiling. But his latest venture may be his most auda cious. On July 18 his and Nelson Mandela's shared birthday they announced the fo rmation of a Council of Elders, a group of seasoned world leaders who literally will try to solve the world's problems. "You only live once," he said. "You migh t as well throw yourself into life and enjoy it." These days, at age 57, Branson 's preoccupations seem to have more to do with saving the world than conquering it. Being in the airline and train business, Branson says he has helped contribu te to environmental degradation. But now he hopes to help repair the world. "For a while, I hoped the skeptics were right. But I read a lot, and met a lot of sc ientists, and realized the world had a real problem," Branson said. He is offeri ng a $25 million prize for anyone who comes up with an invention that can rid th e atmosphere of carbon gases, and he has pledged to spend all the profits from h is airlines that's $3 billion or so to develop earth-friendly alternative fuels. "What we're hoping to do is actually come up with an alternative fuel that will shake the very foundations of the oil companies and shake the foundations of th e coal companies because if we don t shake their foundations, the world could pote ntially be doomed. I certainly don't feel chosen, but I feel extremely grateful, " he said. "I feel I'm in a position where I can make a difference, and I'm not going to waste that position I find myself in."

Farewell, wires? Power beamed through air 2007-06-07, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19098305 Power cables and even batteries might become a thing of the past using a new tec hnique that can transmit power wirelessly. Scientists lit a 60-watt light bulb f rom a power source 7 feet (2 meters) away with their new technique, with no phys ical connection between the source and the appliance. The researchers have dubbe d their concept "WiTricity," as in "wireless electricity." MIT physicist Marin S oljacic began thinking years ago about how to transmit power wirelessly so his c ell phone could recharge without ever being plugged in. Scientists have pursued wireless power transmission for years notably, eccentric genius Nikola Tesla, wh o devoted much energy toward it roughly a century ago. Soljacic and his colleagu es devised WiTricity based off the notion of resonance. One well-known example o f resonance can be seen when an opera singer hits the right note to cause a cham pagne glass to resonate and shatter. Two objects resonating at the same frequenc y tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with objects not resonating at the same frequency. Instead of sound, the MIT physicists focused on magnetic fields. Most common materials interact only very weakly with magneti c fields, so little power would get wasted on unintended targets. In their lates t work, the scientists designed two copper coils roughly 20 inches (50 centimete rs) in diameter that were specially designed to resonate together. One was attac hed to the power source, the other to a light bulb. The practical demonstration

of their earlier theoretical work managed to power the light bulb even when obst acles blocked direct line of sight between the source and device. Note: For more on Nikola Tesla's amazing inventions from a century ago, and how they were suppressed, click here. For lots of additional information on new ener gy sources and inventions, click here.

World's First Air-Powered Car: Zero Emissions by Next Summer 2007-06-01, Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4217016.html India s largest automaker is set to start producing the world s first commercial air -powered vehicle. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Ngre for Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air, as opposed to the gas-and-oxygen expl osions of internal-combustion models, to push its engine s pistons. Some 6000 zero -emissions Air Cars are scheduled to hit Indian streets in August of 2008. Barri ng any last-minute design changes on the way to production, the Air Car should b e surprisingly practical. The $12,700 CityCAT, one of a handful of planned Air C ar models, can hit 68 mph and has a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes for the CityCAT to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compr essor units; MDI says it should cost around $2 to fill the car s carbon-fiber tank s with 340 liters of air at 4350 psi. Drivers also will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car s built-in compressor to refill the tanks in abou t 4 hours. Of course, the Air Car will likely never hit American shores, especia lly considering its all-glue construction. But that doesn t mean the major automak ers can write it off as a bizarre Indian experiment MDI has signed deals to brin g its design to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa. Note: For a cornucopia of exciting articles on new automobile designs and energy inventions, click here.

Iceland the First Country to Try Abandoning Gasoline 2006-01-18, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1518556 Iceland wants to make a full conversion and plans to modify its cars, buses and trucks to run on renewable energy -- with no dependence on oil. Iceland has alre ady started by turning water into fuel -- hydrogen fuel. Here's how it works: El ectrodes split the water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Hydrogen electrons pass through a conductor that creates the current to power an electric engine. H ydrogen fuel now costs two to three times as much as gasoline, but gets up to th ree times the mileage of gas, making the overall cost about the same. As an adde d benefit, there are no carbon emissions -- only water vapor. By the middle of t his century, all Icelanders will be required to run their cars only on hydrogen fuel, meaning no more gasoline. Icelanders say they're committed to showing the world that by making fuel from water, it is possible to kick the oil habit. Note: This is mind-blowing information! Why isn't this amazing news of economica l, non-polluting energy sources making top headlines? A video clip of the above ABC News story is available on the ABC website at the link above. A friend of mi ne invented a similar device only to have it ruthlessly suppressed. For lots mor e on all this, click here.

Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory

2005-12-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27eins.html?ex=1293339600&en=caf5d8... The idea that measuring the properties of one particle could instantaneously cha nge the properties of another one (or a whole bunch) far away is strange to say the least. The team that pulled off the beryllium feat...hailed it as another st ep toward computers that would use quantum magic to perform calculations. But it also served as another demonstration of how weird the world really is according to the rules, known as quantum mechanics. Nary a week goes by that does not bri ng news of another feat of quantum trickery once only dreamed of in thought expe riments: particles (or at least all their properties) being teleported across th e room in a microscopic version of Star Trek beaming; electrical "cat" currents that circle a loop in opposite directions at the same time; more and more partic les farther and farther apart bound together in Einstein's spooky embrace now kn own as "entanglement." At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researche rs are planning an experiment in which a small mirror will be in two places at o nce. Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna said that he thought, "The worl d is not as real as we think. Note: Consider also that top secret projects are generally at least 10 years in advance of anything reported in the news or scientific magazines. We can only im agine what these projects might be doing.

Stockton Engineer Creates Energy Saving Device 2006-12-13, CBS News, Stockton Affiliate http://cbs13.com/local/local_story_347191740.html Chuck Larue may be the man who drastically cuts your electricity bill. For fourt een years, Chuck and his partner have quietly been inventing a little micro cont roller called the "Plug Power Saver." He claims it works on all electric motors from your air conditioner to refrigerators, washing machines to whole house fans . He rigged a one-third horsepower motor to show us the savings. Without the con troller, It's drawing 171 to 180 watts." Plug in the Power Saver and, It's trying to find the most optimum levels of power consumption. It actually has a micropro cessor in here." After a few seconds, the motor is running strong but using half the electricity. And if you know anything about electricity, you know this moto r running normally should be warm to the touch, it isn t. That seems to show no ex tra electricity is being lost as heat. John Lander: This looks already to sell. Chuck Larue: Yeah it is, it's ready to go. John Lander: How much? Chuck Larue: $ 49.95. So you'd pay for the Power Saver in under a year. Chuck says he has 10,00 0 of these devices headed here from a manufacturing plant in Korea. Now all he h as to do is find a retailer willing to sell it. Chuck says he has tried to inter est the Governor and the utilities commission to sponsor his invention, but no o ne has called him back.

France wins battle to host experimental fusion reactor 2005-06-29, Boston Globe/Los Angeles Times http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2005/06/29/france_wins_battle_... In a bid to harness what backers say could be a nearly limitless source of clean electric power, an international consortium chose France yesterday as the site for an experimental fusion reactor that will aim to replicate how the sun create s energy. The planned $13 billion project is one of the most prestigious and exp ensive international scientific efforts ever launched. French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement. "[This] unprecedented scientific and technological c hallenge ... opens great hopes for providing humanity with an energy that has no

impact on the environment and is practically inexhaustible." The reactor's main fuel, deuterium, also known as heavy hydrogen, can be obtained from water. The project's website states that Lake Geneva alone contains enough deuterium to mee t global energy needs for several thousand years. Existing nuclear reactors use fission, or the splitting of large atoms, to produce power, a process that leave s waste that remains highly radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Fusi on reactors, by contrast, would produce minimal waste that would be radioactive for a much shorter period. If the project is successful, long-term plans call fo r a demonstration fusion power plant to be built in the 2030s and the first comm ercial fusion plant to be built in midcentury.

These men think they're about to change the world 2006-08-25, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://environment.guardian.co.uk/energy/story/0,,1858172,00.html These dynamic and personable businessmen from Dublin insist that they have found a way of producing free, clean and limitless energy out of thin air. So, as the y prepare to demonstrate this wonder of science to me...I feel all the excitemen t of Christmas Day. There is a test rig with wheels and cogs and four magnets me ticulously aligned so as to create the maximum tension between their fields and one other magnet fixed to a point opposite. A motor rotates the wheel bearing th e magnets and a computer takes 28,000 measurements a second. And when it is all over, the computer tells us that almost three times the amount of energy has com e out of the system as went in. In fact, this piece of equipment is 285% efficie nt. "We couldn't believe it at first, either," says McCarthy, chief executive of the company. "We wanted to improve the performance of the wind generators...so we experimented with certain generator configurations and then one day one of ou r guys...came in and said: 'We have a problem. We appear to be getting out more than we're putting in.'" That was three years ago. Since then, McCarthy says, th e company has spent 2.7m developing the technology. Until their claims have been assessed by the jury, McCarthy says they won't be accepting any investor offers. So if this is a hoax, it would appear not to be a money-making scheme. The Econ omist ad alone cost 75,000. "We expected stick, and we're getting it already. We' ve had a lot of abusive emails and telephone calls -people telling us to watch o ur backs" Note: To understand how this is possible, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/newener gysources

Scientists flock to test 'free energy' discovery 2006-08-20, The Observer (one of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1854305,00.html A man who claims to have developed a free energy technology which could power ev erything from mobile phones to cars has received more than 400 applications from scientists to test it. Sean McCarthy says that no one was more sceptical than h e when Steorn, his small hi-tech firm in Dublin, hit upon a way of generating cl ean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields. 'It wasn' t so much a Eureka moment as a get-back-in-there-and-check-your-instruments mome nt, although in far more colourful language,' said McCarthy. But when he attempt ed to share his findings, he says, scientists either put the phone down on him o r refused to endorse him publicly in case they damaged their academic reputation s. So last week he took out a full-page advert in the Economist magazine, challe nging the scientific community to examine his technology. McCarthy claims it pro vides five times the amount of energy a mobile phone battery generates for the s ame size, and does not have to be recharged. Within 36 hours of his advert appea

ring he had been contacted by 420 scientists in Europe, America and Australia, a nd a further 4,606 people had registered to receive the results.

Steorn and free energy: the plot thickens 2006-08-19, Houston Chronicle Science Blog http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/08/steorn_and_free_1.html Steorn has now posted a slick, five-minute video that features interviews with c ompany CEO Sean McCarthy as well as the company's marketing director. For more b ackground, see our earlier discussion. The video's slick, and not too heavy on s cientific detail. But it's worth checking out. It does begin to explain the comp any's motivations for choosing to issue a challenge in the Economist. McCarthy: "The first roadblock is science. With the academic community, it might take five to seven years before being able to get to a consensus position. As a business, that makes absolutely no sense." The video explains that a "quiet" campaign was plan A. The direct marketing approach currently being taken is Plan B. McCarthy : "The claim does rail against so much thinking from ordinary people. We have to fight public opinion, we have to fight the scientific community and we have to fight the energy industry. We couldn't pick a worse battleground." Note: For lots more on the many who have developed similar discoveries and how t hey have been either bought out or shut down: http://www.WantToKnow.info/newener gyinformation.

Electric cars lighting up again 2006-07-31, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2006-07-26-electric-cars-usat_x.htm Several small, independent automakers are juicing up electric cars. Among the co mpanies trying to lead the charge: Tesla. Tesla Motors...is taking orders for a $100,000 electric high-performance sports car...billed as capable of a Ferrari-l ike zero to 60 mph in four seconds. The car was designed in California but will be built by Lotus in Great Britain. Its sophisticated lithium-ion battery will a llow a range of 250 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 130 mph. Wrights peed...hopes to produce its own, $100,000 high-performance car within two years. It will have about a 200-mile range. Ian Wright, who heads Wrightspeed...says t he new breed of electric cars could have three times the energy efficiency of ga s-electric hybrids. "You can build something that's seriously fast and a lot of fun to drive." Zap. At the other end of the performance spectrum...Zap last mont h started selling a three-wheel electric "city car" imported from China that it says is capable of a top speed of 40 mph. Priced at $9,000, the Xebra has a rang e of about 40 miles. Tomberlin Group...plans to sell three versions of electric cars. Prices will range from $5,000 for E-Merge E-2 to $8,000 for the four-seat Anvil. The electric revival comes as...Who Killed the Electric Car? has started playing in theaters. The movie alleges that big automakers, oil companies and th e government sank promising electric-car technology. The film singles out Genera l Motors for...having created a futuristic electric car that became a Hollywood enviro-darling. When leases ran out, GM collected its Saturn EV1s and sent them to the crusher. Note: I've heard that Who Killed the Electric Car? is an excellent, revealing fi lm. For lots more on why car mileage has not significantly increased since the d ays of the Model T (which got 25 miles to the gallon), see http://www.WantToKnow .info/050711carmileageaveragempg

Bush energy plan whacks conservation 2006-05-31, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p02s01-uspo.html A few years ago a little-known US Energy Department program helped produce a des ign technology for lightweight cars and trucks that in 2004 alone saved the nati on 122 million barrels of oil, or about $9 billion. So, with energy prices spiki ng and President Bush pushing for more energy research, the ITP would seem a nat ural candidate for more funding. In fact, its budget is set to get chopped by a third from its 2005 level. It's one of more than a dozen energy-efficiency effor ts that the Energy Department plans to trim or eliminate in a $115 million costsaving move. If Congress accepts the Energy Department's proposed 2007 budget, i t will cut $152 million - some 16 percent - from this year's budget for energy-e fficiency programs. Adjusting for inflation, it would mean the US government wou ld spend 30 percent less on energy efficiency next year than it did in 2002. One energy-efficiency program on the chopping block...helps improve the fuel effici ency of heavy-duty trucks, one of the nation's biggest oil consumers. That progr am is "zeroed out" in the 2007 budget request. The same fate awaits the $4.5 mil lion Building Codes Implementation Grants program. It helps states adopt more en ergy-efficient requirements for new buildings, the nation's largest consumer of electricity and natural gas. The $8 million Clean Cities program has helped clea n-fuel technologies, like buses that run on compressed natural gas, get to marke t. But it's slated for a $2.8 million cut. Note: To better understand why this is happening: http://www.WantToKnow.info/new energysources

Beam weapons almost ready for battle 2006-01-11, MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10805240/ LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - There is a new breed of weaponry fast approaching. They are l abeled "directed-energy weapons," and they may well signal a revolution in milit ary hardware -- perhaps more so than the atomic bomb. Directed-energy weapons ta ke the form of lasers, high-powered microwaves and particle beams. Their adoptio n for ground, air, sea, and space warfare depends not only on using the electrom agnetic spectrum, but also upon favorable political and budgetary wavelengths to o. After more than two decades of research, the United States is on the verge of deploying a new generation of weapons that discharge beams of energy, such as t he Airborne Laser and the Active Denial System, as well as the Tactical High Ene rgy Laser, or THEL. Then there s Active Denial Technology -- a non-lethal way to u se millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy to stop, deter and turn back an advanc ing adversary. This technology, supported by the U.S. Marines, uses a beam of mi llimeter waves to heat a foe s skin, causing severe pain without damage, and makin g the adversary flee the scene. By tuning the resonance of a laser onto Earth s io nosphere, you can create audible frequencies. Like some boom box in the sky, the laser-produced voice could bellow from above down to the target below: "Put dow n your weapons."

Scientists explore how the humble leaf could power the planet 2009-08-11, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/aug/11/artificial-leaf-energy It is one of evolution's crowning achievements - a mini green power station and organic factory combined and the source of almost all of the energy that fuels e

very living thing on the planet. Now scientists developing the next generation o f clean power sources are working out how to copy, and ultimately improve upon, the humble leaf. The intricate chemistry involved in photosynthesis, the process where plants use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugar, is th e most effective solar energy conversion process on Earth. And researchers belie ve that mimicking parts of it could be the ticket to a limitless supply of clean power. The untapped potential for using the sun's rays is huge. All human activ ity for a whole year could be powered by the energy contained in the sunlight hi tting the Earth in just one hour. Harnessing even a small amount of this to make electricity or useful fuels could satisfy the world's increasing need for energ y, predicted to double by 2050, without further endangering the climate. Most so lar power systems use silicon wafers to generate electricity directly. But altho ugh costs are coming down, these are still too expensive in many cases when comp ared with fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. Scientists are keen to develop more efficient and cheaper alternatives sources of energy. At Imperial College London, researchers have embarked on a 1m project to study, and eventually mimic, photosynthesis. Part of a project called the "artificial leaf", involves workin g out exactly how leaves use sunlight to make useful molecules. The team then pl ans to build artificial systems that can do the same to generate clean fuels suc h as hydrogen and methanol. These would then be used in fuel cells to make elect ricity or directly to power super-clean vehicles.. Note: For more reports from reliable sources on exciting new energy developments , click here.

Forget gas, batteries pee is new power source 2009-07-09, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31805166/ns/technology_and_science-innovation Urine-powered cars, homes and personal electronic devices could be available in six months with new technology developed by scientists from Ohio University. Usi ng a nickel-based electrode, the scientists can create large amounts of cheap hy drogen from urine that could be burned or used in fuel cells. "One cow can provi de enough energy to supply hot water for 19 houses," said Gerardine Botte, a pro fessor at Ohio University developing the technology. "Soldiers in the field coul d carry their own fuel." Pee power is based on hydrogen, the most common element in the universe but one that has resisted efforts to produce, store, transport and use economically. Storing pure hydrogen gas requires high pressure and low t emperature. Chemically binding hydrogen to other elements, like oxygen to create water, makes it easier to store and transport, but releasing the hydrogen when it's needed usually requires financially prohibitive amounts of electricity. By attaching hydrogen to another element, nitrogen, Botte and her colleagues realiz ed that they can store hydrogen without the exotic environmental conditions, and then release it with less electricity, 0.037 Volts instead of the 1.23 Volts ne eded for water. Stick a special nickel electrode into a pool of urine, apply an electrical current, and hydrogen gas is released. A fuel cell, urine-powered veh icle could theoretically travel 90 miles per gallon. A refrigerator-sized unit c ould produce one kilowatt of energy for about $5,000, although this price is a r ough estimate, says Botte. "The waste products from say a chicken farm could be used to produce the energy needed to run the farm," said John Stickney, a chemis t and professor at the University of Georgia. Note: For many exciting reports from reliable sources on new energy technologies , click here.

Cheap solar at night? MIT may have answer

2008-07-31, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/08/01/cheap_solar_at_night_mit_m... MIT researchers say they have discovered a way to use solar energy cheaply even after the sun goes down, which could make it a mainstream source of power within the next decade. Solar energy has been expensive and inefficient to use after d ark, said Daniel Nocera, 51, the Henry Dreyfus professor of energy and professor of chemistry at MIT. But in an article published in the July 31 issue of the jo urnal Science, Nocera and other Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher s say they have found a simple, inexpensive process for storing solar energy. "H ow the heck are you going to build an economy or a business only if the sun is s hining?" said Nocera, the senior author. "What you really need to do is when the sun is shining, figure out how to store some of that energy so you can unleash it when the sun isn't shining." Nocera and the other researchers based their wor k on a compound made from cobalt and phosphate, both readily available. When the sun is out, electricity from solar panels can be fed to the compound in water, causing the water to split into hydrogen and oxygen. The elements create a chemi cal fuel that can be recombined to create energy later, when the sun is not shin ing. The discovery breaks "the connection between energy and fossil fuels becaus e my energy is coming from water," said Nocera, "unleashing the solar energy, no t in real time, but when you want to." The researchers said the findings open th e door for large-scale use of solar energy around the clock - not right away but within 10 years. Note: For a treasure trove of reports on new energy inventions with great potent ial, click here.

Congress votes to stop filling oil reserve 2008-05-14, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/14/MN0810LU7S.DTL The House and Senate voted overwhelmingly ... to temporarily stop filling the St rategic Petroleum Reserve, a response to public anger over rising oil prices as the average price of regular unleaded gasoline nationwide hit a new high of $3.7 3 per gallon. The legislation would halt shipments for the rest of the year of r oughly 70,000 barrels a day into the reserve, a system of four underground salt domes on the Gulf Coast run by the Energy Department. The reserve currently hold s about 702 million barrels of oil, an amount equal to two months of U.S. import s. The government pays the market price for the light crude oil it stores in the reserve. Congress created the reserve two years after the 1973 Arab oil embargo as a way to prevent supply disruptions. Kevin Book, senior energy analyst for F riedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., noted that in the hour after the Senate passed the measure nearly unanimously the price of crude oil jumped by a dollar. Book s aid, "70,000 barrels is a rounding error. It is not material in an 85.7 million barrel per day market." Book added that it will take much more significant actio n ... for the markets to take notice. The Senate, by a 56-42 vote, defeated a Re publican measure ... that would have opened Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Re fuge to drilling and allowed states to drill off their shores.

Meet The First Car Powered By Air 2006-10-28, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/28/tech/main2135518.shtml At their factory in southern France, father-and-son team Guy and Cyril Negre ins ist air power is no joke. Plain old air compressed in the tank, they say, cheap and non-polluting. Sound too good to be true? Says Cyril, It's a real car. The ot

her thing is it's a very zero emission car. You won't pollute, there won't be em ission. You have a very economical car. A car, says the Negres, that will cost ju st $2 for every 120 miles. The Negres have a long love affair with cars. Guy des igned a Formula One race car engine. Cyril worked at Bugati. The technology for their car, they say, is relatively simple and safe. When you compress the air...i nside of the tank, this is like compressing a spring, and then the tank gives yo u back the energy of the air when it expands, says Cyril. Compressed air in a car bon-fiber tank, something like scuba divers use, drives the pistons and turns th e crankshaft. There is no combustion and no gasoline. That's why there's no poll ution. You fill it up at an air compressor. It may sound far-fetched, but at his labs on the campus of UCLA, professor Su-Chin Chow is also exploring the power of air. The Negres say after years of delays...they have solved their technical problems. Another year, they say, and they'll be ready for large scale productio n, with a top speed of 55 miles-an-hour.

Big Oil's enormous profits ignite suspicion of gouging 2006-07-28, Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_4105814 As motorists continue to pay more at the gas pump, two of the nation's largest o il companies on Thursday reported second-quarter profits of nearly $18 billion. The huge profits come at a time when refiners are marking up wholesale gas price s to levels seen during the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, reigniting concerns a bout the possibility of price gouging. Exxon Mobil Corp. said Thursday that its second-quarter profits increased 36 percent to $10.36 billion, the second-larges t quarterly profit ever for a U.S. publicly traded company. Royal Dutch Shell, w hich operates 155 gas stations in Colorado, reported earnings of $7.32 billion, up 40 percent from a year ago. Including earnings from BP and ConocoPhillips, wh ich reported earlier this week, four of the nation's five largest oil companies netted more than $30 billion in profit during the second quarter. National gross profit margins for refiners have hovered around $21 a barrel this week, compare d with about $12 a barrel a year ago. Amid outcry from lawmakers about its profi ts, the oil industry this week paid for advertisements in 14 newspapers - includ ing The Denver Post, The New York Times and The Washington Post - that insist oi l companies' earnings are not exorbitant. The national average price of regular unleaded gasoline is $3 a gallon this week, according to AAA. The price would be about $2.60 a gallon, factoring in taxes and transportation and other costs, if the refiners' gross profit margin had remained at the same levels from a year a go. Note: At the bottom of this article is an excellent, revealing graph showing the extent of profit margins for oil refiners since January 2005. Very few other ma jor media have been willing to show the hard data in this article.

The next X-Prize: How about a 250 m.p.g. car? 2006-05-07, USA Today/Christian Science Monitor http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-07-x-prize-competition_x.htm The challenge: Build the world's most fuel-efficient production car -- one that gets maybe 250 miles per gallon and causes little or no pollution. The payoff: p rize money from the group that awarded $10 million for the world's first private spaceflight two years ago. "Ford's Model T got 25 miles per gallon, and today a Ford Explorer gets 18 miles per gallon," says Peter Diamandis, X-Prize Foundati on chairman. "We believe the time is ripe for a fundamental change in what we dr ive -- and we believe an X-Prize in this area can drive a substantial change." U .S. agencies procure new technology mostly through contracts with universities a

nd companies. Taxpayers typically pay, whether or not companies or researchers a ctually succeed. But government interest in prizes began to grow after 1996, whe n the $10 million Ansari X-Prize was announced for a privately financed craft to fly into space. That means inspiring the likes of Felix Kramer, a California In ternet entrepreneur who hopes to partner with a big auto company to create a hig h-mileage car. That's what his CalCars team did in September 2004, when it devel oped the prototype of a Toyota Prius with an electric cord. The extra reliance o n electric power gives the "Prius-plus" better than 80 miles per gallon. Note: In 2002, the London Times reported on a new Toyota that got over 100 mpg w hich was due to hit the market. Yet the car mysteriously disappeared: http://www .WantToKnow.info/carmileage. For an abundance of information on suppression of n ew energy technologies: http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergyinformation

"Double Crystal Fusion" Could Pave the Way for Portable Device 2006-02-13, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=1358&setappvar=page(1) Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accele rator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation o f an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA). The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful elect ric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron genera tor for a variety of applications, from non-destructive testing to detecting exp losives and scanning luggage at airports. The device is essentially a tabletop p article accelerator. At its heart are two opposing pyroelectric crystals that crea te a strong electric field when heated or cooled. The device is filled with deut erium gas a more massive cousin of hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus . The electric field rips electrons from the gas, creating deuterium ions and ac celerating them into a deuterium target on one of the crystals. When the particl es smash into the target, neutrons are emitted, which is the telltale sign that nuclear fusion has occurred. The new study also verified the fundamental physics behind the original experiment. This suggests that pyroelectric crystals are in fact a viable means of producing nuclear fusion, and that commercial applicatio ns may be closer than originally thought. Note: Why was this fascinating news not reported in the major media? For more, s ee our New Energy Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergyinfo rmation

Iceland's hydrogen buses zip toward oil-free economy 2005-01-14, Detroit News (Detroit's leading newspaper) http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0501/14/autos-60181.htm Hydrogen, tested in buses from Amsterdam to Vancouver ... is a clean power that promises to break dependence on oil and gas -- at least in Iceland. With almost unlimited geothermal energy sizzling beneath its surface, Iceland has an officia l goal of making the country oil-free by shifting cars, buses, trucks and ships over to hydrogen by about 2050. About 70 percent of Iceland's energy needs ... a re already met by geothermal or hydro-electric power. Only the transport sector is still hooked on polluting oil and gas. The world's first hydrogen filling sta tion, run by Shell, opened in Reykjavik in April 2003. Hydrogen bus projects hav e also been launched in cities including Barcelona, Chicago, Hamburg, London, Ma drid, Stockholm, Beijing and Perth, Australia. The efficiency of the hydrogen fu el cells will decide if the ventures take off into the wider car market. "The id ea is that the buses should be twice as efficient as an internal combustion engi

ne," said Jon Bjorn Skulason, general manager of Icelandic New Energy Ltd. Great er engine efficiency would compensate for the inefficiency of producing hydrogen . Iceland's buses, made by DaimlerChrysler, cost about 1.25 million euros ($1.67 million) each, or three to four times more than a diesel-powered bus, Skulason said. It takes about 6-10 minutes to refill a hydrogen bus, giving a range of 24 0 miles. [A] Reykjavik bus driver said diesel and hydrogen buses were similar to drive. "But the hydrogen bus is less noisy."

Blame the feds for fuel economy figures that don't match real world 2004-05-19, WantToKnow.info/Detroit News http://www.WantToKnow.info/040519fueleconomymonitors Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Co. are probably wishing they d never put those f un fuel economy monitors in their gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles. The display s are causing angst among some owners who aren t getting the miles-per-gallon perf ormance posted on their window sticker. Frustrated consumers are asking dealersh ips to fix their vehicles. Pete Blackshaw of Cincinnati is chronicling his dismay publicly in his own Internet blog. He says Honda is ignoring his claim that he s n ever gotten more than 33 mpg in his Civic Hybrid. The combined city/highway rati ng from the car s window sticker is 47.

Refusing to be Muzzled by LA Auto Show, AFS Trinity Pulls 150 MPG SUV out of Sho w 2008-11-07, MarketWatch (A Wall Street Journal Digital Network Website) http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Refusing-Muzzled-LA-Auto-Show/story.asp... AFS Trinity Power Corporation today announced it pulled its 150 MPG plug-in hybr id SUV prototypes out of the LA Auto Show but will independently exhibit and dem onstrate the super fuel-efficient vehicles on their own elsewhere in downtown LA during the show. The company's decision followed actions by the LA Auto Show to muzzle AFS Trinity from highlighting the 150 miles per gallon fuel economy of i ts XH150 prototype vehicles. "The suppression by the automakers of information a bout technologies such as this raises serious questions about the judgment, visi on, intentions and capabilities of the leadership of these companies," said Edwa rd W. Furia, Chairman and CEO of AFS Trinity. "Such conduct by the automakers, w ho are currently seeking tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, ostensibly to dev elop fuel efficient vehicle technologies, is evidence they are reluctant to embr ace solutions they didn't invent." First shown at the North American Internation al Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit in January, 2008, two XH150 prototypes have tour ed the country for the last ten months and received positive reactions from the American public, national media, public officials, governors, ... members of Con gress as well as automotive fleet managers and engineers in Austin, Salt Lake Ci ty, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Seattle, Livermore and Sacramento. Furia expl ained that, when AFS Trinity sought exhibition space on the main floor of the LA Auto Show, the only space that show management offered was the Kentia Hall base ment. Note: The LA Auto Show is "owned" by the Greater Los Angeles New Car Dealers Ass ociation, which, in turn, is closely associated with the major auto makers in De troit. For lots more exciting developments in automotive and new energy technolo gies from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

Senators Try to Limit Fuel-Efficiency Rules 2007-06-14, Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR20070613022... Allies of the U.S. auto industry stepped up a campaign yesterday to soften stric t vehicle fuel-efficiency mandates in proposed energy legislation before the Sen ate, even as momentum for the tougher measures continued to build. Auto lobbyist s said they were encountering stiff resistance on Capitol Hill. They said they f elt like the industry was being punished for what one called the "sins of the pa st" -- successfully beating back attempts to make major changes to the nation's vehicle mileage laws. Yesterday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) defended the c urrent bill, arguing that it would provide flexibility for automakers. "There ar e all kinds of dire warnings," Feinstein said. "The fact of matter is that Detro it has done nothing about mileage efficiency for the past 20 years, and the time has come." Note: It is also worth noting that Congress itself has done nothing to mandate h igher fuel efficiency in cars over the last twenty years. For a highly revealing article showing that while other industries have had many major breakthroughs a nd huge technological advances over the decades, automobile makers for some stra nge reason have been unable to improve car mileage since the days of the Model T , click here.

Russia suspects US plans to monopolise fuel from moon 2007-05-02, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/russia-suspects-us-plans-to-monopolise-fuel-... Mankind's second race for the moon has taken on a distinctly Cold War feel, with the Russian space agency accusing its old rival NASA of rejecting a proposal fo r joint lunar exploration. The charge comes amid suspicion in Moscow that the US is seeking to deny Russia access to an isotope in abundance under the moon's su rface that many believe could replace fossil fuels and even end the threat of gl obal warming. A new era of international co-operation in space supposedly dawned after the US, Russia and other powers declared their intention to send humans t o the moon for the first time since 1972. But while NASA has lobbied for support from Britain and the European Space Agency, Russia says its offers have been re buffed. While the Americans have been either coy or dismissive on the subject, R ussia openly says the main purpose of its lunar program is the industrial extrac tion of helium-3. Some scientists say helium-3 could be the answer to the world' s energy woes. As helium-3 is non-polluting and effective in tiny quantities, ma ny countries are taking it very seriously. Germany, India and China, which will launch a lunar probe to research extraction techniques in September, are all stu dying ways to mine the isotope. "Whoever conquers the moon first will be the fir st to benefit," said Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist of China's lunar program . Many in Moscow's space program believe Washington's agenda is driven by a desi re to monopolise helium-3 mining. The plot, says Erik Galimov, of the Russian Ac ademy of Sciences, would "enable the US to establish its control of the energy m arket 20 years from now and put the rest of the world on its knees as hydrocarbo ns run out".

Silicon Valley Takes On Detroit 2006-07-22, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/22/eveningnews/main1826843.shtml At a glittering Los Angeles party, an ambitious new car maker declared the elect ric car alive and well. The Tesla Roadster, which can go from 0 to 60 mph in 4 s econds doesn't come from Detroit, but from high tech Silicon Valley aiming to do what Detroit couldn't -- make a commercially successful car that doesn't burn g

as. "Electric cars don't have to be little, pathetic commuter cars," says Martin Eberhard, CEO of Tesla Motors. "They can be quick and they can be desirable." E berhard made millions in the computer industry, then convinced other high tech i nvestors like Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, to put in big money. Musk expect s huge rewards if Silicon Valley can break Detroit's grip on the U.S. auto indus try. "It's batteries, it's drive electronics, it's electric motors," says Musk. "Those are skills that are present in Silicon Valley and not present in Detroit. " There's a quick charger for the Tesla's lithium batteries but the car can be p lugged in anywhere. It'll go 250 miles on a single charge -- at a cost the compa ny says, of just 1 cent a mile. Tesla expects to quickly sell its first 100 cars for $100,000 each. But, don't give up. The company also has plans for a car for the rest of us. Tesla promises a less expensive four-door family car within thr ee years. For now, however, it's the rich and famous who are getting a charge ou t of this electric car, such as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who tried out the ca r and had two words to say: "Very Nice." Note: Don't be surprised if this technology inexplicably disappears as so many o thers have, like the once heralded 100 MPG Toyota Eco Spirit back in 2002. For l ots more reliable information on the suppression of new energy inventions, see h ttp://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergyinformation.

Top oil firms expected to report huge earnings 2006-04-25, MSNBC/Associated Press http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12484314/ The country s three largest oil and gas companies are expected to report combined first-quarter profits this week in excess of $16 billion, a 19 percent surge fro m last year. Elected officials are scrambling for ways to assuage angry consumer s and businesses. President Bush on Tuesday gave the Environmental Protection Ag ency the authority to temporarily waive regional clean-fuel regulations to promo te greater gasoline-supply flexibility, but members of Congress have other ideas . Some are renewing calls for a windfall profits tax and some want federal regul ators to investigate industry consolidation. Still others are threatening hearin gs and expressing outrage at how the industry invests cautiously in new refining capacity yet rewards its executives lavishly. The combined earnings expected fr om ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. will be 14 times greater than the combined first-quarter profits of Google Inc., Apple Computer Inc. and Oracle Corp. Analysts say full-year profits for the oil majors are likely to sur pass the record-setting earnings of 2005, when Exxon reported a $36.13 billion p rofit -- the highest ever for a U.S. company.

The Hutchison Effect: The Race to Zero Point 2006-04-16, New Energy Video http://stream.osen.org/aag/Hutchison_RaceToZeroPoint.wmv The above link is not a news article, but rather a fascinating 12-minute video d emonstrating inspiring new energy technologies. I have seen the longer, full vid eo, which is one of the best videos available covering this exciting field. For more on the full video, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/resources#free. For an ex cellent two-page summary of the new energy field, see http://www.WantToKnow.info /newenergysources. Note: The Guardian also had an article on this amazing technology last year. See the link below: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1481009,00.html

Big Oil's Big Windfall 2006-03-28, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/opinion/28tue1.html?ex=1301202000&en=c70b43... A public already groaning under huge deficits does not need more red ink. An oil industry already rolling in record profits does not need more tax breaks. But b oth are sure to happen unless some way can be found to claw back from a decade's worth of Congressional and administrative blunders, aggressive lobbying and ind ustry greed. According to a detailed account in Monday's Times...oil companies s tand to gain a minimum of $7 billion and as much as $28 billion over the next fi ve years under an obscure provision in last year's giant energy bill that allows companies to avoid paying royalties on oil and gas produced in the Gulf of Mexi co. The provision received almost no Congressional debate, in part because Congr ess was lazy and in part because the provision was misleadingly advertised as co st-free. A court decision in 2003 effectively doubled the amount of oil and gas exempted from royalties. Then the Bush administration offered special exemptions for "deep gas" producers, drilling more than 15,000 feet below the sea bottom. Then came the 2005 energy bill, which essentially locked in the old incentives f or five more years.

Military examines 'beaming up' data, people 2005-08-29, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/29/MNGA0EENPC1.DTL The military has a long history of funding research into topics that seem straig ht out of science fiction, even occultism. These range from "psychic" spying to "antimatter"-propelled aircraft and rockets to strange new types of superbombs. In recent years, many physicists have become excited about a phenomenon called " quantum teleportation," which works only with infinitesimally tiny particles. Da vis, who has a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Arizona, has wor ked on NASA robotic missions. His 79-page Air Force study seriously explored a s eries of possibilities, ranging from "Star Trek"-style travel to transportation via so-called wormholes in the fabric of space to psychic travel through solid w alls. Davis expressed great enthusiasm for research allegedly conducted by Chine se scientists who, he says, have conducted "psychic" experiments in which humans used mental powers to teleport matter through solid walls. He claims their rese arch shows "gifted children were able to cause the apparent teleportation of sma ll objects" (radio micro-transmitters, photosensitive paper, mechanical watches, horseflies, other insects, etc.). If the Chinese experiments are valid and coul d be repeated by American scientists, Davis told The Chronicle in a phone interv iew Thursday, then, in principle, the military might some day develop a way to t eleport soldiers and weapons.

Novel approach to concentrating sunlight could cut solar panel costs 2006-04-25, Technology Review http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16736&ch=biztech The main limitation of solar power right now is cost, because the crystalline si licon used to make most solar photovoltaic (PV) cells is very expensive. One app roach to overcoming this cost factor is to concentrate light from the sun using mirrors or lenses. But traditional light concentrators are bulky and unattractiv e. Now Prism Solar Technologies...has developed a proof-of-concept solar module that uses holograms to concentrate light, possibly cutting the cost of solar mod ules by as much as 75 percent, making them competitive with electricity generate

d from fossil fuels. The panels, says Rick Lewandowski, the company's president and CEO, are a "more elegant solution" to traditional concentrators, and can be installed on rooftops -- or even incorporated into windows and glass doors. A la yer of holograms...directs light into a layer of glass where it continues to ref lect off the inside surface of the glass until it finds its way to one of the st rips of PV silicon. Reducing the PV material needed could bring down costs from about $4 per watt to $1.50 for crystalline silicon panels. The company is expect ing to...start manufacturing its first-generation modules by the end of the year , selling them at about $2.40 per watt. CEO Lewandowski says the holographic mod ules will cost about $1.50 per watt in a few years, using their second-generatio n technology. At that price, they'll start to compete with fossil fuel-generated electricity, which now costs almost three times less than conventional solar el ectricity.

Renewable Energy Faces Funding Cuts 2006-09-15, CBS News/Christian Science Monitor http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/15/tech/main2013856.shtml The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is quitting the hydropower and geothermal po wer research business -- if Congress will let it. Declaring them "mature technol ogies" that need no further funding, the Bush administration in its FY 2007 budg et request eliminates hydropower and geothermal research. "What we do well is re search and funding of new, novel technologies," says Craig Stevens, chief spokes man for the DOE. "I'm just astonished the department would zero out these very s mall existing budgets for geothermal and hydro," says V. John White, executive d irector of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. "These a re very important resources for our energy future that could replace the need fo r a lot of coal-fired power plants." Indeed, the costs of lost opportunities fro m dropping such research could be enormous in the long run. Geothermal holds vas t potential -- at least 30,000 megawatts of identified resources developable by 2050. Meanwhile, the more than 5,400 potential "small hydro" power projects coul d produce about 20,000 megawatts of power, a DOE study in January found. And mos t would require no new dams at all, shunting a portion of a small river's flow t o one side to make electricity. Others would add turbines to dams that don't hav e them yet. Together, high-tech hydropower and geothermal resources could contri bute at least enough power to replace more than 100 medium-size coal-fired power plants with emissions-free electricity.

Peat grows as new fuel source 2006-12-26, Detroit News http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061226/BIZ04/612260366/10... Turning corn into fuel is all the rage these days as America attempts to reduce its oil dependency. But a team of Metro Detroit researchers has identified a pot entially cheaper and more Earth-friendly fuel source: peat, that half-rotted veg etation that covers a considerable chunk of Michigan. The scientists, from Unive rsity of Detroit Mercy and Wayne State University, are working to develop what t hey call "pethanol" to run small, fuel-cell-powered vehicles such as golf carts and riding mowers. Because peat forms naturally and requires no fertilization, i t's a benefit over corn, the researchers say. "Corn's biggest problem is that yo u only get one crop a year," said John Shewchun, an adjunct chemistry and engine ering professor at Wayne State. "Peat is dirt cheap (to harvest), and with it yo u've got something that is easily replenished." In lab tests, the pethanol has a lso powered a fuel cell without the use of hydrogen, which eliminates the need f or hydrogen storage tanks in fuel-cell vehicles. Benvenuto, principal investigat or on the project, said if peat works as a fuel, the researchers will look at du

plicating its success with other hearty native Michigan plants. He said the answ er is likely not one plant, but a variety of sources. "None of the three of us t hink this will solve America's energy dependence," Benvenuto said. "But it will help."

Powered by the sun's rays 2006-08-22, Sacramento Bee (leading newspaper of the capital city of California) http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/14304274p-15182191c.html Sacramento's Solar Cookers International, will take the global stage Friday in F lorence, Italy. The nongovernmental organization, which is dedicated to saving t he world with solar power, will receive an award from the World Renewable Energy Congress. The secret of the group's success is the "CooKit," a 3-by-4-foot piec e of cardboard lined with aluminum foil that harnesses the sun's rays to cook fo od and pasteurize water. About 90,000 "CooKits" are heating up in Africa, where they are being manufactured and sold for $8 or $9. The group has helped introduc e 500,000 solar cookers to 25 nations where people spend half their $1-a-day wag es to buy firewood to cook their meals, said Bob Metcalf, a microbiologist who c o-founded the group in 1987. Solar cookers allow them to spend that money on foo d instead of firewood, said Metcalf, who teaches at California State University, Sacramento. Metcalf says he hopes the award will get him 30 minutes with Bill G ates or some other investor to spread the gospel of the CooKit, which could be u sed by "2.5 billion people today" who rely on wood, charcoal or animal dung to c ook meals. Metcalf also invented the Water Pasteurization Indicator -- a reusabl e sealed test tube with wax that melts when food or water has been pasteurized a t 149 degrees Fahrenheit. "It takes about 90 minutes in the sun," he said. For m ore information, go to www.solarcookers.org. Note: For how to easily help several families a year pull out of poverty in thir d world countries, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/051023microcredit

Engineers Create Vehicle that Travels from Vancouver to Halifax on a Gallon of G as 2006-06-20, PHYSORG.COM http://www.physorg.com/news70040977.html A team of engineering students from The University of British Columbia has built a vehicle so efficient that it could travel from Vancouver to Halifax on a gall on of gasoline. The futuristic-looking, single-occupancy vehicle won top prize a t a recent international competition, marking the UBC team's fourth win in as ma ny years. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Supermileage Competition too k place June 9 in Marshall, Michigan. Forty teams from Canada, the U.S. and Indi a competed in designing and building the most fuel-efficient vehicle. 'We achiev ed this level of efficiency by optimizing many aspects of the vehicle design, in cluding: aerodynamics, light-weight construction, a small displacement engine (5 4 cc), and conservative driving habits,' says Team Captain Kevin Li. The UBC des ign...achieved 3,145 miles per US gallon. Supermileage...is an annual student co mpetition that challenges students to design, build, and drive a single person v ehicle (powered solely by a gasoline engine) to achieve the best fuel mileage po ssible. The vehicle must be powered by only an internal combustion engine, with no assistance from electric motors or human propulsion. Note: Why don't we see articles like this in the mainstream media? Even if this vehicle is ultra lightweight and has a top speed of only 30 mph, why can't we de sign heavier, faster cars which get just 10% of what this car got? For answers t o this question, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/050711carmileageaveragempg

Saudis warn of shortfalls as oil hits $61 2005-07-06, Financial Times http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e0cdc282-ee47-11d9-98e5-00000e2511c8.html Oil prices hit new record highs above $61 a barrel on Thursday, driven by shortterm supply fears as the first hurricane of the season threatened crude producti on and refinery operations in the Gulf of Mexico. But private warnings also poin t to a worsening long-term outlook, with Saudi officials saying that the Organis ation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will be unable to meet projected west ern demand in 10 to 15 years. Senior Saudi energy officials have privately warne d US and European counterparts that Opec would have an extremely difficult time eting that demand. Saudi Arabia calculates there is a 4.5m b/d gap between what the world needs and what the kingdom can provide.

me

Kissinger warns of energy conflict 2005-06-02, MSNBC http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?Feed=FT&Date=20... Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, on Wednesday warned that the glob al battle for control of energy resources could become the modern equivalent of the 19th century "great game" the conflict between the UK and Tsarist Russia for supremacy in central Asia. "The great game is developing again," he told a meet ing of the US-India Business Council. "The amount of energy is finite, up to now in relation to demand, and competition for access to energy can become the life and death for many societies. It would be ironic if the direction of pipelines and locations become the modern equivalent of the colonial disputes of the 19th century." The two nuclear superpowers, the US and Soviet Union, navigated the co ld war because they made "the same calculations", Mr Kissinger said. "When nucle ar weapons spread to 30 or 40 countries and each conducts a calculation, with le ss experience and different value systems, we will have a world of permanent imm inent catastrophe." Note: Here is one of the key power players, openly promoting their plan: keep pe ople polarized and in a state of perpetual fear (you must believe the world is i n a state of permanent imminent catastrophe). For an excellent summary of the pl ans of the power elite and what we can do about it, click here.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Company Starts Small 2006-07-24, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=2224856 It's a dream that's been pursued for years: Mass-producing affordable hydrogen-p owered cars that spew just clean water from their tailpipes. So Shanghai's Horiz on Fuel Cell Technologies decided to start small. Really small. This month, it w ill begin sales of a tiny hydrogen fuel-cell car, complete with its own miniatur e solar-powered refueling station. The toy is a step toward introducing the tech nology to the public and making it commercially viable. Though prototype hydroge n cars exist, they're far from practical or affordable. Horizon's H-Racer and fu eling station solve those problems on a very small scale. The price: $80 for the set. The toy's fuel cell, like those envisioned for real cars, relies on an ele ctrochemical reaction...that powers the gadget's electric motor. The only byprod ucts are electricity, heat and water. The fuel is supplied by its alarm clock-si zed refueling station. A small electric current, generated by the solar cells, e

xtracts hydrogen from water. With the flip of a switch, the car takes off and ru ns for 4 minutes on a full tank. At Horizon's headquarters...Wankewycz and forme r Eastman Chemical Co. colleague George Gu demonstrated prototypes of a hydrogen -powered electric bicycle and a golf caddy they are converting from lead acid ba tteries to hydrogen power. "We're working on the smaller things until the infras tructure is ready," he says. On the Net: Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies: http:// www.horizonfuelcell.com Note: If governments and car companies poured millions into researching this tec hnology, rapid progress could be made. For why this cutting-edge company is loca ted in Shanghai and why they have only $3 million to work with, take a look at h ttp://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources

Mystery Robot Said to Solve Crimes, Find Mines in Chile 2006-05-23, National Geographic http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060522-robots.html Manuel Salinas, a 39-year-old inventor, claims he has built a machine that has e xtraordinary capabilities for finding buried objects. And now that university la b tests seem to confirm that his robot works, mining and oil corporations are fl ooding him with business plans. How this machine functions is still an "industri al secret," Salinas said. But ask him for proof that it works and he'll hand you a pile of press clippings on the device, called Geo-Radar or Arturito (a play o n the name of Star Wars robot R2-D2). In September 2005 Salinas announced that h e had found gold and buried treasure on the Juan Fernndez Islands...off the coast of Chile. Recently, Salinas asked a Chilean university to study the machine and put the questions surrounding it to rest. In early May the results came in, and the Geo-Radar jumped back into local headlines. University investigators announ ced laboratory and field tests indicating that the Geo-Radar technology is capab le of quickly finding copper deposits, petroleum, and gold bullion at depths of up to 600 feet (283 meters). "This reduces the time of exploration from three mo nths to one day," said engineering professor Ricardo Neira Navarro at a press co nference in Santiago, the national capital. "I built this machine to find buried antipersonnel mines," explained Salinas. When he finished building the machine in 2004 and ran field tests, Salinas says, the machine surprised him with its ab ilities to find water, petroleum, and buried metals.

Battery power as good as gas? 2006-03-06, Toronto Star (one of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... A much-shrouded idea could give portable power a real charge, for a change -- an d change, well, everything. Imagine the day when cellphones charge up in seconds , laptop batteries never degrade, and electric cars have the same power, driving range and purchase price as their gas-powered cousins. Such a battery -- a supe rbattery -- doesn't exist today, but a tiny company out of Austin, Texas, is get ting remarkably close, and the possibilities have caught the attention of the U. S. army, the former vice-chairman of Dell Computer, and one of the most respecte d venture capital firms in North America. Among EEStor's claims is that its "ele ctrical energy storage unit" could pack nearly 10 times the energy punch of a le ad-acid battery of similar weight and, under mass production, would cost half as much. It also says its technology more than doubles the energy density of lithi um-ion batteries in most portable computer and mobile gadgets today, but could b e produced at one-eighth the cost. The company...is weeks away from seeking inde pendent verification of the product's performance. Adding more intrigue to the s tory is the fact that Colin Powell, the former U.S. secretary of state, joined K

leiner Perkins last summer as a strategic partner.

A Rising Wave Of Tidal Power 2006-11-04, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/04/business/main2153298.shtml In the quest for oil-free power, a handful of small companies are staking claims on the boundless energy of the rising and ebbing sea. The technology that would draw energy from ocean tides...is largely untested, but several newly-minted co mpanies are reserving tracts of water from Alaska's Cook Inlet to Manhattan's Ea st River in the belief that such sites could become profitable sources of electr icity. The site that is furthest along in testing lies in New York's East River, between Manhattan and Queens, where Verdant Power plans to install two underwat er turbines this month. If all goes well, New York-based Verdant could have up t o 300 turbines in the river by 2008. The turbines would produce as much as 10 me gawatts of power, or enough electricity for 8,000 homes. With 12,380 miles of co astline, the U.S. may seem like a wide-open frontier for the fledgling industry, but experts say interest will focus on only a few. Government and the private s ector in Europe, Canada and Asia have moved faster than their U.S. counterparts to support tidal energy research. As of June 2006, there were small facilities i n Russia, Nova Scotia and China, as well as a 30-year-old plant in France, accor ding to a report by EPRI. Tidal power proponents liken the technology to little wind turbines on steroids. Water's greater density means fewer and smaller turbi nes are needed to produce the same amount of electricity as wind turbines. Wave energy technology is less advanced than tidal and will need more government subs idies...however, the number of good wave sites far exceeds that of tidal. But a few companies are working aggressively to usher wave power into the energy indus try. Note: To understand why the U.S. is moving slowly, see http://www.WantToKnow.inf o/newenergysources.

UFO News Articles Excerpts of Key UFO News Articles in Major Media Below are many highly revealing excerpts of important UFO articles from the main stream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major media websites. I f any link should fail to function, click here. These UFO news articles are list ed by order of importance. For the same articles by date posted to this list, cl ick here. For the list by date of news article click here. By choosing to educat e ourselves on these important issues and to spread the word, we can and will bu ild a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. Roswell Truth Debated 2008-07-04, CNN Larry King Live http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0807/04/lkl.01.html LARRY KING: On July 8th, 1947, Colonel William H. Blanchard, commanding officer of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field released a press statement tha t a flying saucer had crashed ... and that the Army had recovered the disk withi n hours. A second press release was issued claiming that it was nothing more tha n a weather balloon. Carlene Green['s] father was stationed [there]. GREEN: He s aid, "Don't let anybody tell you that the incident at Roswell did not happen. I was there. I saw the spacecraft." They were told, don't talk about it. SCHMITT: [They] threatened physical violence if they should ever talk about this. KING: F rankie Rowe. Her father was a fireman in Roswell. [He] reported to his family th at in addition to a crashed saucer, he saw two full body bags and one living lit tle person. ROWE: He said that they tried to help it. KING: We are now joined by ... Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo XIV astronaut, sixth man to walk on the moon . MITCHELL: All of my experience comes from what I call the old timers. Because I lived in the area ... and because I was an astronaut, some of them wanted to g et it off their chest before they passed on. I eventually went to the Pentagon a nd asked for a meeting with the Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of St aff. A vice admiral said ... I don't know about that but I'm going to find out. [He] called a few weeks later and said he had found the source of the black budg et funding for this project and that he was going to subsequently investigate. [ Yet he was later] told, I'm sorry, admiral, you do not have need to know here. W e knew many of the people, including the ranch where this was discovered, and in spite of all of the security oaths, etc, the talk in the community was ... that it was an alien craft.

Note: For a five-minute clip of this CNN report, click here. For more detailed, fascinating testimony on the existence of UFOs from Dr. Edgar Mithcell, the sixt h man to walk on the moon, click here. For our resource-filled UFO Information C enter, click here.

Debate Over Existence of UFOs 2008-07-18, CNN Larry King Live http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0807/18/lkl.01.html LARRY KING: Bob Salas is a former captain [of the] U.S. Air Force. He was at Mal strom Air Force Base in 1967, where there were claims that a UFO caused missiles to malfunction. SALAS: I was on duty as a missile launch officer. First, I get one call saying that they're seeing strange lights flying in the sky. About five minutes later ... the flight security controller calls down and says he's looki ng at a glowing red object, very large, hovering over the front gate. Within sec onds of that call, my missiles start shutting down. I recall losing all 10 of th em. KING: Bob Jamison you were there too, right? JAMISON: My job as a target off icer was to bring them back up. KING: Is it possible they just malfunctioned? JA MISON: Very rarely does a missile malfunction. Much more rare would be two at th e same time. But never ten. DR. BOB JACOBS: I was in charge of optical instrumen tation at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Our job was to photograph ... every missile launch. [One day] we photographed an Atlas missile raising up out of the fog co ver. The next day I was called into the office. Major Mansmann [turned on] the p rojector. I recognized it as the film that we had shot ... the previous day. Tow ard the end of the flight ... everything was flying along and suddenly ... at ab out 8,000 miles an hour, an object came into the frame, shot a beam of light at the warhead, flew up to the top, shot another beam of light at the warhead ... a nd then flew out the same way it came in. Major Mansmann said ... were you guys screwing around up there? I said, no, sir. And he said then tell me what that wa s. And I said we got a UFO. And he said, lieutenant, you are never to speak of t his again. As far as you're concerned, this didn't happen. KING: Our latest Asso ciated Press poll shows 14 percent of Americans claim they've seen a UFO. Note: For a more detailed description of the experience of both Capt. Salas and Dr. Jacobs, click here. For a two-page summary of other riveting testimony on UF Os from top officials, click here. For a ten-minute video clip of this show, cli ck here. For our resource-filled UFO Information Center, click here.

UFOS: Are They for Real? 2007-11-09, CNN http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0711/09/lkl.01.html LARRY KING, HOST: Our panel here in Los Angeles, Fife Symington, the former gove rnor of Arizona, who in 1997 ridiculed an infamous UFO sighting by thousands of people in the state and later admitted that he himself saw a craft. James Fox, t he filmmaker who is the executive producer of the award-winning feature length d ocumentary "Out of the Blue" -- the definitive investigation of the UFO phenomen on. Colonel Chuck Halt [USAF] the deputy base commander of Bentwaters Woodbridge , a U.S. military base in Suffolk, England. Sergeant Jim Penniston ... a securit y supervisor at that base in 1980. He says he sat with a UFO on the ground for 4 5 minutes before it hovered above him and shot into the air at an unearthly spee d. SYMINGTON: I was a skeptic [until] I saw a wedge-shaped craft of enormous pro portions fly over ... Phoenix. KING: Colonel Halt [what] did you see? HALT: We n oticed three objects. They were illuminated with multiple lights and were moving at high speed in sharp, angular patterns. One of them approached us at very hig h speed and sent down a beam ... at our feet. SGT. JIM PENNISTON: I was there. W

e discovered a craft of unknown origin ... on the ground. We touched it, walked around it, photographed it. KING: Added to [our panel] is John Callahan, the for mer division chief of accidents and investigations branch of the FAA. In 1986 a Japanese pilot said he saw twin cylinders flying in formation within 500 feet of his air cargo jet. He claimed the object was the size of two aircraft carriers and it followed him for over 30 minutes. KING: After this incident, you said [th e] FAA administrator held a briefing. CALLAHAN: When we got all done with our br iefing ... the CIA man stood up and said, this event never happened, we were nev er here, you're all sworn to secrecy and we are confiscating all of this data. Note: To watch the full video of this discussion, click here. For lots more fasc inating information suggesting there may have been a major cover-up of the UFO p henomenon, follow the links in the article above and see our UFO Information Cen ter, which is filled with reliable, verifiable information on this important top ic.

Group Calls for Disclosure of UFO Info 2001-05-10, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98572 A group of about 20 former government workers, many of them military and securit y officials ... stepped forward on Wednesday to say they had witnessed evidence of aliens and unidentified flying objects and called for congressional hearings about such sightings. "These testimonies establish once and for all that we are not alone," said Steven Greer, director of the Disclosure Project, a nonprofit r esearch organization dedicated to disclosing alleged alien sightings. Greer, who organized the program at the National Press Club in Washington, argued that the United States and other governments have known about UFOs for at least 50 years and have been keeping the information secret. Greer said there were some 400 wi tnesses who claim to have firsthand experience with UFO sightings or alien evide nce, and are willing to testify before Congress. Among them is Daniel Sheehan, a well-known Washington lawyer who is acting as counsel for members of Greer's gr oup. Sheehan told reporters that during the Carter administration he found out a bout government-held UFO information that then-CIA Director George Bush, father of the current president, would not release. Sheehan said he was then led into t he National Archives, where he was shown photographs of captured UFOs, complete with what appeared to be alien writing symbols. Former Air Force Maj. George Fil er III told reporters that when he was at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, an alien craft came down, and an alien got out and was shot by a military police man. "Our security police went out there and found him at the end of the runway dead," Filer said. Note: To watch a video of this most intriguing program, click here. An MD and fo rmer hospital ER director, Dr. Steven Greer has videotaped interviews with over 100 military and government witnesses who had personal experiences with the UFO cover-up. To order these mind-boggling videos, click here. For lots more reliabl e, verifiable information on this intriguing topic, click here.

Air Force Order on Saucers Cited 1960-02-28, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50A12F9345D1A728DDDA10A94DA4... The Air Force has sent its commands a warning to treat sightings of unidentified flying objects as "serious business" directly related to the nation's defense, it was learned today. An Air Force spokesman confirmed issuance of the directive after portions of it were made public by a private flying saucer group. The new r

egulations were issued by the Air Force inspector general Dec. 24. Existence of the document was revealed by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phe nomena [NICAP]. The privately financed committee accused the Air Force of decept ion in publicly describing reports of unidentified flying objects as delusions a nd hoaxes while sending the private admonition to its commands. Vice Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter (Ret.), a committee board member and former director of the Cen tral Intelligence Agency, said ... "It is time for the truth to be brought out i n open Congressional hearings. Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officer s are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicul e, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense," th e retired admiral said. He charged that "to hide the facts, the Air Force has si lenced its personnel. Note: If the above link fails, click here for a free copy of this article. Why w ould a former head of the CIA be claiming that Air Force officers are "soberly c oncerned" about UFOs? For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on th is major cover-up, click here

Cattle mutilations baffle Colorado ranchers 2009-12-14, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-dead-calves14-2009dec14,0,... Livestock are being found with eyes, tongues and other body parts cut neatly out . There are no tracks or bloodstains. It's been happening, off and on, for decad es. Manuel A. Sanchez has ruled out every logical explanation for the fate that has befallen the calves on his ranch in southern Colorado. Over the past month, he's found four calves dead in a way that he cannot reconcile with anything in h is 50 years of raising cattle: eyes and ears missing, tongues and genitals excis ed in what appeared to be a series of fine cuts. Mountain lions, bears or coyote s would leave messier marks, he said. And Sanchez found no tire tracks or footpr ints that would suggest a human invader -- nor even bloodstains he'd expect to f ind around the carcasses if someone had butchered them. It's not the first time. In the 1970s, ranchers in eastern and southern Colorado filed more than 200 mut ilation reports, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation reports. The agen cy investigated, even conducting an undercover operation, but to no avail. "It w as such a bewilderment," recalled Tillie Bishop, a state senator at the time. So me people suspected satanic cults. Others grew convinced of an otherworldly expl anation -- space aliens. In the mid-1990s, 27 cattle in northern New Mexico were mutilated in 16 months, the Associated Press reported. Again, ranchers found ca ttle with genitals removed, tongues cut off at the roots, and eyes and ears miss ing. The incisions appeared to have been cauterized, they said. Note: For a powerfully revealing documentary on UFOs with top military and gover nment witnesses, click here.

The Road to Area 51 2009-04-05, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/la-mag-april052009-backstory,0,786384.story Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't off icially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert. Then again, maybe not the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades. It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing th

at the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial bein gs stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by undergro und tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk in fact, five men are, and their s tories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, ... spent three d ecades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft. Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton "T.D." Ba rnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was on e of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-p lane fuels. As for the underground-tunnel talk ... Barnes worked on a nuclear-ro cket program ... in Area 51's backyard. "Three test-cell facilities were connect ed by railroad, but everything else was underground," he says. Note: So the government has been lying to us for 50 years about Area 51 and unde rground research there. What else are they lying to us about? For a more powerfu l, incisive article on this development, click here. And why isn't this getting more coverage? For another report showing major media cover-up of UFOs, click he re.

I touched a UFO: ex-air force pilot 2007-11-13, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/unusual-tales/i-touched-a-ufo-exair-force-pilot/20... A group of former pilots who have recounted seeing strange phenomena in the sky has demanded the US government reopen an investigation into UFOs. Several pilots offered dramatic accounts of witnessing UFOs - including a transparent flying d isc and a triangular craft with mysterious markings. "We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-ear th, conventional terms," said Fife Symington, [a] former governor of Arizona and air force pilot who says he saw a UFO in 1997. "Our country needs to reopen its official investigation that it shut down in 1969," Symington said. "Nothing in my training prepared me for what we were witnessing," said James Penniston, a re tired US Air Force pilot, as he described seeing and touching a UFO when he was stationed at a British air base in Woodbridge. He said he saw an inexplicable tr iangular craft in a clearing in the woods with "blue and yellow lights swirling around the exterior". The UFO was "warm to the touch and felt like metal," Penni ston said. One side of the craft had pictorial symbols. Then after 45 minutes, t he light from the object "began to intensify" and it then "shot off at an unbeli evable speed" before 80 Air Force personnel, he said. "In my logbook, I wrote 's peed: impossible'." A former official with the Federal Aviation Administration, John Callahan, said government agencies discourage inquiries into UFOs. "'Who be lieves in UFOs?' is the kind of attitude of the FAA all the time," he said. "How ever, when I asked the CIA person: 'What do you think it was,' he responded 'a U FO'." When Callahan suggested the government tell Americans about [the] UFO, the CIA official allegedly told him: "'No way, if we were to tell the American publ ic there are UFOs they would panic."' Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information and resources suggest ing a UFO cover-up, click here.

Former pilots and officials call for new U.S. UFO probe 2007-11-12, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3855969 An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials calle

d on the U.S. government on Monday to reopen its generation-old UFO investigatio n as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports about flying discs , glowing spheres and other strange sightings. "Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns ... which cannot be a ssociated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters," they said in a statement released at a news conference. The panelists from seven countries, i ncluding former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or condu cted an official investigation into UFO phenomena. "It's a question of who [are] you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?" remarked John Callaha n, a former Federal Aviation Administration investigator, who said the CIA in 19 87 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska. The panel, organized by a group dedicated to winning credi bility for the study of UFOs, urged Washington to resume UFO investigations thro ugh the U.S. Air Force or NASA. "It would certainly, I think, take a lot of angs t out of this issue," said former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who said he was a mong hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous lights silently travers e the sky near Phoenix in 1997. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For a eight-minute CNN clip on this h istoric event including witness testimony, click here. For lots more media cover age of this and other major UFO events, click here. For their bios, photos, and official statements, click here.

The Lights Over Phoenix 2007-03-22, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/03/22/transcript.fri/index.html#three Ten years ago in Arizona's capital, thousands of people reported seeing a massiv e, v-shaped line of lights. Some government officials later said military flares caused the confusion. But Gary Tuchman spoke with one former governor who's now saying they didn't look like flares to him. GARY TUCHMAN, CNN REPORTER: Fife Sy mington ... was the Republican governor of Arizona for six years. FIFE SYMINGTON : If you had been here ten years ago, and looked at the lights and the view, you would have been astounded. TUCHMAN: Governor Symington is referring to what is now known as the Phoenix lights -- an object videotaped by many and seen by thou sands over several nights in the Arizona sky in 1997. It was described by witnes ses as larger than a football field and silent. The governor, a Vietnam Air Forc e veteran, had never publicly acknowledged seeing it until now. SYMINGTON: I sus pect that unless the Defense Department proves us otherwise, that it was probabl y some form of alien spacecraft. TUCHMAN: So why didn't he say anything then? Pa rtly he says, because he didn't want people to panic. UFO enthusiasts were not a mused, especially since the governor was believed to have seen nothing. But now he's coming out. SYMINGTON: The lights were really brilliant. And it was just fa scinating. It was enormous. It just felt otherworldly. TUCHMAN: Symington will b e talking about this in an updated film about UFOs called 'Out of the Blue.' Gov ernor Symington says he did tell his family, friends, and staff about what he sa w early on. SYMINGTON: I still behind the scenes tried to investigate it, but I got nowhere. Note: To watch this fascinating three-minute CNN broadcast, click here. For more on the intriguing Phoenix lights, click here. For lots more on the powerfully r evealing UFO documentary Out of the Blue, arguably the best UFO documentary ever made, click here. Learn about dozens of top military brass who have publicly te stified on a major cover-up of UFOs and more. For a two-page summary of this pow erful witness testimony, click here.

Method and Apparatus for Tunneling by Melting 1972-09-22, US Patent and Trademark Office http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&... The invention described herein was made in the course of, or under, a contract w ith the U. S. ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION. It relates ... to a method and apparatus for drilling, tunneling and shaft-sinking in rock with particular advantage at hitherto inaccessible depths. The present invention uses the basic apparatus and method disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,357,505 and in Los Alamos Scientific Labora tory of the University of California Report No. LA-3243 (1965) entitled "Rock Me lting as a Drilling Technique." In the existing rock melting devices of the prio r art, a major difficulty which limited performance was that of delivering a suf ficiently large heat flux to the melting face of the drill or penetrator. The de velopment of the heat pipe alleviates this problem in that the use of heat pipes enables the transfer of heat energy from a compact heat source to the extended melting surface of the penetrator at rates high enough to maintain the surface a bove the melting temperature of the rock. The extrapolation of a mechanism usefu l for forming large holes in the earth in accordance with the present invention uses the combination of a refractory rock-melting tool, an in situ heat source p referably a small nuclear reactor and an exceedingly efficient heat transfer mec hanism such as a system of heat pipes to convey heat from the source to the wall s of the drilling tool. Note: This patent shows that government scientists at Los Alamos were using a "s mall nuclear reactor" to drill underground tunnels. Several of the inventors lis ted on the patent worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including: McInteer, Berthus B.; Mills, Robert L.; Potter, Robert M.; Robinson, Eugene S.; Rowley, J ohn C.; and Smith, Morton C.. For photos and more fascinating information on thi s most intriguing patent, click here.

Are UFOs real? Famous people who believed 2009-04-22, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/5201410/Are-UFOs-real-Famous-... The former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell has claimed that aliens exist and their visits are being covered up by the United States government. Mitchell is in goo d company in his beliefs. Here we highlight 12 other public figures who believe that extraterrestrials may have been visiting our planet over the last 100 years . Jimmy Carter, US President from 1976 to 1980, promised while on the campaign t rail that he would make public all documents on UFOs if elected. He said: "I don 't laugh at people any more when they say they've seen UFOs. I've seen one mysel f." General Douglas MacArthur, the Korean and Second World War soldier, said in 1955 that "the next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets. Th e politics of the future will be cosmic, or interplanetary". J Edgar Hoover, hea d of the FBI from its inception in 1935 to 1972, said of a famous incident when flying saucers were allegedly fired at over Los Angeles in 1942: "We must insist upon full access to disks recovered. For instance, in the LA case the Army grab bed it and would not let us have it for cursory examination." Monsignor Corrado Balducci, a Vatican theologian, said: "Extraterrestrial contact is a real phenom enon. The Vatican is receiving much information about extraterrestrials and thei r contacts with humans from its embassies in various countries, such as Mexico, Chile and Venezuela." Professor Stephen Hawking: "Of course it is possible that UFO's really do contain aliens as many people believe, and the Government is hus hing it up." Note: For a concise summary of evidence for UFOs and extra-terrestrial visitors presented by many highly-respected and credible former government and military o

fficials, click here.

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons 2004-10-04, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie "mirror" of ordinary matter -- in future weapons. The most powerful potential energy source presently thoug ht to be available to humanity, antimatter is a term normally heard in science-f iction films. But antimatter itself isn't fiction. During the Cold War, the Air Force funded numerous scientific studies of the basic physics of antimatter. Fol lowing an initial inquiry from The Chronicle this summer, the Air Force forbade its employees from publicly discussing the antimatter research program. Still, d etails on the program appear in numerous Air Force documents distributed over th e Internet prior to the ban. It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive fo rce available in a speck of antimatter. One millionth of a gram of positrons con tain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to t he explosion ... in Oklahoma City in 1995. Officials at Eglin Air Force Base ini tially agreed enthusiastically to try to arrange an interview with ... Kenneth E dwards, director of the "revolutionary munitions" team at the Munitions Director ate at Eglin. "We're all very excited about this technology," spokesman Rex Swen son [said] in late July. But Swenson backed out in August after he was overruled by higher officials in the Air Force and Pentagon. Reached by phone in late Sep tember, Edwards repeatedly declined to be interviewed. His superiors gave him "s trict instructions not to give any interviews personally. "I'm sorry about that -- this (antimatter) project is sort of my grandchild."

UFO pyramid reported over Kremlin 2009-12-18, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/6837200/UFO-pyram... A giant pyramid which appears to be a UFO hovering over the Kremlin has caused f renzied speculation in Russia that it is an alien spacecraft. The object has bee n compared to an Imperial Cruiser in the Star Wars films and witnesses estimated it could be up to a mile wide. Two film clips exist which appear to show the sa me object and footage has been repeatedly playing on Russian television news cha nnels. The shots, one taken at night from a car and one during the day, were bot h filmed by amateurs. The 'craft' was said to have hovered for hours over Red Sq uare in the Russian capital. The clips of the 'invasion' have gone to the top of the country's version of YouTube. The identity of the shape has not been confir med. Russian reports ruled out a UFO but police refused to comment. Nick Pope, a former Ministry of Defence UFO analyst, said it was "one of the most extraordin ary UFO clips I've ever seen. At first I thought this was a reflection but it ap pears to move behind a power line, ruling out this theory." A spokesman for aero space journal Jane's News said: "We have no idea what it is." Note: Go to the link above to view the fascinating videos of this UFO over Mosco w. For a powerful summary of evidence for UFOs presented by highly credible mili tary and government officials, click here.

Out of Space or Out of Mind? 2008-07-28, ABC News

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5451107 Only 12 [people] have ever set foot on the moon, providing them the unique oppor tunity to peer at the Earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away. For many, the experience appears to have changed them. The select group has returned to re gular life and dispersed into a wide array of careers, [and] spiritual and philo sophical leanings. Most recently, NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, a member of the Apollo 14 mission that landed on the moon in 1971, elaborated on his own fluid thoughts on the universe, arguing that alien visits to Earth have been covered u p by governments for more than 60 years. "I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real," Mitchell said. "It has been covered up by governments for quite some t ime now," added Mitchell, who grew up in Roswell, N.M., the location of the cont roversial 1947 incident in which some believe the U.S. military covered up the c rash scene of an alien spacecraft. Alan Bean, who flew the second moon landing o n Apollo 12 in 1967, became a painter after returning to Earth. Astronaut Gene C ernan, who made the last moon-landing in 1972, said he became a believer in the idea of a greater power after traveling to outer space. "I felt that the world w as just too beautiful to have happened by accident. There has to be something bi gger than you and bigger than me." said Cernan. "There has to be a creator of th e universe who stands above the religions that we ourselves create to govern our lives." Note: For an engaging Reuters video report on Edgar Mitchell's recent statements , click here. For more detailed testimony of Dr. Mitchell on UFOs, click here. F or a powerful summary of evidence for UFOs presented by highly credible governme nt and military professionals, click here.

Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona sky 2007-11-09, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/11/09/simington.ufocommentary/ In 1997, during my second term as governor of Arizona, I saw something that defi ed logic and challenged my reality. I witnessed a massive delta-shaped craft sil ently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona. It was tru ly breathtaking. As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively s ay that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I'd ever seen. The incid ent was witnessed by hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people in Arizona, and m y office was besieged with phone calls from very concerned Arizonians. The growi ng hysteria intensified when the story broke nationally. I decided to lighten th e mood of the state by calling a press conference where my chief of staff arrive d in an alien costume. We managed to lessen the sense of panic but, at the same time, upset many of my constituents. I would now like to set the record straight . I never meant to ridicule anyone. My office did make inquiries as to the origi n of the craft, but to this day they remain unanswered. Eventually the Air Force claimed responsibility stating that they dropped flares. This is indicative of the attitude from official channels. We get explanations that fly in the face of the facts. Explanations like weather balloons, swamp gas and military flares. I was never happy with the Air Force's silly explanation. I now know that I am no t alone. There are many high-ranking military, aviation and government officials who share my concerns. While on active duty, they have either witnessed a UFO i ncident or have conducted an official investigation into UFO cases relevant to a viation safety and national security. By speaking out with me, these people are putting their reputations on the line. Investigations need to be re-opened, docu ments need to be unsealed and the idea of an open dialogue can no longer be shun ned. Note: For a two-page summary of UFO testimony by top government and military off

icials, click here.

Plan 9 from outer space 2007-11-03, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/plan-9-from-outer-space/2007/11/02/119361914... In January 1979, The New York Times reported that despite repeated, feverish den ials, the CIA had indeed investigated the UFO phenomenon. The report is said to have so upset the then CIA director, Stansfield Turner, that he reportedly asked his staff: "Are we in UFOs?" The answer was yes. This year a raft of newly uncl assified CIA documents revealed that the remote possibility of alien invasion el icited greater fear than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack. The subject of U FOs ... not only focused the attention of the US government elite for 50 years, but of some of the greatest scientific and military minds of the era. The CIA do cuments show that despite decades of repeated public denials, behind the scenes there raged a series of inter-agency feuds that involved the highest levels of t he US government. UFO files cover everything from "flying saucers over Belgian C ongo uranium mines" to Nazi "flying saucers". A 1953 memo shows that the physici st John Wheeler, while critically involved with Edward Teller in the creation of the hydrogen bomb, was available to the "CIA attack on the flying saucer" probl em. A secret 1995 report was titled: CIA's role in the study of UFOs 1947-90: a diehard issue. Written by Gerald Haines, the CIA's National Reconnaissance Offic e historian, its detailed summary of CIA involvement inadvertently undermined it s "UFOs-don't-exist" conclusion. Although the air force was the agency given the task of investigating UFOs from 1948 onwards, the CIA remained deeply involved. Some of their highlights, quoting directly from the documents, include: "[Since ] 1947 there have been about 1500 official reports of sightings and [of these] t he air force carries 20 per cent as unexplained." Note: For a concise summary of UFO evidence from highly-respected former US gove rnment and military officials, click here.

Are UFOs Real? 2007-07-13, CNN http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0707/13/lkl.02.html LARRY KING: A return to Roswell, New Mexico, where the UFO controversy began 60 years ago with the man who says his father showed him debris from an alien space craft. Dr. Jesse Marcel ... was shown UFO debris by his father, Major Jesse Marc el. Tell us about your dad. DR. JESSE MARCEL, JR.: He was the base intelligence officer for the 509th Bomb Group, which is the bomb group that dropped the atomi c bomb on Japan that won the war. KING: They were based at Roswell? MARCEL: They were. As the intelligence officer, his job was to investigate unusual events. H e found a large area of strange looking debris. This was not remains of a weathe r balloon. He picked up a certain representative portion of the debris, brought it in to Roswell. KING: Julie Shuster ... your father was ... Walter Haut. He wa s public information officer. JULIE SHUSTER: My father ... issued the press rele ase [which] basically said ... we have in our possession a flying saucer. And he used the words "not of this Earth." KING: Julie, did your father go to his grav e believing? SHUSTER: Yes. He was very firm in the fact that he said it was not of this Earth. FIFE SYMINGTON, FORMER GOVERNOR OF ARIZONA: I saw the Phoenix Lig hts along with hundreds if not thousands of people. To my astonishment this larg e sort of delta-shaped, wedge-shaped, craft moved silently over the valley ... d ramatically large, very distinctive leading edge with some enormous lights. I wa s absolutely stunned. It was definitely not an airplane. And it was certainly no t high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation. We have a lot of e

vidence, a lot of photographs, a lot of news media coverage of it. You can't jus t [say] everybody in Phoenix was hallucinating. Note: Isn't it interesting that Roswell happened to be the military base for wha t at the time was the only nuclear-equipped jet squadron in the world? For Dr. M arcel's book The Roswell Legacy, click here. This interview also includes Dr. St anton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who has spent many years studying Roswell an d has little doubt that the military covered up the incident. Note that CNN fail s to mention in the entire interview that Friedman is a respected nuclear physic ist who worked numerous years with top corporations in this capacity. For lots m ore reliable, verifiable information on this intriguing topic, see our UFO Infor mation Center.

Former governor says he saw UFO 2007-03-21, CNN http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2007/03/former-gover... It's not everyday a former governor tells you he witnessed a UFO that he believe s came from another world. But that's what Fife Symington, who served as governo r of Arizona for six years in the 1990s, just did. Symington ... says he saw wha t is now referred to as the "Phoenix Lights." Exactly 10 years ago, thousands of Arizonans saw an object in the sky described by witnesses as larger than a foot ball field with brilliant lights. It was also videotaped by many. Witnesses say it made no noise. Symington was governor at the time, and not only did he never publicly mention that he saw it, but there are many who feel he ridiculed those who did. The governor held a news conference after the sightings in which he cla imed the case had been solved. At that point, a man in an alien costume walked i nto the room. That "alien" was his chief of staff. The creators of a film about UFOs called "Out of the Blue" contacted Symington because they are updating thei r documentary. After being asked questions about the 1997 episode, Symington tol d the filmmakers that he did indeed see the UFO but said nothing publicly, in pa rt, because he didn't want to scare Arizonans. Symington [says] what he saw in t he sky that night was "otherworldly" and he believes it was an "alien spacecraft ." He is a U.S. Air Force veteran who served in Vietnam and is highly doubtful i t was some secret military craft. Note: For a three-minute CNN video interview with the ex-governor, click here. F or the CNN transcript, click here. If you are at all open to the possibility of UFOs, the film mentioned in this article, Out of the Blue, is a powerful, amazin g collection of reliable information and video clips on UFOs which was aired on the Sci-Fi channel and ended up being its most watched episode. To watch this in credible documentary free, click here.

UFO spotters slam 'US cover-up' 2001-05-10, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1322432.stm The suitably sci-fi sounding Project Disclosure ... launched a campaign in Washi ngton on Wednesday. It is aimed at persuading the US Congress to hold hearings o n the existence of unidentified flying objects and extra-terrestrials. The campa ign believes the US Government has known about the existence of UFOs for over 50 years but has been trying to hide it. It was surely the strangest ever news con ference hosted by Washington's august National Press Club. Donna Hare was just o ne of over 20 witnesses, most of them ex-military, and all deadly serious. The b rains behind Project Disclosure is country doctor turned ambassador to outer spa ce Steven Greer. He says there are two reasons for the project: first, to persua

de the US Government to reveal the astonishing planet-saving technology he says it has picked up from super-clever aliens, and second, to stop the Bush administ ration from annoying them by building weapons in space. Despite the impressive m ilitary credentials and undoubted sincerity of the witnesses, Congress is surely unlikely to move on their request for a hearing - unless a space ship lands on, or at least within sight of, Capitol Hill. Note: Though BBC quotes one Army sergeant in this article, they fail to quote so me of the many, credible higher ranking military officers and government officia ls who shared mind-boggling stories of personal experiences with a major governm ent cover-up of UFOs. To watch a video of this highly revealing press conference , click here. For a reliable, verifiable two-page summary of the UFO cover-up, c lick here.

Up, up and away! Scientists levitate mice 2009-09-09, MSNBC/Live Science http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32760311 Scientists have now levitated mice using magnetic fields. Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consist s of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temper ature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float c omfortably in during experiments. Repeated levitation tests showed the mice, eve n when not sedated, could quickly acclimate to levitation inside the cage. The s trong magnetic fields did not seem to have any negative impacts on the mice in t he short term, and past studies have shown that rats did not suffer from adverse effects after 10 weeks of strong, non-levitating magnetic fields. The researche rs also levitated water drops up to 2 inches wide (5 cm). This suggests the vari able gravity simulator could be used to study how liquids behave under reduced g ravity, such as how heat is transferred or how bubbles behave. Note: Remember that secret government research projects are generally at least 1 0 years ahead of any public research.

Russian Navy Reveals Its Secret UFO Encounters 2009-07-28, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,534960,00.html It sounds like the classic science movie "The Abyss" only in Russian. The Russia n Navy has declassified its records of UFO encounters, many of which take place in or around water, reports the Web site of the English-language Russian news ch annel Russia Today. "They are most often seen in the deepest part of the Atlanti c Ocean, in the southern part of the Bermuda Triangle, and also in the Caribbean Sea," said one naval intelligence officer quoted by the Web site. Another incid ent cited involved six unknown objects that followed a nuclear submarine in the Pacific. When the sub surfaced, so did the objects which then lifted themselves out of the water and flew away. In perhaps the most compelling account, military divers in Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake, encountered "a group of humanoid creatures dressed in silvery suits" at a depth of 160 feet. Three h umans died during the ensuing chase. Note: For the testimony of numerous top government and military officials from s everal different countries on a major UFO cover-up, click here.

Missing Moon-Landing Videotapes May Have Been Found 2009-06-30, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,529476,00.html Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, NASA may have f ound the long-lost original Apollo 11 videotapes. Back on July 20, 1969, the raw video feed from the moon was beamed to the Parkes Observatory radio telescope i n southeastern Australia, and then compressed and sent to Mission Control in Hou ston. Because of technical issues, NASA's images couldn't be fed directly to the TV networks. Instead, the grayish, blotchy images Americans saw on their TV set s were the result of a regular TV camera pointed at the huge wall monitor in Hou ston a copy of a copy, in effect. Those images survive, and anyone can see them on YouTube. But the original, sharp, black-and-white tapes that were recorded at Parkes vanished. NASA had thought they'd been shipped to the Goddard Space Flig ht Center in Greenbelt, Md., But a search there a couple of years ago turned up nothing. Around the same time, though, a cache of tapes containing data from moo n-surface experiments from the entire Apollo program was discovered in a univers ity basement in Perth, Western Australia, on the other side of the country from Parkes. According to the Sunday Express, NASA has combed through those tapes and found the original Apollo 11 video footage. "We're talking about the same tapes ," an unnamed NASA spokesman told the newspaper, though he added that "at this p oint, I'm not prepared to discuss what has or has not been found." Note: Isn't it amazing that NASA could lose these invaluable tapes? There are ma ny strange questions surrounding this issue.

Ex-UFO Researcher Details British Government X-Files 2009-06-02, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,524639,00.html Britain's top UFO expert says there's no smoking gun that proves UFOs exist, but he's seen enough evidence to convert him from skeptic to believer. Among the ev idence, says Nick Pope, who ran the Ministry of Defense's unexplained-encounter section from 1991 to 1994, are: -- a cigar-shaped object that passed so close to an airliner that the jet's pilot was heard shouting "Look out, look out!"; -- a USAF pilot who caught up to and almost fired upon a UFO over England; -- a phot o of a UFO that British officials worried might actually be part of a secret mil itary project. To him, there's enough evidence in the files to convince anyone t hat more investigation is needed and that even better material may soon be relea sed. "The French government's 2007 decision to release its UFO files was a major factor in the U.K. decision," he writes, "as was the fact that the MoD receives more FOI [Freedom of Information] requests on UFOs than any other topic." In fa ct, Pope says, the demand for newly declassified UFO files is so overwhelming, t he few staffers the Ministry of Defense has on the subject no longer have the ti me or manpower to follow up on significant encounters. "Investigations are suffe ring because of the workload being put on staff due to FOI," he writes, "but FOI is taking priority because if it fails to comply, MoD would be breaching the la w." Hence the decision to start releasing Britain's X-Files en masse in May 2008 , followed by a second batch in October. "MoD has received over 11,000 UFO repor ts to date and case files on major incidents can run to over 100 pages of docume ntation," says Pope. "The entire process is likely to take 3-4 years." Note: Click here to read Nick Pope's full posting at The X-Journals. Click here to view the Ministry of Defense's declassified UFO files.

A climate solution that's out of this world 2009-05-14, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/05/14/14greenwire-a-climate-solution-thats-... One of the newest energy lobbyists claims he has the answer to climate change: s paceships. The government has in its possession "extraterrestrial vehicles," lob byist Stephen Bassett said. As in flying saucers. Imagine the power source, he s aid, behind a 30-foot wide saucer that weighs the same as a tractor-trailer yet hurtles through galaxies at 20,000 miles per hour. "What is the energy system op erating that craft?" Bassett said. "They're not burning kerosene." Bassett ... i s working for free as a lobbyist, representing the Hawaii-based Exopolitics Inst itute, an educational organization which describes itself as "dedicated to study ing the key actors, institutions and political processes associated with extrate rrestrial life." Bassett said he is less lobbyist and more political activist. " The UFO phenomenon is real," Bassett said. "The E.T. extraterrestrial presence i s real." Bassett's been lobbying about seven months, targeting the science and t echnology, and defense and aviation angles. He added energy to his portfolio in a Senate filing last week. He has spoken to lawmakers in the past, Bassett said, but he's writing off lobbying Congress for now, calling the extraterrestrial is sue "the third rail" of politics. Besides, he and other believers have a bigger name on their list. "Knowing that Congress could not act," Bassett said, "what w e did was focus on the executive branch, the White House." Those who believe the truth is out there have been waiting for someone like President Obama to come c lean about the government hiding information on extraterrestrials, Bassett said. Note: What's highly unusual about this article is that there is not a note of ri dicule. This may be a first for a UFO article in the New York Times. For lots mo re eye-opening, reliable information on this topic, including a Times article in which a former CIA chief describes a UFO cover-up, click here and here.

Former astronaut: Man not alone in universe 2009-04-20, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/20/ufo.conference/index.html Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was part of the 1971 Apollo 14 moon mi ssion, asserted Monday that extraterrestrial life exists, and that the truth is being concealed by the U.S. and other governments. He delivered his remarks duri ng an appearance at the National Press Club following the conclusion of the fift h annual X-Conference, a meeting of UFO activists and researchers studying the p ossibility of alien life forms. Mitchell grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, which s ome UFO believers maintain was the site of a UFO crash in 1947. He said resident s of his hometown "had been hushed and told not to talk about their experience b y military authorities. And being a local boy and having been to the moon, they considered me reliable enough to whisper in my ear their particular story." Roug hly 10 years ago, Mitchell claimed, he was finally given an appointment at Penta gon to discuss what he had been told. An unnamed admiral working for the Joint C hiefs of Staff promised to uncover the truth behind the Roswell story, Mitchell said. The stories of a UFO crash "were confirmed," but the admiral was then deni ed access when he "tried to get into the inner workings of that process." The sa me admiral, Mitchell claimed, now denies the story. "I urge those who are doubtf ul: Read the books, read the lore, start to understand what has really been goin g on. Because there really is no doubt we are being visited," he said. "The univ erse that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting, complex and far-reaching t han we were ever able to know up to this point in time." Note: Astronaut Mitchell has spoken openly of this in the media numerous times i n the past. For more on this, click here. For a concise summary of evidence for UFOs and extra-terrestrial visitors presented by many highly-respected and credi

ble former government and military officials, click here.

UFO enthusiasts call on Obama to release X-Files 2008-11-30, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3536229/UFO-enthusias... UFO enthusiasts are pressing Barack Obama to release classified documents about sightings of alien spacecraft, encouraged by support from within the President-E lect's own White House team. Desperate to see the US emulate the British Governm ent and disclose reported "contact" with UFOs, the enthusiasts have written to M r Obama to ask that his administration [come] clean about the contents of Americ a's "X-Files". They believe they have good prospects of success after public sta tements of support from both John Podesta, who is running Mr Obama's White House transition team, and Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico ... who is exp ected to secure a cabinet post. When he was the White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, Mr Podesta led a project to declassify 800 million pages of intel ligence documents. Gov Richardson, a former presidential candidate and fellow UF O aficionado, has written a forward to a book on the so-called Roswell Incident in New Mexico. He has called for full disclosure by the Pentagon of what really occurred. Only last week a US Air Force pilot, Milton Torres, whose testimony wa s released from the British archives, appeared on US television explaining how h e was ordered to shoot down a large UFO over the UK in 1957 and then silenced by military officials, who told him never to speak of the incident. Note: Podesta has also publicly called for a release of UFO records for years, a lleging a cover-up. See the CNN article reporting this available here. For a con cise summary of evidence on UFO sightings presented by highly-respected former m ilitary and government professionals, click here.

We're not alone, says former Nasa astronaut 2008-07-26, The Guardian (one of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jul/26/spaceexploration The list of those who subscribe to the theory that alien life forms and UFOs hav e visited Earth amid a massive government cover-up is long and varied. But a Nas a astronaut who has walked on the moon? The profile of Edgar Mitchell does not c onform to that of your common or garden UFO aficionado. He holds two Bachelor of Science degrees and a doctorate in aeronautics from the prestigious and not exa ctly tree-huggy Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with Alan Shepard, he holds the record for the longest moon walk - for nine hours on February 9 197 1 as part of the Apollo 14 mission, making him the sixth man to walk on the moon . "There's not much question at all that there is life throughout the universe. I'm totally sure we are not alone." Mitchell said he had intelligence "that we h ave been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real - though it's bee n covered up by governments for the last 60 years or so". In a [NASA] statement, the agency said: "Nasa does not track UFOs. Dr Mitchell is a great American, bu t we do not share his opinion on this issue." Note: For an engaging Reuters video report on this, click here. For more detaile d testimony of Dr. Mitchell on UFOs, click here. For a powerful summary of evide nce for UFOs presented by highly credible government and military professionals, click here.

"There are alien bases on earth"

2008-07-10, BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/content/articles/2008/07/10/timothy_good_feat... Timothy Good is considered one of the world's leading experts on the UFO phenome non. For more than 40 years he has studied the controversial subject, having int erviewed thousands of witnesses worldwide, many from military, governmental and scientific backgrounds. Timothy has written numerous best-selling books on UFOs and aliens - which he calls 'the most highly classified subject on earth' - and has acted as a consultant to several US Congress investigations into the phenome non. An international lecturer, in January 1989 following the collapse of the So viet Union, Timothy became the first UFO researcher from the west to be intervie wed on Russian television. With UFO fever sweeping Britain, Timothy Good spoke l ive to BBC WM on Wednesday 9th July 2008. In highlights, Timothy discussed: * Th e declassification of thousands of government documents relating to UFO's on May 2008 and what this means. * His belief that aliens are here on earth - in bases dotted around the planet - and how world governments have been - and may still be - in liaison with them. * How the west has secretly developed advanced weapon ry to deal with a possible interstellar threat. * How the United States and Brit ish governments have secretly spent millions of pounds attempting to solve the U FO mystery and that it is 'the most highly classified subject on earth'. Note: The 14-minute audio excerpt available at the link above is quite good.

Inside the Black Budget 2008-04-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/science/01patc.html?ex=1364702400&en=f406ed... Skulls. Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Snakes. Swords. Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. A dragon holding the Earth in its claws. No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy. It is ... part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon s classified, or black, budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy armies of high-tech warriors. [A new] book offers a glimpse of this dark world through a revealing lens patches t he kind worn on military uniforms. Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer fin ishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has man aged to document some of this hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reve al a bizarre mix of high and low culture. Oderint Dum Metuant, reads a patch for a n Air Force program that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence , according to Mr. Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first -century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates Let them hate so lo ng as they fear. Wizards appear on several patches. The one hurling lightning bol ts comes from a secret Air Force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas in a secluded valley. Mr. Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separat e star as a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced air craft and, U.F.O. buffs say, captured alien spaceships. What sparked his interes t, Mr. Paglen recalled, were Vice President Dick Cheney s remarks as the Pentagon and World Trade Center smoldered. We ve got to spend time in the shadows, Mr. Cheney said. It s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, t o achieve our objective. Note: The webpage at the link above includes color photos of several of these re vealing patches. To read reviews or purchase the book by Trevor Paglen, I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me, click here.

New UFO Sighting Reported In Stephenville Texas 2008-02-12, washingtonpost.com

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/offbeat/2008/02/new_ufo_sighting_reported_in_s... The truth may be out there, but, when it comes to UFO stories, it is sure hard t o find. Conjecture breeds conspiracy theories. Any official denial can be labele d a cover-up. In the end, it often boils down to a he-said-she-said scenario. Su ch is the case in Stephenville, Texas, a small, rural community thrust into the spotlight after several unexplained disturbances in January. Though that spotlig ht has now faded, the town remains altered. Some members of the community want t o move on; others cannot let go. And some, if you believe them, say that UFOs ar e still there. According to Angelia Joiner, the reporter who wrote the original UFO stories, there was another UFO sighting on Saturday. "If the military is tes ting a secret military device, why do they keep doing it here?" she asked me. "I f it's not a secret why do they keep scaring the bejesus out of people?" Adding a further wrinkle to this story, Joiner was fired from The Empire-Tribune a week ago. She claims she had been told to back off the story and thinks the town's " upper crust" was "embarrassed" by all the attention. The Empire-Tribune has avoi ded comment, which of course only fans the flames of the conspiracy theories. Fo r its part, the military has done itself no favors, first denying that it had an y aircraft in the area, then flip-flopping a few days later -- after more witnes ses came forward. A spokesperson blamed internal miscommunication for the mix-up . Others, including CNN's Larry King, have asked whether it wasn't a cover-up. B ut who can we believe? The truth remains unidentified. Note: As revealed in this commentary, the courageous reporter, Angelia Joiner, w ho gave the Stephenville UFO story legs and led to more sales of her newspaper t han ever before, has now been fired. To read highly revealing information about this bizarre twist, click here and here.

Dead Airman's Affidavit: Roswell Aliens Were Real 2007-07-03, FOX News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287643,00.html Sixty years ago ... military authorities issued a press release, which began: "T he many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the int elligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc." The headlines scr eamed: "Flying Disc captured by Air Force". Yet, just 24 hours later, the milita ry changed its story and claimed the object it had first thought was a "flying d isc" was a weather balloon. The key witness was U.S. Army Maj. Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who had gone to the ranch to recover the wreckage. He desc ribed the metal as being wafer-thin but incredibly tough. It was as light as bal sa wood, but couldn't be cut or burned. These and similar accounts of the incide nt have largely been dismissed by all except the most dedicated believers. But l ast week came an astonishing new twist to the Roswell mystery. Lt. Walter Haut w as the public-relations officer at the base in 1947 and was the man who issued t he original and subsequent press releases after the crash on the orders of the b ase commander, Col. William Blanchard. Haut died in December 2005, but left a sw orn affidavit to be opened only after his death. Last week, the text was release d. It asserts that the weather-balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar. He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies. He wasn't the first Roswell witness to talk about alien bodies. Local undertaker Glenn Dennis had long claimed that he was contacted by authorities at Roswell shortly after the crash and asked to provide a number of child-sized coffins. Note: This article abridged by FOX News was originally published in the U.K.'s p opular Daily Mail. It was written by the staff at the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense (MOD) assigned to investigate UFO phenomenon, Nick Pope. To see his website, cl

ick here. Note also that Walter Haut revealed the cover-up before he died. For m ore on this, click here. For a concise summary of highly credible reports of UFO evidence, click here.

Roswell officer's amazing deathbed admission raises possibility that aliens DID visit 2007-06-30, Daily Mail (U.K.) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=4... [Walter] Haut is the only one of the original participants to claim to have seen alien bodies. Haut's affidavit talks about a high-level meeting he attended wit h base commander Col. William Blanchard and the Commander of the Eighth Army Air Force, Gen. Roger Ramey. Haut states that at this meeting, pieces of wreckage w ere handed around for participants to touch, with nobody able to identify the ma terial. Haut also spoke about a clean-up operation, where for months afterward m ilitary personnel scoured both crash sites searching for all remaining pieces of debris, removing them and erasing all signs that anything unusual had occurred. This ties in with claims made by locals that debris collected as souvenirs was seized by the military. Haut then tells how Colonel Blanchard took him to "Build ing 84" one of the hangars at Roswell and showed him the craft itself. He descri bes a metallic egg-shaped object around 12-15 feet in length and around 6 feet w ide. He said he saw no windows, wings, tail, landing gear or any other feature. He saw two bodies on the floor, partially covered by a tarpaulin. They are descr ibed in his statement as about 4 feet tall, with disproportionately large heads. Another military witness who claimed to know that the Roswell incident involved the crash of an alien spacecraft is Colonel Philip J. Corso, a former Pentagon official. Corso died of a heart attack shortly after making these claims, prompt ing a fresh round of conspiracy theories. Corso's story ... has support from a n umber of unlikely sources, including former Canadian Minister of Defence Paul He llyer, who spoke out recently to say that he'd checked the story with a senior f igure in the U.S. military who confirmed it was true. Note: WantToKnow.info does not normally summarize articles from the British tabl oid Daily Mail. This excellent article, however, was written by former U.K. Mini ster of Defense researcher Nick Pope, and was republished by FOX News in an abri dged form. To read Col. Corso's fascinating tell-all book The Day After Roswell, click here. For a concise summary of highly credible reports of UFO evidence, c lick here.

Former Arizona Governor's Close Encounter With UFO 2007-03-30, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2994569 For six years, Fife Symington was governor of Arizona. He now says that while he was governor, he had a brush with something not from America or from this plane t. "It was absolutely breathtaking," Symington said. "I mean when I saw it, I sa id this is definitely a UFO. I have never seen anything like this in my life." I t was an event that is now the stuff of legend, called the Phoenix Lights. There was video taken in 1997 of those mysterious lights flying in formation in the A rizona night sky, and was witnessed by thousands. Symington recently described h is sighting of the Phoenix Lights as "a geometric form with extremely bright lig hts on the leading edge." That's a different story than Symington gave when he w as governor, when he held a fake news conference to present the source of the gl owing lights: his chief of staff in a Martian costume. Symington now says that h e was just trying to keep everyone calm. The Air Force claimed that the famed Ph oenix Lights were nothing more than flares that had been dropped by military air

craft during training exercises. But Symington believes otherwise. "There is alw ays that 5 percent of sightings, which are inexplicable, which leads me to belie ve there are definitely UFOs," he said. Many people agree with Symington. Just t his week, France became the first country to put all its X-files online about 10 0,000 documents were released, describing many sightings over the last 70 years. There was so much public interest, the Web site crashed within two hours. Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a major UFO cove r-up, click here.

French get a look at nation's UFO files 2007-03-22, MSNBC/Washington Post http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17753893 [A] voluntary decision by France's National Center for Space Studies to dump mor e than 100,000 pages of witness testimony, photographs, film footage and audiota pes from its secret UFO archives onto its Internet site for worldwide viewing is an unprecedented move among Western countries. Most of them, the United States included, consider such records classified matters of national security. Within three hours of posting the first cases Thursday morning, the French space agency 's Web server crashed, overwhelmed by the flood of viewers seeking the first gli mpses of official government evidence on a subject long a target of both fascina tion and ridicule. The material dates as far back as 1954. Over the next several months, the space agency will post it to enhance scientific research seeking to explain what the French government calls "unexplained aerospace phenomena." One of the most detailed inquiries involved the report of an Air France crew flying near Paris on Jan. 28, 1994. Three crew members spotted a large reddish brown d isk "whose form is constantly changing and which seems very big in size." As the passenger plane crossed its trajectory, the object "disappeared on the spot," t he report said. Radar signatures confirmed an object of the same size and locati on described by the crew and led investigators to conclude that "the phenomenon is not explained to date and leaves the door open to all the assumptions." Note: Why do governments keep information on UFOs secret for reasons of national security? For highly reliable information from high-level government officials revealing a major cover-up of UFOs, click here. For a four-minute video clip of government witnesses to the UFO cover-up, click here.

Have We Visitors From Space? 1952-04-07, Life magazine http://books.google.com/books?id=ElYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=%22four+yea... For four years the U.S. public has wondered [about] the strange and insistent ta les of eerie objects streaking across American skies. Last week the U.S. Air For ce made known to LIFE the following facts: As a result of continuing flying sauc er reports the Air Force maintains constant intelligence investigation and study of unidentified aerial objects. A policy of positive action has been adopted to find out, as soon as possible, what is responsible for observations that have b een made. For the first time the Air Force (while in no way identifying itself w ith any particular conclusions) has opened its files for study. Out of this exha ustive inquiry these propositions seem firmly shaped by the evidence: * 1. Disks , cylinders and similar objects of geometrical form, luminous quality and solid nature for several years have been, and may be now, actually present in the atmo sphere of the earth. * 2. Globes of green fire also, of a brightness more intens e than the full moon's, have frequently passed through the skies. * 3. These obj ects cannot be explained by present science as natural phenomena -- but solely a

s artificial devices, created and operated by a high intelligence. * 4. Finally, no power plant known or projected on earth could account for the performance of these devices. Note: This is a copy of the Apr. 7, 1952 Life magazine article as reproduced by Google at the link above. Another copy of the article with several letters to th e editor added at the bottom is available here.

Vatican Looks to Heavens for Signs of Alien Life 2009-11-10, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=9047492 Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Cath olic Church. "The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhe re in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said th e Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory . Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results ... of a five-day conference tha t gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos. The Church of Rome's views have shifted radically throu gh the centuries since Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stak e as a heretic in 1600 for speculating, among other ideas, that other worlds cou ld be inhabited. Funes told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that believin g the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a fai th in God. "How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere? Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even in telligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we c annot put limits on God's creative freedom." Funes maintained that if intelligen t beings were discovered, they would also be considered "part of creation."

Encore: UFO Hunters Investigate Sightings 2008-07-13, CNN Larry King Live http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0807/13/lkl.01.html LARRY KING: Tonight, UFOs over Texas -- where were they heading? Radar shows som ething was headed very fast in the direction of Crawford. Could it have been an alien aircraft or a super secret military mission? What the heck has been going on in the skies over Stephenville, Texas? It's a small town not too far from Pre sident Bush's Crawford ranch. And earlier this year, Stephenville became ground zero for the biggest mass UFO sighting since the 1997 lights over Phoenix phenom enon. A guest in Stephenville is Constable Lee Roy Gaitan. CONSTABLE LEE ROY GAI TAN: It was already dark ... as I'm returning back into the house, off to the so uthwest sky I see a red orb. The red orb was round, very large, I'd say probably 500 yards away. As I focused, it disappeared. To my surprise, it reappeared sec onds later. Again, I just saw it for just a couple of seconds and it vanished. I knew it wasn't normal. I looked in the direction of the southwest sky. I no lon ger could see these red orbs. Instead, I saw nine to 10 flashing lights up a lit tle further west, I'd say probably 3,000 feet up in the air. These lights were b ouncing around, not staying still. They were very bright. I went to the car and got my binoculars. These lights shot off to the southeast sky at a blazing speed . They were out of sight within two or three seconds. I don't know what I saw. I do know that shortly after seeing these lights disappear, I did see two jets fl y over, traveling in the path of these lights. I don't know if it was part of an experiment, military or what. But I clearly saw and heard the jets. I didn't he

ar any sound when I saw the lights. Note: To watch the video of this interview, click here.

How to crack a case from the UFO files 2008-05-15, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24636796/ Consider one of the most sensational UFO stories in Soviet history [the Minsk UF O sighting] has been enshrined in world "ufology" as a classic that cannot be ex plained in any prosaic terms. A passenger jet is flying north on Sept. 7, 1984, near Minsk, in present-day Belarus. Suddenly, at 4:10 a.m., the flight crew noti ces a glowing object out their forward right window. In the 10 minutes that foll ow, the object changes shape, zooms in on the aircraft, plays searchlights on th e ground beneath it, and envelops the airliner in a mysterious ray of light that fatally injures one of the pilots. Other aircraft in the area, alerted by air t raffic control operators who are watching the UFO on radar, also see it. A leadi ng Russian UFO expert, Vladimir Azhazha, reported that as a result of the encoun ter the co-pilot "had a serious mental derangement the encephalogram of his brai n was not of an 'earthly' character, as he lost memory for long periods of time. " Note: This article is trying to debunk this event, yet in doing so it reveals a fascinating occurrence. The "explanation" used to debunk the Minsk sighting is a lmost more unbelievable than the UFO claim. If you read the article, ask yoursel f how the explanation given would cause the fatal injury of one of the pilots an d mental derangement of another. This MSNBC page has a fascinating video on UFOs , "Do UFOs Really Exist?"

What Kucinich Saw: Witnesses Describe His Close Encounter 2008-01-02, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119923872081461417.html What exactly did Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich see hovering above actress Shirley MacLaine's house 25 years ago? Now, after keeping quiet about the incid ent for a quarter of a century, the two people who say they were at Mr. Kucinich 's side that evening have come forward to describe an event which they say left them convinced that there's intelligent life in outer space. "At no time did I f eel afraid, even though I felt very small," says ... Paul Costanzo. "I sensed th at I was in the presence of a greater technology and intelligence." The close en counter ... took place in September 1982 at Ms. MacLaine's former home in Graham , Wash. [Kucinich] ... lived there for the better part of a year. Also in reside nce was Mr. Costanzo, a Juilliard-trained trumpet player and jujitsu black belt, who worked as Ms. MacLaine's assistant, personal trainer and bodyguard. Mr. Cos tanzo's girlfriend at the time ... was visiting when the UFO incident took place . The day was strange from the start. For hours, Mr. Kucinich, Mr. Costanzo and his companion noticed a high-pitched sound. "There was a sense that something ex traordinary was happening all day," says the girlfriend. Mr. Kucinich spotted a light in the distance, to the left of Mount Rainier. What they saw in the far di stance, according to both witnesses, was a hovering light, which soon divided in to two, and then three. After a few minutes, the lights moved closer and it beca me apparent that they were actually three charcoal-gray, triangular craft, flyin g in a tight wedge. The craft approached to within 200 yards, suspended over the field just beyond the swimming pool. Both witnesses say it emitted a quiet, thr obbing sound -- nothing like an airplane engine. The craft held steady in midair , for perhaps a minute, then sped away, Mr. Costanzo says. "Nothing had landed,"

he says. "No strange beings had disembarked. No obvious messages were beamed do wn. When they were completely out of sight, we all looked at each other disbelie ving what we had seen." Note: This article amazingly was published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal!

'Out of the Blue': Do Aliens Exist? 2007-07-06, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=3349575 It's an age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? Now, 60 years after the reported crash of a UFO in Roswell, N.M., and with the French government releasi ng its UFO archives, there are new efforts to prove alien spacecrafts really exi st. James Fox, the producer of [the documentary] Out of the Blue, says that alie ns are out there. He also believes that they have incredible technical ability, saying that they can "fly rings around our fastest jets." Out of the Blue is an attempt to weed out the wackos and present credible witnesses who say they saw w hat looked like alien spacecraft. Witnesses like former President Carter, who sa id, "I saw one, but I don't know where. It just disappeared." And Mercury astron aut Gordon Cooper, who says he saw "this typical saucer shape, double-cylindrica l shape, metallic." The subject of UFOs is one of those things that never gets a satisfactory answer, and never quite seems to go away. The documentary begins w ith an ... incident that occurred in Phoenix in March 1997, known as the "Phoeni x Lights." Hundreds and possibly thousands of people, many of them looking at th e Hale-Bopp comet, reported seeing an array of lights and an enormous delta-shap ed craft. The first report of a strange flying object came about 8:20 p.m. from a former police officer in Paulden, Ariz. Over the next 40 minutes, people gave similar reports of an object along a 20-mile route south to Phoenix and Tempe. A mong other claims, Fox focuses on a 1980 report of UFO sightings at an American air force base in England the so-called "Bentwaters" incident. Three former Air Force security officers told Fox about actually touching a small, strange craft that landed outside the base. Note: To watch the engaging 15-minute clip of this ABC News report, click here. For media articles on the Phoenix Lights, click here. To watch the full astoundi ng documentary Out of the Blue free online, click here.

'I finally concluded - UFOs are, in fact, real' 2007-03-27, National Post (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/editorialsletters/story.html?id=14912... Mary Vallis and the National Post have contributed to a new era of openness rega rding UFOs. Her coverage of the disclosure by former Arizona governor Fife Symin gton -- that he witnessed the Phoenix Lights on March 13, 1997 -- is Earth-shatt ering news, to say the least. Mr. Symington now joins the ranks of astronauts, p ilots and highly placed political figures who have demanded governments speak op enly to the reality of the extraterrestrial presence on the planet. This group i ncludes former Canadian minister of defence Paul Hellyer ... Lord Hill-Norton Br itish Admiral of Fleet; U.S. presidents Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter ... astronaut s Gordon Cooper ... and Edgar Mitchell, all of whom have demanded governments sp eak openly to the reality of the extraterrestrial presence on the planet. Each o f these figures has made a call for an end to the secrecy and truth embargo surr ounding the certainty of ET issue. Will our government break ranks with the U.S. government and follow the lead of France in releasing its files on UFOs and the non-correlated target reports catalogued by pilots and radar reports within the

Canadian-American co-terminus agency NORAD? Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on UFOs, see our UFO Information Center.

'Rita Cosby Live and Direct' with Dan Aykroyd, UFO specialists 2006-05-31, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13083821/ Dan Aykroyd played an alien in 'The Coneheads,' but now he says he believes in U FOs. For the very first time, Aykroyd is sharing his experiences in a new DVD ca lled 'Dan Aykroyd: Unplugged on UFOs.' COSBY: Dan, do you believe that there's a massive government cover-up about UFOs? AYKROYD: I think [UFOs are] here, and I think some want to make life on this planet better, to end violence and end abu se of our environment. COSBY: We re joined by...Dr. Bruce Maccabee. He is a Ph.D. with the Mutual UFO Network. And with me here in the studio is Michael Luckman ...the director of the New York Center for Extraterrestrial Research. MACCABEE: The documents show that, as early as the early 1950s, the Air Force intelligence concluded that there was a definite possibility that interplanetary ships were being sighted by literally hundreds of people. COSBY: There's a new poll...that says that 14 percent...claim to have had an encounter or know someone who has. C OSBY: Do you believe that there are UFOs? LUCKMAN: Absolutely. The proof is [in] hundreds of thousands of formerly top secret documents that have been pried out of the government as a result of the Freedom of Information Act. The smoking gu n...lies in about 200 former military [and] intelligence people. I have copies o f videotaped depositions that were done with these gentlemen. I am convinced tha t they're telling the truth about their knowledge, and they're willing to go pub lic. Note: To read the fascinating testimony of dozens of government and military wit nesses, including astronauts, generals, and admirals, see http://www.WantToKnow. info/ufocover-up10pg. For a 10-minute clip of Aykroyd on NBC in Philadelphia: cl ick here. For a May 30 Washington Post/AP article on Aykroyd and UFOs click here . For CNN's interview with Aykroyd, including excellent footage of UFOs, click h ere.

Former Canadian Minister of Defence on UFO Cover-up 2005-12-09, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10439223 Paul Hellyer is a former minister of defense and deputy prime minister of the co untry of Canada. He joins us now from Toronto. HELLYER: I finally concluded, esp ecially after reading a book called "The Day After Roswell," written by Colonel Philip Corso, that unidentified flying objects are, in fact real. I have conclud ed unequivocally that the people who claim that they have either seen UFO's or h ave seen classified documents about UFO's or have seen wreckage from the crash a t Roswell, on or about July 4, 1947, are the ones telling the truth. CARLSON: Yo u laid out these views in September of this year at a speech at the University o f Toronto, and according to the news report I have of the speech, your address.. ."ended with a standing ovation." That implies, I think, that your views are com monplace in Canada. HELLYER: No, absolutely not. Most of them are skeptics. Most of them haven't spent much time researching the subject, and so they're...very similar to the average American. I am hoping that, maybe, we can persuade the Ca nadian Senate to hold hearings and listen to some of the 400 witnesses that...Dr . Steven Greer, has compiled, and hear them [so that Senate members can] make up their minds as to whether or not there is a real threat. Maybe this would be ju

st enough to push the American government, the U.S. Congress or Senate, into hol ding its own hearings, and then getting the United States government finally to come clean and tell us what they are worried about. Note: To watch the MSNBC video clip of this interview, click here.

Mexican A.F. Pilots Film 'UFOs' 2004-05-12, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/12/world/main616937.shtml Mexican Air Force pilots filmed 11 unidentified flying objects in the skies over southern Campeche state, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed. A videotape made widely available to the news media ... shows the bright objects, some sharp points of light and others like large headlights, moving rapidly in what appear s to be a late-evening sky. The lights were filmed on March 5 by pilots using in frared equipment. They appeared to be flying at an altitude of about 11,480 feet , and allegedly surrounded the Air Force jet as it conducted routine anti-drug t rafficking vigilance in Campeche. Only three of the objects showed up on the pla ne's radar. "Was I afraid? Yes. A little afraid because we were facing something that had never happened before," said radar operator Lt. German Marin in a tape d interview. "I couldn't say what it was ... but I think they're completely real ," added Lt. Mario Adrian Vazquez, the infrared equipment operator. Vazquez insi sted that there was no way to alter the recorded images. The plane's captain, Ma j. Magdaleno Castanon, said the military jets chased the lights "and I believe t hey could feel we were pursuing them." When the jets stopped following the objec ts, they disappeared, he said. A Defense Department spokesman confirmed ... that the videotape was filmed by members of the Mexican Air Force. The spokesman dec lined to comment further and spoke on customary condition of anonymity. The vide o was first aired on national television [and] then again at a news conference . .. by Jaime Maussan, a Mexican investigator who has dedicated the past 10 years to studying UFOs. "This is historic news," Maussan told reporters. "Hundreds of videos (of UFOs) exist, but none had the backing of the armed forces of any coun try. ... The armed forces don't perpetuate frauds." Note: To watch TV reports of this sighting on Fox News and CNN, click here.

Government is covering up UFO evidence, group says 2001-05-11, WantToKnow.info/Washington Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/ufosgovernmentwitnessestestify The U.S. government has been covering up evidence of extraterrestrial visits for more than 50 years, an array of 20 retired Air Force, Federal Aviation Administ ration and intelligence officers said Wednesday. They demanded Congress hold hea rings on what they say is long-standing secret U.S. involvement with UFOs and ex traterrestrials. Calling it the "greatest secret of the 20th century," the offic ials, who termed themselves "witnesses" of UFO-related events, described a serie s of military investigations they said they saw: crashes of alien spacecraft, bo dies of alien beings, secret government documents, even James Bond-style "erasur es" of people who knew too much. "The field is filled with hoaxes and scams," sa id Dr. Steven Greer, director of the Disclosure Project, which had gathered the witnesses. "But it doesnt mean all of it is." The 20 witnesses, he said, were a f raction of the 400 people who are willing to testify under oath and under congre ssional immunity about a secretive portion of the government they say has gone o ut of control. Note: For a CNN news video clip on this highly revealing event, click here. For

lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a major UFO cover-up, clic k here.

'Moon Rock' in Dutch Museum Is Fake 2009-08-27, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/08/27/world/AP-EU-Netherlands-Not-Moon-R... It's not green cheese, but it might as well be. The Dutch national museum said T hursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood. Rijksmuseum spok eswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece w as a fake, said the museum will keep it anyway as a curiosity. "It's a good stor y, with some questions that are still unanswered," she said. "We can laugh about it." The museum acquired the rock after the death of former Prime Minister Will em Drees in 1988. Drees received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969, from then -U.S. ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 ast ronauts, part of their "Giant Leap" goodwill tour after the first moon landing. Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch broadcaster NOS news that he h ad gotten it from the U.S. State Department, but couldn't recall the exact detai ls. "I do remember that (Drees) was very interested in the little piece of stone ," the NOS quoted Middendorf as saying. "But that it's not real, I don't know an ything about that." The U.S. Embassy in the Hague said it was investigating the matter. The museum had vetted the moon rock with a phone call to NASA, Van Gelde r said. "Apparently no one thought to doubt it, since it came from the prime min ister's collection," Van Gelder said. Researchers from Amsterdam's Free Universi ty said they could see at a glance the rock was probably not from the moon. They followed the initial appraisal up with extensive testing. "It's a nondescript, pretty-much-worthless stone," Geologist Frank Beunk concluded in an article publ ished by the museum. Note: For more evidence raising questions about the official account of the Apol lo moon landings, click here.

MoD's latest UFO files reveal saucerful of secrets 2009-08-17, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/aug/17/mod-report-ufo-sightings Two terrified youths who ran into a Staffordshire police station were in no doub t they had seen a UFO land in a field near Chasetown after they experienced an i ntense heat when they were walking up Rugeley Road, Burntwood, at 11pm on 4 May 1995. "Their skin turned a glowing red," said the Staffordshire police inspector 's report. "They saw a darkish silver inverted saucer shaped object in a field, which was glowing red beneath. The object was about four houses high in the sky and about 40ft away from them. Neither was drunk or under the influence of illeg al substances and the next day both provided the police with detailed written re ports of what they had seen. The release of the latest batch of the Ministry of Defence's UFO files reveals a hidden British obsession with flying saucers and s uch close encounters. Bright lights seen across Devon and Cornwall, South Wales and Shropshire in the early hours of 31 March 1993 by 70 police and military wit nesses were documented in more than 30 sightings reported to the MoD over a sixhour period. The reports said it was very big, shaped like a catamaran and was c ompletely silent. The head of the UFO section told Sir Anthony Bagnall, the assi stant chief of the air staff, that given the quality of the witnesses the sighti ngs could not simply be written off: "It seems that an unidentified object of un known origin was operating in the UK air defence region without being detected o n radar; this would appear to be of considerable defence significance."

Note: For a powerful two-page summary of evidence for UFOs presented by highly r espected and credible former government and military personnel from many countri es, click here.

How Gary McKinnon became a cause celebre 2009-08-04, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8181100.stm British computer hacker Gary McKinnon's fight against extradition to the US has drawn support from a large and diverse range of influential people. How did his case become such a cause celebre? Mr McKinnon has become Britain's best-known co nspiracy theorist. Mr McKinnon does not deny he hacked into Pentagon systems, bu t claims he was searching for evidence of a UFO cover-up. The American authoriti es see it differently. The 43-year-old is a wanted man in the US, where he has b een accused of "the biggest military computer hack of all time". For the past fi ve years he has been fighting an extradition request from the American authoriti es which want to try him on US soil. If convicted there he faces up to 60 years in prison. Along the way he has amassed a legion of supporters, as diverse in th eir make up as they are distinguished in their own fields of achievement. They i nclude novelist Nick Hornby, film critic Barry Norman, Emma Noble, the ex-glamou r model and former daughter-in-law of John Major, Sting, his film producer wife Trudie Styler and actress Julie Christie. Politicians of all hues have also leap t on Mr McKinnon's case. And pop stars Chrissie Hynde and Sir Bob Geldof have te amed up with Gilmour to record a song of support. In the past six weeks his caus e has been further bolstered by a high-profile campaign in the Daily Mail newspa per. Note: For more on Gary McKinnon's fascinating reasons for hacking into US milita ry computer systems, click here and here.

Aliens exist and UFOs are covered-up by US government, says ex-astronaut 2009-04-22, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/space/5198506/Aliens-... Alien life does exist but the truth is being covered up by the United States gov ernment, former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell has claimed. Mr Mitchell, who was part of the 1971 Apollo 14 moon mission, made the claims in a talk to the fifth annual X-Conference a meeting of those who believe in UFOs and other life forms. He also said he had attempted to investigate the 1947 'Roswell Incident', which some believe was the crash-landing of a UFO, but had been thwarted by military authorities. The former astronaut, 78, said: "We're not alone. Our destiny, in m y opinion, and we might as well get started with it, is [to] become a part of th e planetary community. ... We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there." Mitchel l grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, which some UFO believers maintain was the site of a UFO crash in 1947. He said residents "had been hushed and told not to talk about their experience by military authorities." He claimed he had raised the i ssue of evidence from local residents with the Pentagon 10 years ago. An unnamed admiral working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff promised to uncover more informat ion for Mitchell but was denied access when he "tried to get into the inner work ings of that process." Mitchell claimed the admiral now denies the story. "I urg e those who are doubtful: Read the books, read the lore, start to understand wha t has really been going on. Because there really is no doubt we are being visite d," Mitchell said. "The universe that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting , complex and far-reaching than we were ever able to know up to this point in ti

me." Note: For a powerful summary of evidence of UFOs presented by highly respected m ilitary and government officials, including Edgar Mitchell, click here.

US airman Milton Torres told to shoot down UFO when based at RAF Manston 2008-10-20, Times of London http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4974540.ece The order came straight out of the Cold War manual: "Arm all weapons and fire on sight." For Lieutenant Milton Torres, an American jet fighter pilot based in Br itain, it was the first and last time that he had received such a chilling instr uction. As soon as he scrambled his Sabre jet from RAF Manston in Kent and heade d eastwards, he saw the blip on his radar, indicating the presence of an aircraf t the size of a B52 about 15 miles away, and he prepared to close in for the kil l with a salvo of rockets. But the "aircraft", judged to be hostile and probably Russian, simply vanished. The blip on the radar disappeared. The 24-year-old Am erican pilot's extraordinary experience on the night of May 20, 1957, which he w as officially ordered never to reveal to anyone, has come to light after the dec lassification of another batch of Ministry of Defence files relating to reported incidents of unidentified flying objects appearing in British airspace in this case the only known example of a jet fighter pilot being ordered to shoot down a UFO. Mr Torres, now 77 and a retired professor of civil engineering living in M iami, told The Times that the day after he was scrambled from RAF Manston he rec eived a visit from an American in a trenchcoat who waved a National Security Age ncy identity card at him and warned him that, if he ever revealed what had happe ned, he would never fly again. He took the warning to heart and said nothing unt il 1988 when, through a solicitor with an interest in ufology, he sent the Minis try of Defence a report giving a full account of the incident. Today his narrati ve is released by the National Archives. Note: For a highly revealing summary of key evidence for UFOs presented by respe cted military and government officials, click here.

UK Government Releases UFO Files 2008-05-15, CNN Larry King Live http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0805/15/lkl.01.html KING: Britain's Ministry of Defense has just released secret UFO files on sighti ngs dating from 1978 through 1987. They include live, eyewitness accounts and th e government's response. More files dating from the 1950s and recent events will be released over the next four years. Joining us to discuss this in London is N ick Pope [and others. Pope] ran the British government's UFO project at the Mini stry of Defense from 1985 to 2006. Nick, what do you make of all of this? What's in these files? NICK POPE: Well, this is extremely exciting news here in the UK . It is a massive story. What we've seen is the first step in a three to four-ye ar program to release the government's entire archive of UFO files. We have got some absolutely fascinating cases. A lot of UFOs seen by police officers. We hav e got some cases where pilots have seen UFO. And we have got a really amazing ca se where a UFO was tracked on military radar traveling 10 nautical miles in 12 s econds. KING: Peter Davenport, will this tend to put naysayers away? PETER DAVEN PORT, UFO EXPERT: It's still [hearsay] evidence. I find it interesting that the release follows hot on the heels of the Vatican just yesterday, I think it was, stating that they felt it was OK to believe in aliens and UFOs and life elsewher e in our galaxy. This is an interesting one-two punch. KING: Lieutenant Chuck Ha lt, the only one of our panel, I guess, who's seen one. What do you make of it?

CHUCK HALT, RETIRED UNITED STATES AIR FORCE: I find it quite puzzling. Why is th is being spread over four years? It doesn't really make sense to me, unless the volume is so great it takes that long to preview it. Note: This fascinating interview begins about 3/4 of the way down the page at th e link above. For a powerful summary of other evidence on UFO sightings presente d by government and military professionals, click here.

Seeking UFOs, deep underground 2008-03-28, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ufoguy28mar28,1,3633549.... [Peter] Davenport, longtime director of the National UFO Reporting Center, a non profit clearinghouse and 24-hour hotline for UFO sightings, [is] a full-time UFO investigator and possessor of one of the world's most comprehensive, though uno fficial, UFO databases. The center, in continuous operation since 1970, is known worldwide among those interested in UFOs: scientists as well as people surfing the Web. The hotline [206-722-3000] is posted on various UFO websites, and calls -- as many as 20,000 in a year -- come from people who believe they've seen or experienced something beyond the ordinary, potentially involving extraterrestria ls. If the case seems compelling and is a short flight away, Davenport will inve stigate in person. He takes written reports, records testimony and consults expe rts in specialty areas. Costs can range from $500 to $5,000 a month, depending o n travel. Davenport, 60, is a passionate, cerebral man with a haughty disdain fo r the media. "I do not countenance fools," he [said]. "The work of studying UFOs is of immense consequence to every living thing on this planet. If I sense you are wasting my time, I will be blunt." His life revolves around a question, name ly: "Are we alone in the universe or are we not?" A number of prominent scientis ts and much of the public -- as many as 60%, according to polls -- believe UFOs exist and should be studied. As a corollary, a large number of astronomers belie ve life in other parts of the universe is not only possible but likely. Among th e famous, former President Carter, anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychiatrist Ca rl Jung and astronaut Gordon Cooper reported seeing a UFO or proclaimed a belief in UFOs as representing visitations from extraterrestrials. Note: For a powerful two-page summary of UFO sightings by highly respected forme r government and military personnel, click here.

Intrigue persists over lights in sky 2007-02-25, Arizona Republic (leading newspaper of Phoenix) http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0225phxlights0225.html On a mild springlike evening the string of amber orbs appeared ... that would in the coming weeks make headlines and video highlights across the nation. The hov ering and evenly spaced balls of light would soon become known as the Phoenix Li ghts, an event that 10 years later continues to spark debate over just what was seen that night. In the ensuing decade, the Phoenix Lights would change outlooks , minds and even a few lives. What she was seeing had barely registered when Lyn ne Kitei raced inside to fetch her video camera. Lights, six of them, evenly spa ced in a direct line. By the time she was back on her patio, only three lights c ontinued to shine. She pressed "Record," and those several seconds of tape would become one of the seminal recordings of the Phoenix Lights to be shown on the n ews, TV specials and, several years later, her own documentary. In the decade si nce that night Kitei, a respected physician, has resigned from her position at t he Arizona Heart Institute to devote herself full time to talk about, and furthe r investigate, the Phoenix Lights. For seven years she spent nearly all her spar

e time trying to answer the question that plagued her: What were those orbs, and what did they want? She finished with 750 pages of notes detailing her intervie ws with witnesses, experts and UFO investigators. She condensed her notes into a 222-page book, The Phoenix Lights, where she revealed her findings. Kitei ... s aid she still receives e-mails from fans of her book and her documentary, The Ph oenix Lights . . . We Are Not Alone. She takes no offense at those who call her efforts a waste of time. "That's OK if it gives them comfort. Everyone in their own time." Note: For Dr. Kitei's website on this (including video clip), click here. For th e work of Dr. Steven M. Greer, another prominent physician who risked his life a nd career to expose a major cover-up of UFOs, click here. You will likely be ama zed at some of the top witnesses who publicly testify to the cover-up at this li nk.

NASA Searching for Moon Landing Tapes 2006-08-17, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/15/ap/tech/mainD8JH4N0O0.shtml Red-faced because the best pictures of its glory days are missing, NASA said Tue sday it was launching an official search for more than 13,000 original tapes of the historic Apollo moon missions. Everything from all 11 missions from launch t o splashdown is on the videos. What's missing are the never-before-broadcast cle ar original videos not the grainy converted pictures the world watched on televi sion more than three decades ago. The tapes aren't lost, insists the NASA offici al put in charge of the search. But he doesn't know where they are. The original video, taken directly from the moon and beamed to deep space network observator ies in Australia, has never been seen by the general public or even NASA officia ls. There are 15 reels (three boxes) for just Apollo 11's stay on the moon. "It' s the whole history of the entire mission, of everything that went on." Note: Does this seem strange? If you are ready for something even stranger, see the documentary "Dark Side of the Moon" available free at http://video.google.co m/videoplay?docid=3288261061829859642. Though some claim this is a "mockumentary " on Stanley Kubrick's involvement with the moon landings, consider the large am ount of money that went into making this very professional, sophisticated film. Could it be sophisticated disinformation put out purposely to lead investigators astray? The documentary certainly would explain the missing tapes above. Two Fo x News clips raise more questions. Click here and here.

How to float like a stone 2005-05-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1481009,00.html British scientists have developed an antigravity machine that can float heavy st ones, coins and lumps of metal in mid-air. Based around a powerful magnet, the d evice levitates objects in a similar way to how a maglev train runs above its tr acks. The device exploits diamagnetism. Place non-magnetic objects inside a stro ng enough magnetic field and they are forced to act like weak magnets themselves . Generate a field that is stronger below and weaker above, and the resulting up ward magnetic force cancels out gravity. Scientists have used diamagnetism to ma ke wood, strawberries and, famously, a living frog fly. "That force is strong en ough to float things with a density similar to water, but not things with the de nsity of rocks."

The sightings of strange flying objects found in britain's 'X-Files' 2005-01-22, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=603470 They contain Britain's very own X-Files: thousands of classified documents detai ling credible observations of unidentified flying objects reported by RAF person nel, British Airways pilots and senior police officers. Now under the Freedom of Information laws, files previously held by the Ministry of Defence's special UF O department, known as SF4, are being released to the public. Among the most cre dible reports of a possible visit by extraterrestrial life-forms is one made by an RAF pilot and two NCOs. In July 1977 Flt Lt A M Wood reported "bright objects hanging over the sea". The RAF officer said the closest object was "luminous, r ound and four to five times larger than a Whirlwind helicopter". This account wa s deemed so sensitive to the national interest that the MoD had delayed its rele ase for an extra three years. Some of the other reports are equally compelling. A British Airways Tri-Star on a return flight from Portugal in July 1976 was inv olved in an incident [where] the Tri-Star captain reported "four objects - two r ound brilliant white, two cigar-shaped". The captain was so alarmed by what he a nd the passengers had seen that he reported the sighting to air traffic controll ers at Lisbon and Heathrow. The report says that fighters were immediately scram bled from Lisbon. Shortly afterwards another Tri-Star crew on the same flight pa th reported a similar unexplained sighting. This time they said there was a "bri ght object with two contrails". In another incident in the same month two Tri-St ar co-pilots and five of their cabin crew reported "passing underneath a bright white circular object". The files also contain reports compiled by police office rs of their first-hand experiences of observing UFOs. Note: If UFOs don't exist, why would the government delay release of the documen ts three years? As this article is no longer available on the Independent websit e, to read it in full, click here.

Space pioneer Gordon Cooper dies: Believed in UFO Coverup 2004-10-04, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/10/04/gordon.cooper Leroy Gordon Cooper, one of the nation's first astronauts who once set a space e ndurance record by traveling more than 3.3 million miles aboard Gemini 5 in 1965 , died on Monday. Cooper served on the boards of directors as a technical consul tant to a number of companies in the aerospace, electronics and energy fields. H e also was the vice president for research and development for Walter E. Disney Enterprises Inc., from 1974-1980. In his post-NASA career, Cooper became known a s an outspoken believer in UFOs and charged that the government was covering up its knowledge of extraterrestrial activity. "I believe that these extraterrestri al vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which o bviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth," he t old a United Nations panel in 1985. "I feel that we need to have a top-level, co ordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the E arth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interface wi th these visitors in a friendly fashion." He added, "For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can no w reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of fo rm and composition unknown to us." Note: The second to last sentence in an AP article on Gordon's death refers to a book he wrote: "Cooper in the book said that as an Air Force pilot in 1951 that he chased UFOs while based in Germany."

UFO 'appeared above jazz stage at Glastonbury' 2009-08-18, CNN News http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/08/17/ufo.sightings/index.html An alien with a lemon-shaped head and a jazz-themed encounter with a UFO at the Glastonbury Festival are among hundreds of UFO sightings detailed in the latest batch of documents released Monday by the UK's Ministry of Defence. Fourteen fil es, containing over 4,000 pages of UFO sightings from 1981 to 1996, have now bee n placed on Britain's National Archives database and are publicly available onli ne. The sightings range from lights in the sky to close contact with aliens, and the files contain detailed analysis on some of the UK's most popular cases -- a number of which remain officially unexplained. The files ... shed new light on Britain's own 'Roswell', the Rendlesham Forest sightings of December 1980 in whi ch American air force men saw a series of mysterious lights in the trees at the perimeter of an air base used by the U.S. Air Force. The then government of Marg aret Thatcher was quick to dismiss the incident, but a letter from a former chie f of defense staff in 1985 warned that the affair could prove a 'banana skin' fo r the Ministry of Defence. "The case has puzzling and disquieting features which have never been satisfactorily explained ... which continue to preoccupy inform ed sections of the public," said the letter. This latest release of documents re presents the fourth set of UFO files released since 2008 as part of a three-year project in conjunction with the National Archives. Note: For a powerful two-page summary of evidence for UFOs presented by highly r espected and credible former government and military personnel from many countri es, click here. For excellent information on the Rendlesham Forest case, click h ere.

Are we really alone? 2008-10-21, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=6076967 Nick Pope worked for Britain's ministry of defense - his job to investigate UFOs sightings. There are some cases, ... about 5 percent, that can't be explained. They are genuine unknowns. 11,000 UFO sightings have been reported in Britian si nce 1959. Only now are the details being revealed. Lieutenant Milton Torres was ordered to keep silent about what happened. [On] May 20, 1957, he scrambled his sabre jet from a base in England with orders to arm all weapons and fire on sigh t. Before he could fire, the erratic bright blip on his radar simply disappeared . Any day now, the most contentious file of them all will be opened, the file on Rendlesham Forest, Britain's equivalent of Roswell. POPE: "I have no explanatio n for the Rendlesham Forest incident." It was Christmas night 1980. Guards at tw o US Air Force bases in eastern England thought they saw a plane crash in these woods. They investigated and reported a strange glowing object, metallic in appe arance. It illuminated the entire forest. The object was hovering or on legs. Tw o nights later the lights returned. Lt. Col. Charles Halt recorded this as he wa lked through the dark forest: "Weird. It is coming this way. It is definitely co ming this way. This is wierd. There's something very, very strange." Halt's men recorded high radiation levels here at the alleged landing site. The official ag enda is ... that gradual disclosure has to be the way. When we're deemed ready t o handle the unsettling truth of aliens among us, then all will be revealed. Note: Don't miss this fascinating five-minute video clip at the link above. To s ee the video without commercials, click here. For an excellent website on the Re ndlesham Forest incident, click here.

Could So Many UFO Witnesses Be Right? 2008-09-12, ABC News http://www.abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=5790432 For decades, millions of people around the world have reported seeing UFOs hover ing in their skies. It is a mystery that science has been unable to solve, and t he phenomenon remains largely unexamined. Much of the reporting on this subject holds those who claim to have seen UFOs up to ridicule. "UFOs: Seeing is Believi ng" takes a serious look at the phenomenon in today's world. The 90-minute speci al includes interviews with scientists searching for proof of life beyond earth and UFO witnesses who claim aliens are already here. Building on the original Pe ter Jennings report in 2005, David Muir reports on new sightings, as well as NAS A's current search for life on Mars. The program follows the entire scope of the UFO experience, from the first famous sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 to the present day. Muir reports on a recent UFO sighting in Stephenville, Texas, wher e multiple witnesses reported seeing enormous lights moving in strange configura tions on the evening of January 8, 2008. He interviews some of the most credible witnesses of the sighting and a radar expert who evaluated their claims and fou nd something surprising in the data. Sophisticated animations approved by the ey ewitnesses allow viewers to get a feel for the experience first hand. The specia l draws on interviews with police officers, pilots, military personnel, scientis ts and ordinary citizens who give extraordinary accounts of encounters with the unexplained. Note: For an illuminating two-page summary of evidence for UFOs presented by hig hly credible government and military professionals, click here.

Police chase UFO over Cardiff 2008-06-20, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2160814/Police-chase-... A police helicopter crew gave chase to a UFO after it almost collided with their aircraft near a military base. The pilot was forced to bank sharply to avoid be ing hit by the mystery aircraft as the helicopter was returning to the Ministry of Defence base of St Athan, near Cardiff. The three crew, who described the UFO as 'flying saucer-shaped', then gave chase, getting as far as the North Devon c oast before they ran low on fuel, it was reported. A spokesman for South Wales P olice said: "We can confirm the Air Support Unit sighted an unusual aircraft. Th is was reported to the relevant authorities for their investigation." It was rep orted that the aircraft closed in at great speed, aiming straight for the helico pter which swerved sharply. "They are convinced it was a UFO. It sounds far-fetc hed, but they know what they saw." The helicopter crew are said to have crossed the Bristol channel in pursuit of the UFO, but lost sight of it and had to turn back due to a fuel shortage. The sighting comes weeks after the most comprehensi ve Government files on UFO activity are opened to the public for the first time today and they disclose that even air traffic controllers and police officers ha ve seen mysterious craft in the skies over Britain. The sightings [include] corr oborated accounts from policemen and pilots of Unidentified Flying Objects hover ing above towns and cities. All were recorded on official forms, held by air bas es and police stations, and compiled by the Ministry of Defence between 1978 and 2002. Note: For a two-page summary of first-person evidence for UFOs presented by high ly credible military and government officials, click here.

Vatican: It's OK for Catholics to Believe in Aliens 2008-05-13, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,355400,00.html There could be alien life forms and believing they exist isn't contradictory to having faith in God, the top astronomer at the Vatican said in an interview publ ished Tuesday. In the Vatican newspaper piece, titled "The Extraterrestrial Is M y Brother," the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes said the expansiveness of the universe m eans there could be life on planets other than Earth. "In my opinion this possib ility exists," Funes, the director of the Vatican Observatory, told L'Osservator e Romano. "Astronomers believe the universe is made up of 100 billion galaxies, each of which consists of 100 billion stars. Life forms could exist in theory ev en without oxygen or hydrogen." Funes said that there might even be other intell igent life out there, but believing in its existence doesn't pose a problem for those of the Catholic faith. "It is possible. So far we have no proof. But certa inly in a universe so big we can not exclude this hypothesis," he told the paper . "As there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, so there may be other being s, intelligent, created by God. This does not conflict with our faith, because w e cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God." He said human beings could even consider another life form an "extraterrestrial brother" because it, too, w ould be one of God's creatures. "How can we rule out that life may have develope d elsewhere?" Funes said. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It wo uld still be part of creation." Note: For a fascinating summary of evidence presented by government and military professionals for the possible presence of extraterrestrials here on Earth, cli ck here.

Small Texas town abuzz over reported UFO sightings 2008-01-15, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=4133693 In this Texas farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry ski es, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO. S everal dozen people including a pilot, county constable and business owners insi st they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it. "People wonder what in the world i t is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of time s," said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he s aw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutel y nothing from these parts." While federal officials insist there's a logical ex planation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the gro und than an airplane. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane. People in several towns who reported seeing it over sev eral weeks have offered similar descriptions of the object. Machinist Ricky Sorr ells said ... he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a past ure behind his Dublin home.He has seen the object several times. He said he watc hed it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and wi thout seams, nuts or bolts. About 200 UFO sightings are reported each month, mos tly in California, Colorado and Texas, according to the Mutual UFO Network, whic h plans to go to the 17,000-resident town of Stephenville to investigate. Fourte en percent of Americans polled last year by The Associated Press ... say they ha ve seen a UFO. Note: For a succinct summary of UFO evidence presented by highly credible govern ment and military professionals, click here.

The physicist and the flying saucers 2007-09-01, Telegraph-Journal (New Brunswick, Can.'s leading newspaper) http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/front/article/63487 "If you told me in the early 1960s that I'd turn into a full-time ufologist, I w ould have laughed my head off," Stanton T. Friedman, a former nuclear physicist who was honoured with a proclamation this week by the City of Fredericton, says. "I preferred science and people, not science fiction. But how can you not belie ve?" If not New Brunswick's favourite son, Stan Friedman is certainly among its most famous. For 40 years, Carl Sagan's former classmate at the University of Ch icago has lived in Fredericton while trying to convince the world of the existen ce of invaders from outer space. "I have never seen a flying saucer and I have n ever seen an alien, but I have talked to people who have," Friedman says. He is 73, has white hair and a white beard and chatters at warp speed. "I am still an optimist." An expert in nuclear aircraft fission, fusion rockets and power plant s for space travel, Friedman worked 14 years on advanced and highly classified p rojects for General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, TRW and McDonnell Do uglas, among others. He has given lectures on flying saucers at 600 universities over the last four decades, has testified for Congress and spoken at the United Nations twice and has appeared on television shows around the world. Friedman's scientific background, years of navigating through thousands of documents and h undreds of interviews with witnesses led him to the conclusion that aliens are m ore than a myth. "After a while, you get used to the nasty, noisy negativists an d the ancient academics,'' he says. "And years ago, I got angry at the governmen t officials who were lying through their teeth. It got me started on a crusade, in a way. I'm a good detective when I set out to be." Note: Stanton T. Friedman, Ph.D. is one of the foremost scientists investigating the evidence of UFOs. He has written many books presenting the results of his r esearch. For a two-page summary of witness testimony from top government and mil itary officials on a major cover-up of UFOs, click here.

Roswell UFO Incident: Cover-Up or Sci-Fi? 2007-07-06, KLAS-TV (CBS affiliate in Las Vegas) http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6752807 Sixty years ago one of the most enduring mysteries of modern times burst into th e public arena. It was the Roswell incident, the reported crash of a flying sauc er. The U.S. military says it's all a misunderstanding caused by a downed weathe r balloon, but the official story keeps changing, and the Roswell legend won't g o away. On July 5th, sixty years ago, a New Mexico rancher named Mac Brazel gath ered up a pile of strange debris and headed into town. His find led to an astoni shing announcement by our military that a flying saucer had been recovered. Even the strongest supporters of the crashed saucer can't agree on the basics. And t he U.S. military has really muddied the waters, perhaps on purpose, by issuing f our different "official" versions of the story. For one man, in particular, the search for the truth is personal. Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., Roswell eyewitness, sai d, "It's the degree of strangeness of the material and my dad's excitement that really made an impression upon me. It would be pretty difficult to forget what I saw." Jesse Marcel is a Montana surgeon. In 1947, his father, Major Jesse Marce l, was the intelligence officer for the 509th Bomb Wing stationed at Roswell's A rmy air base, the only atomic bomb wing in the world. "He was the intelligence o fficer for the group, which meant he wasn't a fly-by-nighter. Members of the 509 th were handpicked for their credibility, their intelligence. It was his job to brief the crews that dropped the bombs on Japan," Marcel explained. His father's

credibility is one of the main reasons Marcel Jr. wrote a new book, The Roswell Legacy. Over the years, his father has been attacked as a liar, even a traitor, by those seeking to discredit the flying saucer story.

Roswell UFO Incident Part 2: Surprise Witness 2007-07-06, KLAS-TV (CBS affiliate in Las Vegas) http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6756220 Festivities are in full swing in Roswell, New Mexico, celebrating the 60th anniv ersary of a mysterious crash in the desert that some believe involved a UFO. The U.S. military has told four different versions of the Roswell story over the ye ars but now denies that anything alien was ever recovered. Eyewitnesses say othe rwise. Now, there is new testimony, including that of a surprise witness. A new book, Witness to Roswell, lists dozens of witnesses who've come forward in the p ast few years including military police who guarded the debris field and high-ra nking officers who admit it was a cover up of something alien. In 1947, Lt. Walt er Haut was the base information officer. He issued the release about a recovere d flying saucer, then helped with the cover story about a weather balloon. But H aut saw a lot more. In 2002, he signed a sworn affidavit to be released after hi s death. He died in 2006. The statement admits that Haut handled the strange deb ris, that he personally saw the crashed saucer along with the bodies of aliens - not crash test dummies as the air force tried to imply in the 1990's. Former L t. Bob Shirkey backs up Haut's story. He too saw the debris being loaded onto a B-29. Shirkey's friend Glenn Dennis, the town mortician, says he was contacted b y the base and was asked to supply all the youth-sized caskets he had. The pilot who flew the transport plane saw the wreckage and the bodies but told his wife he'd been threatened to keep silent. Physicist Stan Friedman, who started the Ro swell investigation in the late 1970's, says the military threatened others too. "The military told them, if you ever talk about what you saw, we will kill you and we will kill your family," said ... Friedman. Note: For a treasure trove of hard-hitting evidence of UFOs, click here.

Clinton aide slams Pentagon's UFO secrecy 2002-10-22, CNN News http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/10/22/ufo.records/ One winter night in 1965, eyewitnesses saw a fireball streak over North America, bank, turn and appear to crash in western Pennsylvania. Then swarms of military personnel combed the area and a tarp-covered flatbed truck rumbled out of the w oods. Now a former White House chief of staff and an international investigative journalist want to know what the Pentagon knows, calling on it to release class ified files about that and other incidents involving unidentified flying objects , or UFOs. Ex-Clinton aide John Podesta...was one of numerous political and medi a heavyweights on hand in Washington, D.C., to announce a new group to gain acce ss to secret government records about UFOs. The Coalition for Freedom of Informa tion (CFI) is pressing the Air Force for documents involving Project Moon Dust a nd Operation Blue Fly, clandestine operations reported to have existed decades a go to investigate UFOs and retrieve objects of unknown origins. Backed by the Sc i-Fi channel, the CFI hopes to reduce the scientific ridicule factor in this cou ntry when the topic is UFOs.

Abducted by Aliens: Believers Tell Their Stories 2009-08-17, ABC News

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=8330290 In a small New England town, members of a support group, which boasts a growing membership of 1,500, gather for a "secret" meeting. The group that's assembled f or this meeting is not struggling with alcohol, drugs, sex addition or gambling. They're part of Starborn, an alien experience and awareness support group [for those who believe] they've been abducted by aliens. Nearly half of all Americans and millions more globally believe we're not alone, according to a 2000 ABC pol l. While 40 million Americans say they have seen or know someone who has seen an unidentified flying object, or UFO, a growing number believe they've actually m et aliens. Terrell Copeland, a former U.S. Marine, traveled the farthest to atte nd the "secret" meeting, driving 600 miles from rural Virginia. Copeland's foray into the paranormal began two years ago with a UFO sighting he said was capture d on his cell phone from his apartment. But after the video ... was posted on Yo uTube, he said a strange visitor came to his front door. "I woke up from the nap by the sound of someone trying to enter my apartment," he said. "You could see the door knob moving. And I keep a firearm. My thought was to get up and check, [but] I was in complete paralysis. And I heard a voice through the door say, 'Yo u don't need that weapon. We won't harm,'" Copeland said. "I was in complete par alysis, the only thing I could move were my eyes." Copeland's otherworldly convi ctions are shared by thousands of believers. Hundreds flocked to the national co nvention of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, in Denver this month to share thei r experiences with like-minded believers. Note: In the past couple years, the media appears to be focusing more on UFOs th an before. For a powerful two-page summary of evidence for UFOs presented by hig hly respected and credible former government and military personnel from many co untries, click here.

Huge rise in British UFO sightings 2008-02-09, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/07/nufo107.xml Clusters of up to 100 mysterious objects, bright white lights and strange, trian gular shaped objects are just some of a huge surge in UFO sightings reported to the Ministry of Defence last year. The ministry has opened up its own "X-Files" for 2007, revealing 135 UFO sightings from across the UK. The number of sighting s has shot up since 97 were reported in 2006. In Duxford, Cambridgeshire on Apri l 12, a witness reported seeing fifty objects, each with an orange light, assemb ling in the sky before ascending. Two pilots in different planes above Alderney in the Channel Islands reported the same UFOs on April 23. They saw one bright o range craft, then a gap, followed by an identical object. In the West Midlands i n December, one witness got a shock when a UFO shone a light into her window. Hi lary Porter, from the British Earth and Aerial Mysteries Society (BEAMS) said si ghtings were becoming increasingly common. She said: "There has been a huge infl ux of UFOs. Absolutely enormous. There [have] been these huge formations that ha ve been coming. We have had call after call after call, from business people rig ht down to ordinary folk in their cars. There have been some very close encounte rs that have been quite unnerving for the people involved. We have had other peo ple reporting orb sightings." A spokeswoman said the ministry does not investiga te each and every report. "We only investigate if there have been any objects in British air space that may be military," she said. "Unless there's evidence of a potential threat we don't investigate to try to identify it." Note: For a succinct summary of first-hand reports of UFO sightings by highly cr edible former government and military officials, click here.

Thousands see astronaut Buzz Aldrin on Hornet 2009-07-26, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/25/BA5V18V6J7.DTL "I'm gonna reveal a secret to you," he told reporters. "There's a monolith on (M ars' moon) Phobos. It's about 15 meters high. And aliens put it there before the y came to Egypt to build the pyramids." Like a good comic, Aldrin, 79, kept a st raight face - until they laughed. Note: Was this just a joke or not? For lots more on Aldrin's strange comment, cl ick here. For the testimony of numerous other top government and military offici als on a major UFO cover-up, click here.

Author investigates Roswell 2007-08-05, Philadephia Enquirer (Philadelphia's leading newspaper) http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/montgomery/nabes/20070805_Author_inve... Tom Carey has dedicated the last 16 years of his life to uncovering what exactly happened on July 4, 1947, outside Roswell, N.M. Now, along with coauthor Don Sc hmitt, [he] has published Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-year Cover-Up, do cumenting his findings concerning the alleged extraterrestrial event. "The goal was to write a book for those not already initiated in the Roswell case," said C arey, 66. "We wanted to do something that would interest the general public." Th ough originally rejected by 11 of 12 publishers contacted, the book is in its fo urth printing of 10,000 copies. And curiosity continues to grow. After a recent interview on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM show, Carey said Amazon.com logged 2,0 00 sales the next day. What has made the book so explosive, Carey said, are two previously unreleased "smoking-gun documents." The new testimony includes the he retofore sealed affidavit of recently deceased First Lieutenant Walter G. Haut a ttesting to the bizarre debris and bodies recovered from the crash site. The sec ond, a note scribbled by former Roswell Army Air Field base adjutant Patrick Sau nders ... appears to confirm the Air Force's coverup of the incident. Carey ackn owledges that there are some "kooks" involved in the field of UFOlogy, but his m ission has been to use science to take the fiction out of science fiction. "This is a historical mystery that just happens to involve UFOs," he said. A former a nthropology student at the University of Toronto, Carey said he has always been more interested in the empirical evidence as opposed to intangibles such as alie n abductions and crop circles. Note: For a succinct summary of powerful testimony on UFOs by military personnel and pilots, click here.

How to Avoid an Alien Invasion 2006-06-09, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/08/AR20060608015... An excellent meeting starting today in Hawaii featur[es] a former Canadian defen se minister, diplomats, international law experts and others. The topic? "Whethe r extraterrestrial civilizations are visiting the earth, how diplomacy might be conducted with them and the impact on world peace." The keynote speaker, accordi ng to a news release from the Exopolitics Institute, is former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer, who we're told "will be discussing whether humanity is up to the diplomatic task of achieving peace with extraterrestrials." Another dign itary expected to attend the three-day conference is John W. McDonald , who has represented the United States at "four United Nations conferences" and is now he

ad of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy. His topic, naturally, will be "ho w diplomatic initiatives, some involving private citizens, might be conducted wh en and if extraterrestrials visit earth." And retired Air Force Capt. Robert Sal as will discuss a 1967 incident in which "UFOs shut down a Strategic Air command facility" in Montana and disabled its Minuteman nukes. The Exopolitics Institut e was founded by Michael E. Salla, a professor and researcher in international p eace and conflict resolution at American University from 1996 through 2004. Note: For lots more reliable information on this topic, see http://www.WantToKno w.info/ufocover-up

They're coming. Are we ready? 2005-09-24, Globe and Mail (One of Canada's most widely read newspapers) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050924/UFOS2... This weekend, Toronto will host some of the UFO community's more level-headed ty pes. The day-long symposium, dubbed Exopolitics Toronto, is an effort by the UFO community's more moderate and serious adherents to prod officialdom into openin g its own X-files. To them, official disclosure would not only help to silence t he skeptics, but also the wackier elements of the UFO community, who only make t he issue easier for the rest of us to laugh off and for governments to avoid. J. Allen Hynek, the astrophysicist who set out to debunk UFO claims for the U.S. A ir Force in the 1950s...[found] that he couldn't. Dr. Hynek, who coined the term "close encounters of the third kind" before Steven Spielberg made it famous, wa s among the first scientists to lend credibility to UFO study. "We think we're b ringing forth the best people on the planet," [organizer Mr. Bird] says of the f ive speakers on the bill. Most anticipated, perhaps, is the latest addition to t hat list: Paul Hellyer, a former defence minister...who believes that UFOs exist , and that officials have been too quiet about it. Note: For quotes from many top officials on the UFO Cover-up: http://www.WantToK now.info/ufocover-up

UFOs are real, but the Tories are acting 2005-09-03, Globe and Mail (One of Canada's most widely read newspapers) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050903/NOTEB... Paul Hellyer has been a Liberal and a Conservative, has run for the leadership o f both parties and founded two more, and will announce this month that he believ es UFOs exist. Yes, indeed, the 82-year-old former defence minister in Lester Pe arson's government is to address the Exopolitics Toronto Symposium on UFO Disclo sure and Planetary Directions. "My role is really to say publicly for the first time that I believe that what we call unidentified flying objects are real," he said, ". . . and that people should know more about them and some of the implica tions of the fact they exist and that they've been observing our planet for more than half a century now."

Experts Discuss Possibility Of Existence Of UFOs 2005-07-06, CNN News http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0507/06/lkl.01.html LARRY KING, CNN HOST: Tonight, are UFOs real or fake? Have they actually been he re? Some say the truth is out there. Others say there is no proof at all. Now we 'll go inside some 60 years worth of sensational, controversial reports about pe

ople who say they saw UFOs, and those who even claim they were abducted by them. Investigators on both sides of the UFO question will take your calls. HOPKINS: The most important point here, Larry, is that [in a] conversation I had years ag o with the late Carl Sagan, we agreed that the UFO phenomenon was an extraordina ry phenomenon. What I said to Dr. Sagan was: shouldn't we be saying an extraordi nary phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation? We're not getting an inv estigation here. We're getting, unfortunately, lots of arm chair theorists who s it away from the investigation process, who have actually never really gone out to examine the site, the physical marks, or to do any medical work. KING: I will confirm that, because I interviewed the late Dr. Sagan many times, and he was o pen to the possibility and to more investigation of it.

In the sky! A bird? A plane? A ... UFO? 2007-01-01, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/columnists/chi-0701010141... A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for sev eral minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that i t left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees. A g roup of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that ne ither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously. Officials at Uni ted professed no knowledge of the Nov. 7 event--which was reported to the airlin e by as many as a dozen of its own workers. The [FAA] said its air traffic contr ol tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if control lers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Co ncourse C of the United terminal. No controllers saw the object, and a prelimina ry check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth I sham Cory said. The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena ... was first seen by a United ramp worker who was directing back a United plane at Gate C17. The sighting occ urred during daylight, about 4:30 p.m. All the witnesses said the object was dar k gray and well defined in the overcast skies. They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lig hts. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the s ky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds. A United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 [said] "I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definite ly was not an [Earth] aircraft." Note: The Associated Press ran a very short, dismissive story on this sighting w hich was reported widely. For military and government witnesses testifying to ma jor UFO cover-up, click here.

Poll: U.S. hiding knowledge of aliens 1997-06-15, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/US/9706/15/ufo.poll Nearly 50 years since an alleged UFO was sighted at Roswell, New Mexico, a new C NN/Time poll released Sunday shows that 80 percent of Americans think the govern ment is hiding knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms. While nearly three-quarters of the 1,024 adults questioned for the poll said they had never seen or known anyone who saw a UFO, 54 percent believe intelligent life ex ists outside Earth. Sixty-four percent of the respondents said that aliens have contacted humans, half said they've abducted humans, and 37 percent said they ha ve contacted the U.S. government. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minu s 3 percentage points. As for the Roswell incident, nearly two-thirds of the res pondents to the poll said they believed that a UFO crash-landed in a field outsi

de the New Mexico town 50 years ago next month. Most people -- 91 percent -- tol d the pollsters that they had never had contact with aliens or known anyone who had. A similar number -- 93 percent -- said they had never been abducted or know n anyone whisked away by beings from another planet. But if they do meet someone from a galaxy far, far away, 44 percent said they expect to be treated as frien ds, while 26 percent think they'll be treated as enemies. Note: The wording here can be a little misleading. Stated another way, the above poll shows a full 9 percent said they had contact with aliens or knew someone w ho had, while 7 percent were either abducted or knew someone who was. Over one q uarter had seen or know someone who saw a UFO. These are quite significant numbe rs. For lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a major cover-up o n this topic, click here.

Japan's New First Lady Miyuki Hatoyama Claims Alien Abduction 2009-09-02, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WaterCooler/wireStory?id=8473087 Japan's next prime minister might be nicknamed "the alien," but it's his wife wh o claims to have had a close encounter with another world. "While my body was as leep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book publis hed last year. "It was a very beautiful place and it was really green." Yukio Ha toyama is due to be voted in as premier on September 16 following his party's cr ushing election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party Sunday. Mi yuki, 66, described the extraterrestrial experience, which she said took place s ome 20 years ago, in a book entitled Very Strange Things I've Encountered. When she awoke, Japan's next first lady wrote, she told her now ex-husband that she h ad just been to Venus. He advised her that it was probably just a dream. "My cur rent husband has a different way of thinking," she wrote. Yukio Hatoyama, 62, th e rich grandson of a former prime minister, was once nicknamed "the alien" for h is prominent eyes. Miyuki, also known for her culinary skills, spent six years a cting in the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theater group. She met the U.S.-educated Yukio while living in America. Note: For an intriguing ABC special on alien abductions, click here.

The 30 greatest conspiracy theories 2008-11-19, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3483477/The-30-greate... From the assassination of John F Kennedy to the death of Diana, Princess of Wale s. From Roswell, New Mexico, to Nasa's moon landings. From the bloodline of Chri st to the death of Elvis Presley. From the Moscow appartment bombings to the Ind ian Ocean tsunami. From Pearl Harbour to Peak Oil, the Philadelphia experiment a nd Pan Am flight 103. Every major event of the last 2,000 years has prompted a c onspiracy theory and here we examine those with the biggest followings and the m ost longevity. 1. September 11, 2001. Thanks to the power of the web and live br oadcasts on television, the ... theories surrounding the events of 9/11 ... have surpassed those of Roswell and JFK in traction. The [alternative] theories cont inue to grow in strength. At the milder end of the spectrum are the theorists wh o believe that the US government had prior warning of the attacks but did not do enough to stop them. Others believe that the Bush administration deliberately t urned a blind eye to those warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch wars i n the Middle East to usher in another century of American hegemony. A large grou p of people - collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement - cite evidence that a

n airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not ha ve been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. Many w itnesses - including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time - claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves. Note: For a concise two-page summary of many unanswered questions about what rea lly happened on 9/11, click here.

Unidentified Flying Threats 2008-07-29, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/opinion/29pope.html?partner=rssuserland&emc... On the afternoon of Nov. 7, 2006, pilots and airport employees at O Hare Internati onal Airport in Chicago saw a disc-like object hovering over the tarmac for seve ral minutes. Because nothing was tracked on radar, the [FAA] did not investigate . Yet radar is not a reliable detector of all aircraft. Stealth planes are desig ned to be invisible to radar, and many radar systems filter out signals not matc hing the normal characteristics of aircraft. Did it really make sense to entirel y ignore the observations of several witnesses? The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze all sightings to see if any posed a th reat to national security. Britain and France, in contrast, continue to investig ate U.F.O. sightings. On Dec. 26, 1980, for instance, several witnesses at two [ US] Air Force bases in England reported seeing a U.F.O. land. An examination of the site turned up indentations in the ground and a level of radiation in the ar ea that was significantly higher than ordinary. More witnesses at the same base reported the U.F.O. again on subsequent nights. The deputy base commander report ed that the aircraft aimed light beams into the most highly sensitive area of th e base a clear security breach.The United States ... should reopen investigation s of U.F.O. phenomena. It would not imply that the country has suddenly started believing in little green men. It would simply recognize the possibility that ra dar alone cannot always tell us what s out there. Note: The author of this article, Nick Pope, was in charge of U.F.O. investigati ons for the British Ministry of Defense from 1991 to 1994. For his testimony and that of other top officials suggesting a major cover-up of the UFO phenomena, c lick here. Pope is also the author of Open Skies, Closed Minds.

UFO awareness group really isn't so far out 2007-12-31, Dallas Morning News http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-ufo_31m... Anyone who takes the topic seriously knows about what they call the "giggle fact or." So when Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was asked in a re cent debate about his belief in unidentified flying objects, the North Texas mem bers of Mutual UFO Network weren't surprised when it turned into a political pun ch line. On the other hand, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has also addressed U FOs seriously on the campaign trail. And last month, a group of highly credentia led aviation experts from around the world called for more official investigatio ns of UFOs. Getting their cause into the news and not just as a joke is welcome to people who have felt pushed to the fringes for a long time. "There is a growi ng awareness and willingness on the part of the public to take this seriously," said Ken Cherry, the Texas MUFON director. Is the secret that the ufologists of MUFON have been chasing for decades about to come out? "We don't think it's a se cret. Just some people don't believe it," said Terry Groff, webmaster for the lo

cal MUFON group and a trained UFO investigator. "I really haven't made my mind u p," said MUFON regional director James Shatley. "The preponderance of evidence i s that either we have discovered incredible technology, or there are some other races that have conquered time and space and figured out how to get here." Mr. K ucinich said he saw a UFO 25 years ago while visiting Shirley MacLaine's home in Washington. Mr. Richardson pledged to reopen the famous case of aliens reported ly crashing at Roswell in 1947. The aviation experts calling for more investigat ion included a deputy chief of staff from the Belgian Air Force, the retired chi ef of Accidents and Investigations for the Federal Aviation Administration, a pi lot with the Chilean Aviation Army, an Air France captain, a general in the Iran ian Air Force and a representative from the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense . Note: For a powerful summary of UFO evidence presented by highly credible govern ment and military professionals, click here.

Asteroid on track for possible Mars hit 2007-12-21, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-sci-mars21dec21,1,394970... Talk about your cosmic pileups. An asteroid similar to the one that flattened fo rests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said. Resea rchers attached to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November. The scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ... put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan. 30 at about 1 in 75 . A 1-in-75 shot is "wildly unusual," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office, which routinely tracks about 5,000 objects in Earth's neighborhood. "We're used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million," Chesley said. "Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs." The asteroid, designated 2007 WD5, is about 160 feet across, which puts it in the range of the space rock that exploded over [Tunguska,] Siberia. That explosion, the largest impact event in recent history, felled 80 million trees o ver 830 square miles. The Tunguska object broke up in midair, but the Martian at mosphere is so thin that an asteroid would probably plummet to the surface, digg ing a crater half a mile wide, Chesley said. The impact would probably send dust high into the atmosphere. Depending on where the asteroid hit, such a plume mig ht be visible through telescopes on Earth. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, whic h is mapping the planet, would have a front-row seat. And NASA's two JPL-built r overs, Opportunity and Spirit, might be able to take pictures from the ground. S uch a collision on Mars would produce a "scientific bonanza," Chesley said. The possibility of an impact has the Solar System Defense Team excited. "Normally, w e're rooting against the asteroid," when it has Earth in its cross hairs, Chesle y said. "This time we're rooting for the asteroid to hit."

Under the Radar, a Montauk Park 2006-11-24, New York Times http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/travel/escapes/24hero.html?ex=132202440... A sprawling waterfront state park known as Camp Hero [is situated] in Montauk on Long Island. Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that the park has been the site of sci-fi worthy events, including rifts in the time-space continuum [and] mind-control experiments. Such unsubstantiated reports were in large part ignite d by a 1992 book, The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, by Preston B. Nichols with Peter Moon.. All of the rumors, that s part of why we came here, said Patrick W enk, 26, of Stony Brook, N.Y., who was visiting one chilly autumn afternoon. His

girlfriend, Sarah Holub, 25, [said] it was her friends who piqued her initial i nterest in the park by telling her about the conspiracy theories and rumors of p aranormal occurrences. A search on Google revealed several Web sites that elabor ated on the theories and suggested that Camp Hero was the site of time-travel ex periments that picked up where the Philadelphia Experiment in which a 1940s Navy ship and crew were said to have been made invisible and teleported from Philade lphia to Norfolk, Va. left off. when Ms. Holub shared a story about her friends being in Camp Hero at night only to have all their flashlights go dead simultane ously, we both laughed. Yet I was experiencing some technical difficulties of my own. My reliable digital camera was on the fritz. I changed the batteries. I pl ayed with the lens. It would not take a photograph. I slipped it into my coat po cket to fiddle with later and continued my hike. Note: Though it's difficult to find reliable information on these matters, those with an open mind and a desire to know might appreciate spending some time expl oring the links above.

How the men from the ministry hid the hunt for UFOs 2006-09-25, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,1880292,00.html The Ministry of Defence went to extraordinary lengths to cover up its true invol vement in investigating UFOs, according to secret documents revealed under the F reedom of Information Act. The files show that officials attempted to expunge in formation from documents released to the Public Records Office under the "30-yea r rule" that would have revealed the extent of the MoD's interest in UFO sightin gs. The ministry wanted to cover up the operation of a secret unit dedicated to UFO investigations within the Defence Intelligence Staff. The files were made pu blic following FOI requests by David Clarke, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffie ld Hallam University and his colleague Andy Roberts. "These documents don't tell us anything about UFOs but they do show how desperate the MoD have been to conc eal the interest which the intelligence services had in the subject," said Dr Cl arke. A [1976] note from the UFO desk to the MoD's head of security [states] "It is undesirable that even a hint of this should become public and we are current ly consulting...on ways of expurgating the official records against the time whe n they qualify for disclosure." In a note dated April 28 1993 from DI55 to the p ublic UFO desk the unnamed author argued the unit's involvement should be excise d from records due to be released under the 30-year rule. Note: For a riveting two-page summary of reliable information on UFOs: http://ww w.WantToKnow.info/ufocover-up

The nerd who saw too much 2005-07-13, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/the-nerd-who-saw-too-much/2005/07/12/11... A computer geek faces 70 years in jail for hacking into the top levels of US def ence. He had, the US prosecutors said, perpetrated the "biggest military compute r hack of all time". What McKinnon was hunting for ... was evidence of a UFO cov er-up. "What was the most exciting thing you saw?" I ask. "I found a list of off icers' names," he says, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'. It doesn' t mean little green men. What I think it means is not Earth-based. I found a lis t of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. The y weren't US Navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of space ship, off-planet." "The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask. "That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe." 'The whole world thinks it's co

operating in building the International Space Station, but you've already got a space-based army that you refer to as Non-Terrestrial Officers'." Note: For a fascinating video interview with this "nerd," click here.

The UFO Phenomenon -- Seeing Is Believing 2005-02-04, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=468496&page=1 Almost 50 percent of Americans, according to recent polls, and millions of peopl e elsewhere in the world believe that UFOs are real. For many it is a deeply hel d belief. For decades there have been sightings of UFOs by millions and millions of people. On Feb. 24, "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs -- Seeing Is Believing" takes a fresh look at the UFO phenomenon. "As a journalist," says Jennings, "I b egan this project with a healthy dose of skepticism and as open a mind as possib le. After almost 150 interviews with scientists, investigators, and with many of those who claim to have witnessed unidentified flying objects, there are import ant questions that have not been completely answered -- and a great deal not ful ly explained." "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs -- Seeing Is Believing" airs Thur sday, Feb. 24 from 8-10 p.m. ET on ABC.

Dr. John E. Mack, Psychiatrist, Dies at 74 2004-09-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/national/30mack.html?ex=1254283200&en=06ea1... Dr. John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard psychiatrist who studied p eople who said they had encounters with alien beings, died in London on Monday. Dr. Mack was struck by a driver suspected of being drunk and evidently died on i mpact, according to the John E. Mack Institute, formerly the Center for Psycholo gy and Social Change. He was drawn to psychoanalytic analysis of the misundersto od or vulnerable, including children contemplating suicide, teenagers troubled b y the threat of nuclear war and finally, people plagued by what they believed to be recurrent alien encounters. In the 1990s, Dr. Mack studied dozens of people who said they had had such contact with aliens, culminating in his book Abductio n: Human Encounters with Aliens in 1994. In it, he focused less on whether alien s were real than on the spiritual effects of perceived encounters, arguing that "the abduction phenomenon has important philosophical, spiritual and social impl ications" for everyone. The book led Harvard Medical School, where Dr. Mack had been a tenured professor for several years, to appoint a committee to review his research methods and consider censuring him. After 14 months of investigation, it released a statement saying that it "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom t o study what he wishes and to state his opinion without impediment." His work wa s the subject of the 2003 documentary film "Touched," made by Laurel Chiten. A s econd book for general readers, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters, was published in 1999.

Hacker fears 'UFO cover-up' 2006-05-05, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4977134.stm In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK's national high-tech crime unit, a fter being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks. H e says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology. America now wants to put him on trial. He could f

ace 60 years behind bars. Spencer Kelly: You hacked into the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, and Nasa. Why? McKinnon: I was in search of suppressed technology...UFO technology. Secretive parts of the secret governm ent are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy. SK: Did you find what you were looking for? GM: Yes. There was a group called the Disclosure Project. They published a book which had 400 expert witnesses ranging from civilian air t raffic controllers, through military radar operators, right up to the chaps who were responsible for whether or not to launch nuclear missiles. They are some ve ry credible, relied upon people [saying] we've captured spacecraft and reverse-e ngineered [them]...What came on to the screen was amazing. It was a culmination of all my efforts. It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made . It was above the Earth's hemisphere. It was cigar-shaped and had geodesic dome s above, below, to the left, the right and both ends of it. Note: If you are interested in the UFO phenomenon, at the BBC link above there i s a video clip of the entire interview that is quite fascinating. For more, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/ufoinformation

Sci Fi Channel-backed researcher presses NASA for UFO files 2005-12-08, Globe and Mail/Associated Press http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051208.wufoo1208/BNStory... Researchers and witnesses who believe a UFO landed in the woods of western Penns ylvania 40 years ago are marking another anniversary Friday: two years since a l awsuit was filed to persuade NASA to release records of what happened. Governmen t records documenting it have been lost. Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter backed by the Sci Fi Channel and a group connected with the cable TV channel sue d NASA two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act. Witnesses described a "fireball" in the evening sky and a metallic, acorn-shaped object about four me tres high and three metres in diameter that landed gently in the woods, news acc ounts at the time said. Witnesses said military personnel cordoned off the site, removed the object and threatened residents who questioned the incident. The mi litary later called the object a meteor. Note: The Globe and Mail/ is one of Canada's leading newspapers. This article is also available on CBC, Canada's equivalent of the PBS. And for an abundance of reliable information on major cover-ups around UFOs, visit our UFO Information C enter. Note also that no US media picked up this Associated Press article.

Not so great expectations 2009-02-18, The Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, Florida's leading newspaper) http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20090218/BLOG32/902180273 The co-authors of the most extraordinary UFO report ever ignored by the media ar en t expecting much [coverage]. Robert Powell and Glenn Schulze, who produced Steph enville Lights: A Comprehensive Radar and Witness Study Regarding the Events of January 8, 2008 last summer for the Mutual UFO Network, continue to troll the bur eaucracies for more data. Their analysis of radar returns from five civilian sit es in the Stephenville, Tex., vicinity put the military into a jam after eyewitn esses reported a mammoth UFO being chased by F-16s. Responding to FOIA requests, authorities have a) surrendered only redacted flight logs of the 457th Fighter Squadron jets in the air that night, b) claim they have no military radar record s of that incident, and c) offer no explanation for why their planes exited thei r military operating area on what they ve described as routine training missions. Powell doubts a serious search was made for his request. For the trickle-down flo w of information to work, he says, you have to have a push on top of that executiv

e order. If there s no pressure on them to do their jobs, they don t have to ention. In Littleton, Colo., Schulze has moved on. Sort of. He s working on ecords for three additional UFO incidents, one of them involving yet another hting over Stephenville on 10/23/08. Multiple witnesses, nighttime sighting, 6s nearby, etc. Schulze calls it Stephenville II.

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Note: For more on the intriguing Stephenville sightings, click here. For many re ports from reliable, verifiable sources on UFO sightings, click here.

We're not alone . . . politician and pilot spot UFO 2008-09-29, The Irish Independent (One of Ireland's leading newspapers) http://www.independent.ie/national-news/were-not-alone----politician--and-pil... The truth is out there -- and if a senior [constable], a Fianna Fail politician and a pilot are to be believed, aliens are keeping a close eye on us from above. Dramatic eye-witness testimony was heard at a conference over the weekend which , delegates were told, provided "definitive" proof of recent UFO activity in the skies around north Dublin and Meath. Footage, filmed on a camera phone at 10.35 pm on August 3 near Dunboyne was also played and replayed to over 70 delegates w ho attended the fifth Irish International UFO conference in Carrick-on-Shannon. The triangular shaped image, with lights at each point, which appeared to send a red laser-type light towards earth, drew gasps of amazement from the 70 or so d elegates who attended the world premiere of the footage. A senior [police] offic er who was driving when he noticed the unusual light formation in the sky stoppe d to film it. "There is no footage like this in the world. It is the most amazin g and spectacular I have ever seen," said Carl Nally, co-founder of UFO and Para normal Research Ireland and joint author of Conspiracy of Silence. Five days ear lier, on July 29, an off-duty pilot who photographed lightning from Howth pier j ust after midnight later noticed what appeared to be a triangular-shaped object to the right of the lightning fork in the developed image. And Fianna Fail Town Councillor in Trim, Jimmy Peppard, ran indoors for a camera on August 8 when he spotted a triangular-shaped object measuring "about a mile in diameter" in the s ky, where it remained static for about half an hour. Note: For a two-page summary of evidence for UFOs presented by highly-credible g overnment and military officials, click here.

Ex-defence minister joins search for aliens 2007-10-27, Toronto Star (Toronto's leading newspaper) http://www.thestar.com/News/article/270984 Victor Viggiani has one of the toughest jobs in the universe. The retired elemen tary school principal spends his time lobbying reporters to blow a massive gover nment cover-up wide open and reveal that extra-terrestrials have been visiting o ur planet for years. "I have no intention of convincing anybody of anything," sa id Viggiani, 59, director of media relations for Exopolitics Toronto, a non-prof it educational group pushing for full disclosure of the truth about off-world be ings. "What I do is point them to the evidence." Exopolitics is a field of study that has moved far beyond the question of whether we are alone in the universe. Its supporters believe there is enough evidence out there that they can state a s fact that a) intelligent, sentient, ethical extra-terrestrials exist; b) they have made contact; and c) they probably have [many] lessons to teach us about su stainable energy sources and countless other matters of global importance. Viggi ani [has] found [a] champion in Paul Hellyer, who was federal defence minister i n Lester B. Pearson's cabinet. "I think the significance and they are probably e xaggerating it but the significance is that I'm the first person of cabinet rank

in the G8 to have come out openly and unequivocally and said the extra-terrestr ial presence is real," said Hellyer. Stephen Bassett, executive director of the Paradigm Research Group in Washington, D.C., said the dearth of serious coverage has [him] suspecting whether publishers and national security forces are workin g together to keep things quiet. "The failure of the major media in the United S tates to cover the ET issue is one of the great failures of all journalism," he said. Note: For powerful accounts of UFO sightings reported now and again by reliable sources, click here.

NASA to Search Files on UFO Incident 2007-10-27, Associated Press http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hY-pEhBhV6UBddtjWRMkax_ecxFAD8SH5MS80 NASA has agreed to search its archives once again for documents on a 1965 UFO in cident in Pennsylvania, a step the space agency fought in federal court. The gov ernment has refused to open its files about what ... moved across the sky and cr ashed in the woods near Kecksburg, Pa., 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Traffi c was tied up in the area as curiosity seekers drove to the area, only to be kep t away from the crash site by soldiers. The Air Force's explanation for the unid entified flying object: A meteor or meteors. "They could not find anything," one Air Force memo stated after a late-night search on Dec. 9, 1965. Several NASA e mployees also were reported to have been at the scene. Eyewitnesses said a flatb ed truck drove away a large object shaped like an acorn and about the size of a Volkswagen bus. A mock-up based on the descriptions of local residents sits behi nd the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department. UFO enthusiasts refused to let the m atter die and journalist Leslie Kean of New York City sued NASA four years ago f or information. The agency has turned over several stacks of documents which Kea n says are not responsive to the request, an argument that U.S. District Judge E mmet Sullivan agreed with. In March, Sullivan rejected NASA's request to throw t he case out of court, resulting in negotiations that led to the agency promising last week that it will conduct a more comprehensive search. Kean said Friday th at she sued NASA rather than the Army because the space agency a decade ago rele ased some relevant documents on the case. Note: To read a revealing summary of UFO evidence presented by highly credible m ilitary and government officials, click here.

The truth is out there: Roswell incident recalled 2007-09-29, North County Times (Newspaper from San Diego, CA) http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/09/30/lifeandtimes/20_37_059_29_07.txt On July 9, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record, a newspaper, printed a story with the alarming headline: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region." Th ere appear to be few things people agree on regarding what has become known as " the Roswell incident." Six decades later, competing UFO enthusiasts promote thei r own theories, skeptics dismiss the spaceship claims as outrageous, and the mil itary, which originally claimed all the fuss was over a weather balloon, now sti cks to its story that it was an experimental spy craft. Escondido resident Milto n Sprouse, 85, said he knows what happened in Roswell ---- not because he favors one theory over another, but because he was there. As for the outrageous storie s of mysterious metal, alien corpses and a military coverup? It's all true, he s aid. "I was there the day they announced a UFO had crashed," he said. "The next day, it was published in the Roswell Daily Record, and that night, all the gener als said the story was untrue." Sprouse said all copies of the Roswell newspaper

were collected by officers. Sprouse ... said he recalls people speaking about " alien bodies" immediately after the debris discovery. "They took the bodies to a hangar, and there were two guards at each door with machine guns," he said. Spr ouse said one witness, a barracksmate, was an emergency-room medic who reported seeing what he called "humanoid" bodies in the hospital. "They went to the ER ro om and two doctors and two nurses were called in, and they dissected two of thos e humanoid bodies. Then the doctors and nurses were transferred. My friend said he saw the bodies, and I believed him," Sprouse said. "He said, 'We don't think the humanoid ate food.' I don't know why he said that. The digestive system wasn 't designed for food or something." Note: For more revealing information on UFOs from major media sources, click her e.

Fame from outer space 2007-07-15, Fort Worth Star-Telegram (One of the leading newspapers of Texas) http://www.star-telegram.com/metro_news/story/169727.html J. Bond Johnson is one of this newspaper's most famous photographers. He has bee n portrayed in Hollywood films and documentaries and discussed at length in maga zine articles. His photos have been a prominent exhibit for almost two decades i n a museum that draws 150,000 visitors a year. And they are "the most frequently requested images from our Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection -- really from al l of our photo collections," said Brenda McClurkin of the University of Texas at Arlington Library of Special Collections. That's because on a warm afternoon in July 1947, Johnson, at the age of 21, took the only known photographs of the su pposed remains of the UFO crash near Roswell, N.M.. What looked like beams of ba lsa wood and sheets of tinfoil were laid out on the carpet in the office of the airfield commander, Maj. Gen. Roger M. Ramey. Boxes around the office were thoug ht to hold more wreckage that had not been examined. Ramey and Maj. Jesse A. Mar cel, who brought the debris from Roswell, posed for pictures holding the materia l. After filling both sides of three glass-plate negatives ... Johnson, on deadl ine, rushed back to the paper, printed his photos, handed them -- still wet -- t o his editors and went home. By sunrise the next morning, his photos of the shin y material adorned newspapers around the world, accompanied by a story that the Army had explained the wreckage as a fallen weather balloon. "I asked him one ti me if he believed the artifacts were from alien beings," said his daughter, Jani th Johnson. "Having the conservative and religious background that he did, he sa id, 'I don't know, but it was like nothing I have ever seen on this earth.'"

Profile: Gary McKinnon 2007-04-03, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4715612.stm Gary McKinnon has lost his appeal against extradition to the US on hacking charg es. To hear the US government tell it, Gary McKinnon is a dangerous man, and sho uld be extradited back to America to stand trial. One US prosecutor has accused him of committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time". But Mr McKin non has said his motives were harmless and innocent. He was, he says, simply loo king for information on UFOs. If found guilty, Mr McKinnon could face decades in US jail, and fines of close to $2m. Mr McKinnon said that ... he never acted wi th malicious intent. But he did admit that he hacked into dozens of US governmen t computer systems. In fact, he calmly detailed just how easy it was to access e xtremely sensitive information. But for some, his method of hacking is not nearl y so interesting as his reason for doing it. Mr McKinnon told the BBC that he is convinced that the United States government is withholding critical information

about Unidentified Flying Objects. His supporters say that instead of prosecuti ng him, the US government should thank him for pointing out massive computer sec urity lapses. As for his quest to find evidence of a UFO cover-up, Mr McKinnon h as said that he found some circumstantial evidence online ... including what he said are photos with what he speculated were alien spacecraft airbrushed out of the picture. Note: For inspiring, reliable information on the UFO cover-up, see our two-page summary available here.

Circular Sightings Tough to Explain 2006-08-03, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2374926&page=1 For centuries they've puzzled people by their curious appearance. They crop up i n fields across the globe, in patterns ranging from the simple circle to the DNA double helix. Right now in America...it's crop circle season. This year they're popping up all over the Midwest, with recent sightings in Geneseo, Ill.; Sandyv ille, Ohio; and Huntingburg, Ind. And the list goes on. "What exactly are they?" said Stan Friedman, a nuclear physicist and author of the book Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident. "The fact that people can fake [c rop circles] doesn't mean that there aren't real ones. I have no qualms about th e possibility that aliens are appearing," Friedman said. Many experts are unprep ared to rule out aliens. As the Gallup Polls tell, three-fourths of people in th is country believe in paranormal activity. Colin Andrews, a world-leading crop c ircle expert [has] done extensive research that [he says] proves that not all cr op circles come from humans. Andrews and his team conducted a study in central-s outhern England during 1999-2000, which assessed more than 200 circles. That stu dy showed around 80 percent of crop circles to be man-made with the remaining nu mber unaccounted for. According to Andrews, crop circles not made by humans exhi bit a number of peculiar traits. He says that the soil from these circles has a higher magnetic reading and that the position of the circle in the field will re late to the color or nutritional value of the individual plants. Note: To see an excellent gallery of these beautiful formations on Google images : click here.

Profile: Gary McKinnon 2006-02-15, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4715612.stm To hear the US government tell it, Gary McKinnon is a dangerous man, and should be extradited back to America to stand trial. One US prosecutor has accused him of committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time". Mr McKinnon coul d face decades in US jail, and fines of close to $2m. The US government alleges that between February 2001 and March 2002, the 40-year-old computer enthusiast f rom North London hacked into dozens of US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Defense computers, as well as 16 Nasa computers. Mr McKinnon told the BBC tha t he is convinced that the United States government is withholding critical info rmation about Unidentified Flying Objects. "I believe that there are spacecraft, or there have been craft, flying around that the public doesn't know about." He believes the US military has reverse engineered an anti-gravity propulsion syst em from recovered alien spacecraft, and that this propulsion system is being kep t a secret. He said he only wanted to find evidence of a UFO cover-up and expose it.

Note: If you read the entire article, McKinnon appears to have discovered little of significance. Yet an article from Australia's leading newspaper several mont hs ago tells some amazing details of secret files he found on UFOs. See http://w ww.WantToKnow.info/050802coverupnewssummary#ufos

Rep. Dennis Kucinich Acknowledges UFO Sighting 2007-10-31, FOX News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,306616,00.html The truth is out there, and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich had no trouble offering hi s version of it when asked ... about his UFO sighting. "It was an unidentified f lying object, OK? It's, like, it's unidentified," Kucinich said during one of th e few highlights at the Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia. "I saw s omething." Kucinich, whose UFO run-in came to light last week in a passage from Shirley MacLaine's new book [Sage-ing While Age-ing], went on to joke that he pl anned to move his campaign office to Roswell, N.M. Roswell is the place where le gend holds a spacecraft crash-landed in 1947 and was recovered and moved for inv estigation to nearby Area 51, a secretive U.S. government airbase in Nevada. Kuc inich went on to [say] many Americans have shared his experience. "You have to k eep in mind that more that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO and also that more people in t his country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush's presidency," Ku cinich said. According to MacLaine, Kucinich saw the UFO in the 1980s while visi ting the actress at her home in Washington state. "He saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent and observing him," MacLaine wrote. "It hovered for about 10 minut es or so and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind." Note: For many powerful accounts of UFO sightings reported by reliable sources, click here.

Russia suspects US plans to monopolise fuel from moon 2007-05-02, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/russia-suspects-us-plans-to-monopolise-fuel-... Mankind's second race for the moon has taken on a distinctly Cold War feel, with the Russian space agency accusing its old rival NASA of rejecting a proposal fo r joint lunar exploration. The charge comes amid suspicion in Moscow that the US is seeking to deny Russia access to an isotope in abundance under the moon's su rface that many believe could replace fossil fuels and even end the threat of gl obal warming. A new era of international co-operation in space supposedly dawned after the US, Russia and other powers declared their intention to send humans t o the moon for the first time since 1972. But while NASA has lobbied for support from Britain and the European Space Agency, Russia says its offers have been re buffed. While the Americans have been either coy or dismissive on the subject, R ussia openly says the main purpose of its lunar program is the industrial extrac tion of helium-3. Some scientists say helium-3 could be the answer to the world' s energy woes. As helium-3 is non-polluting and effective in tiny quantities, ma ny countries are taking it very seriously. Germany, India and China, which will launch a lunar probe to research extraction techniques in September, are all stu dying ways to mine the isotope. "Whoever conquers the moon first will be the fir st to benefit," said Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist of China's lunar program . Many in Moscow's space program believe Washington's agenda is driven by a desi re to monopolise helium-3 mining. The plot, says Erik Galimov, of the Russian Ac ademy of Sciences, would "enable the US to establish its control of the energy m arket 20 years from now and put the rest of the world on its knees as hydrocarbo ns run out".

An Admiral, an Astronaut, and a CIA Chief Talk About UFOs 2005-03-24, Disclosure Project/WantToKnow.info http://www.WantToKnow.info/050324ufotestimony United Kingdom Chief of Defense (1971 - 73), Admiral Lord Peter Hill-Norton: "I have frequently been asked why a person of my background a former Chief of the Def ense Staff, a former Chairman of the NATO Military Committee why I think there is a cover-up of the facts about UFOs. Governments fear that if they did disclose t hose facts, people would panic. I don t believe that at all. I've said so in print . There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited f or many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations. It behooves us to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation, and not the subject of rub bishing by tabloid newspapers." Apollo 14 Astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, Ph.D. (Sixt h Man to Walk on Moon): "Yes, there have been ET visitations. There have been cr ashed craft. There have been material and bodies recovered. People in high-level government have very little, if any, valid information about this. Most have no more knowledge than the man in the street."

Planet Problems 2005-11-25, Fox News (News Video Clip) http://www.foxnews.com/video2/player05.html?112505/bs_ufo_112505&Big_Story&In... The above link will take you to a fascinating four-minute Fox News video clip fe aturing Mr. Paul Hellyer. Mr. Hellyer, former Minister of Defence and Deputy Pri me Minister of Canada, is asking the Canadian parliament to hold hearings on est ablishing relations with alien civilizations. "UFOs are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head," Mr. Hellyer is quoted as saying. To watch the video c lip, you will need to click on one of the two speed options in the upper left co rner of the webpage. For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on the UFO cover-up, see our UFO Information Center.

UFO research: Findings vs. facts 2006-06-23, CNN News/SPACE.com http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/06/23/ufo.research/ For decades now, eyes and sky have met to witness the buzzing of our world by Un identified Flying Objects, termed UFOs or simply flying saucers. Extraterrestria ls have come a long way to purportedly share the friendly skies with us. UFOs re main a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Why so? For one, the field is fraught with hucksterism. It's also replete with blurry photos and awful vide o. But then there are also well-intentioned and puzzled witnesses. There have be en advances in the field of UFO research, said Ted Roe, Executive Director of th e National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), based in V allejo, California. "Physics is leading to new and potentially paradigm shifting understandings about the nature of our universe and its physical properties," R oe said. "These understandings may point the way towards an acceptance of the pr obability of interstellar travel and communication by spacefaring races." Why is there precious little to show the world of science that UFOs merit attention? " Obviously there is not a simple answer, but part of it is reluctance of the scie ntific community to support such research," explained Bruce Maccabee, regarded a s a meticulous researcher and an optical physicist using those talents to study photographs and video of unexplained phenomena.

Note: This article also includes commentary from several skeptics. Yet for those who have an open mind, don't miss the amazingly solid UFO material available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/ufoinformation

Two MDs Risk Career, Reputation in Revealing Information on UFOs 2005-06-11, WantToKnow.info/Websites of Two Respected MDs http://www.WantToKnow.info/050611ufoevidence "[On] March 13, 1997, thousands of Arizona residents witnessed a mile-long, v-sh aped formation of lights flying in the skies overhead. The UFO sightings garnere d headline news, catching the attention of both USA Today and the 'CBS Evening N ews with Dan Rather'. One person, however, was not surprised. Dr. Lynne Kitei wa s simply grateful that a phenomenon she'd been witnessing - and documenting - fo r months was being validated. After the incident, Dr. Kitei preferred to stay in the background, anonymously feeding information and video clips to the many new s organisations. Now, Dr. Kitei comes forward to tell her own story."

Pentagon eyeing weapons in space 2006-03-14, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/03/14/pentagon_eye... The Pentagon is asking Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to test weap ons in space, marking the biggest step toward creating a space battlefield since President Reagan's long-defunct "star wars" project. The Defense Department's b udget proposal...includes money for a variety of tests on offensive and defensiv e weapons. Arms-control specialists fear the tests will push the military closer to basing weapons in space than during Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in the mid-1980s -- without a public debate of the potential consequences. The des criptions included in the budget request mark only what is publicly known about the military's space warfare plans. Specialists believe the classified portion o f the $439 billion budget, blacked out for national security reasons, almost cer tainly includes other space-related programs. Under President Bush, the White Ho use has emphasized what's known as "space dominance" -- the notion that the Unit ed States must command space to defend the nation, but the budget request marks a transition from laboratory theory to reality. The Bush administration has soug ht to keep the military's options open despite international opposition to weapo ns in space.

War News Articles Excerpts of Key War News Articles in Major Media Below are many highly revealing excerpts of important war articles from the main stream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major media websites. I f any link should fail to function, click here. These war news articles are list ed by order of importance. For the same articles by date posted to this list, cl ick here. For the list by date of news article click here. By choosing to educat e ourselves on these important issues and to spread the word, we can and will bu ild a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. US plans to fight the net revealed 2006-01-27, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4655196.stm A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations". The declassified document is called "Inform ation Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at G eorge Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act. Officials in t he Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it. The operations described in the document include a surprising range of milit ary activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological ope rations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, compu ter network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks. The military' s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans. "Psyops messages will often be replaye d by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public. St rategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fig ht the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads. The document recomme nds that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control o f the entire electromagnetic spectrum". US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors,

and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum". The fact that th e "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense sugge sts that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

The War On Waste 2002-01-29, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml On Sept. 10 [2001], Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war. Not on fo reign terrorists, "the adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy ." He said money wasted by the military poses a serious threat. Rumsfeld promise d change but the next day Sept. 11 the world changed and in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war on waste seems to have been forgotten. Just last week Pre sident Bush announced, "my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new de fense spending." More money for the Pentagon ... while its own auditors admit th e military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends. "According to some e stimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted. $2.3 trillion that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. A former Marine turned whistle-blower is risking his job by speaking out ... about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service ... tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records. "The director looked at me and s aid 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback. My supervisor asking m e why I care about doing a good job," said Minnery. He was reassigned and says o fficials then covered up the problem. The Pentagon's Inspector General "partiall y substantiated" several of Minnery's allegations. Note: To see the CBS video clip of this shocking admission, click here. For anot her key clip, click here. For other media articles revealing major corruption, c lick here. Even though originally not reported because of the trauma of 9/11, wh y wasn't this news broadcast far and wide later? Why isn't it making media headl ines now?

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba 2001-05-01, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662 In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to k ill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans repo rtedly included the possible assassination of Cuban migrs, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even or chestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways t o trick the American public and the international community into supporting a wa r to oust Cuba's ... Fidel Castro. America's top military brass even contemplate d causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Gu antanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would caus e a helpful wave of national indignation." The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defe nse secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years. The J oint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn duri ng the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war wi th Cuba. Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that the fault lies with the Communists." The scar y thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after.

Note: Many military and political leaders tend to look at the world as a chess b oard. Sacrificing pawns (innocent civilians) is sometimes necessary to capture t he queen. Is it beyond comprehension that this might have been the case with 9/1 1? And why was ABC the only major news source to report this highly revealing st ory? To read the shocking declassified documents, click here.

When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing 1999-02-01, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm "Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overt hrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen . Carl W. Steiner. At least the voice sounds amazingly like him. But it is not S teiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Ala mos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Psychological operations ... PSYOPS, as t he military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments , militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives. Cove rt operators kicked around the idea of creating a computer-faked videotape of Sa ddam Hussein crying or showing other such manly weaknesses, or in some sexually compromising situation. The nascent plan was for the tapes to be flooded into Ir aq and the Arab world. The tape war never proceeded...but the "strategic" PSYOPS scheming didn't die. What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah fl oating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army to rise up against Saddam? According to a military physicist given the task of looking into the hologram id ea, the feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air. A super secret program was establishe d in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document as a system to "proj ect information power from space ... for special operations deception missions." Note: If the above link fails, click here. If you want to understand some of the many hidden capabilities of the U.S. military, this article is a must read. For more on the use of these "nonlethal" weapons, click here.

Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman? 2005-01-11, Los Angeles Times http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/11/opinion/oe-scheer11 Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary fi lmmakers systematically challenges this. "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of t he Politics of Fear" ... argues coherently that much of what we have been told a bout the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerat ed and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestio ned ... around the world." Why have we heard so much frightening talk about "dir ty bombs" when experts say it is panic rather than radioactivity that would kill people? Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on "Meet the Press" in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, w hen British and U.S. military forces later found no such thing? The film ... dir ectly challenges the conventional wisdom by making a powerful case that the Bush administration, led by a tight-knit cabal of Machiavellian neoconservatives, ha s seized upon the false image of a unified international terrorist threat to rep lace the expired Soviet empire in order to push a political agenda. "The nightma

re vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our socie ties is an illusion. Wherever one looks for this Al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the 'sleeper cells' in America, the British and Ame ricans are chasing a phantom enemy." Note: If above link fails, click here. This highly revealing film by one of Brit ain's most respected documentary makers is available for free viewing on the Int ernet. For the link and lots more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here. For an excellent review of the film in one of the U.K.'s leading newspape rs, click here.

Why I Resigned From the CIA 2004-12-05, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-scheuer5dec05,1,471321... Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, wrote "Imperial Hubris: Why the W est is Losing the War on Terror." Between January 1996 and June 1999 I was in ch arge of running operations against Al Qaeda from Washington. When it comes to th is small slice of the large U.S. national security pie, I speak with firsthand e xperience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically tha t during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sou nd intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden eith er by capture or by U.S. military attack. I witnessed and documented, along with dozens of other CIA officers, instances where life-risking intelligence-gatheri ng work of the agency's men and women in the field was wasted. I was never charg ed with deciding whether to act against Bin Laden. That decision properly belong s solely to senior White House officials. However, as a now-private American cit izen, it is my right to question their judgment; I am entitled to know why the p rotection of Americans most selfishly, my own children and grandchildren was not the top priority of the senior officials who refused to act on the opportunitie s to attack Bin Laden provided by the clandestine service. Each of these officia ls have publicly argued that the intelligence was not "good enough" to act, but they almost always neglect to say that they were repeatedly advised that the int elligence was not going to get better and that Bin Laden was going to kill thous ands of Americans if he was not stopped. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For many other serious questions arou nd the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Lockheed and the Future of Warfare 2004-11-28, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/business/yourmoney/28lock.html?ex=125938440... Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtaki ngly big part of it. Lockheed ... has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your ma il and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United S tates census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. Lockheed ... is be st known for its weapons. But in the post-9/11 world, Lockheed has become more t han just the biggest corporate cog in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the milit ary-industrial complex. It is increasingly putting its stamp on the nation's mil itary policies. Former Lockheed executives, lobbyists and lawyers hold crucial p osts at the White House and the Pentagon, picking weapons and setting policies. War and crisis have been good for business. The company's stock has tripled in t he last four years. Lockheed is creating robot soldiers and neural software - "i ntelligent agents" - to do their work. Israel spends much of the $1.8 billion in

annual military aid from the United States to buy F-16 warplanes from Lockheed. Its own executives say the concentration of power among military contractors is more intense than in any other sector of business outside banking. AND, after 9 /11 ... cost is essentially irrelevant. Former Lockheed executives serve on the Defense Policy Board ... and the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which help make military and intelligence policy and pick weapons for future battles. Lockh eed's board includes E. C. Aldridge Jr. ... the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer. Note: If the above link fails, click here. To say that "war and crisis have been good for business" is quite an understatement. To read what one of the most hig hly decorated generals had to say about this, click here.

U.S. Embassy in Iraq Largest, Most Expensive Ever 2009-01-05, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,476464,00.html After much delay the United States opened its new $700 million embassy in Iraq o n Monday, inaugurating the largest and most expensive embassy ever built. The co mpound is six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York, and two -thirds the size of the National Mall in Washington. It has space for 1,000 empl oyees with six apartment blocks and is 10 times larger than any other U.S. embas sy. Critics have said that the embassy's fortress-like design and immense size s how a fundamental disconnect between the U.S. and conditions on the ground in Ir aq. The presence of a massive U.S. embassy by far the largest in the world co-loc ated in the Green Zone with the Iraqi government is seen by Iraqis as an indicat ion of who actually exercises power in their country, the International Crisis Gr oup, a European-based research group, said in 2006. "The idea of an embassy this huge, this costly, and this isolated from events taking place outside its walls is not necessarily a cause for celebration," architectural historian Jane Loeff ler wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007. Although the U.S. Government regularly proc laims confidence in Iraq s democratic future, the U.S. has designed an embassy tha t conveys no confidence in Iraqis and little hope for their future. Instead, the U.S. has built a fortress capable of sustaining a massive, long-term presence i n the face of continued violence. Note: Why would the U.S. want Iraq (estimated population 28 million) to have an embassy 10 times or more larger than that of China (over a billion people), Cana da, Japan, or for that matter many other countries? And why isn't any major medi a besides Fox even raising this key question? Look at the AP article which has v irtually nothing critical. Could this possibly have anything to do with control of oil and other precious resources there?

BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince 2008-02-15, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/15/bae.armstrade Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack Lond on unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday. Previously secret files describe how inv estigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence. Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi n ational security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to b e the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than 1bn in secret pay ments from the arms company BAE. He was accused in yesterday's high court hearin

gs of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prim e minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation i nto bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family. The threats halted the fraud inquiry. Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sulliv an, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He sai d one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government. The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massiv e secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms deals. Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn t he decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, ar guing the government had caved into blackmail. Note: This report comes very close to confirming the close link between terroris t attacks and high-level policy of certain states. For many revealing clues alon g these lines from reliable sources, click here.

Bush, aides made 935 false statements in run-up to war 2008-01-23, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/23/bush.iraq/ President Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the se curity risk posed by Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001, accordi ng to a study released ... by two nonprofit journalism groups. "In short, the Bu sh administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information th at it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Ira q on March 19, 2003," reads an overview of the examination, conducted by the Cen ter for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism. According to the study, Bush and seven top officials -- including Vi ce President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Nation al Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- made 935 false statements about Iraq dur ing those two years. The study says Bush made 232 false statements about Iraq an d former leader Saddam Hussein's possessing weapons of mass destruction, and 28 false statements about Iraq's links to al Qaeda. The study, released Tuesday, sa ys Powell had the second-highest number of false statements, with 244 about weap ons and 10 about Iraq and al Qaeda. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Press Secretary Ari Fleischer each made 109 false statements. "It is now bey ond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have me aningful ties to al Qaeda," the report reads. The overview of the study also cal ls the media to task, saying most media outlets didn't do enough to investigate the claims. "Some journalists -- indeed, even some entire news organizations -have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far t oo deferential and uncritical," the report reads. Note: These lies led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundred s of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Why is no action being taken on this matter? For other powerful revelations of war corruption and profiteering, click here.

Buying the War 2007-04-25, PBS http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html Four years ago on May 1, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Linco ln wearing a flight suit ... in front of a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner. He was hailed by media stars as a "breathtaking" example of presidential leaders hip in toppling Saddam Hussein. Despite profound questions over the failure to l

ocate weapons of mass destruction and the increasing violence in Baghdad, many i n the press confirmed the White House's claim that the war was won. How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence o f weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 contin ue to go largely unreported? In the run-up to war, skepticism was a rarity among journalists inside the Beltway. The [PBS "Buying the War"] program analyzes the stream of unchecked information from administration sources and Iraqi defectors to the mainstream print and broadcast press. While almost all the claims would eventually prove to be false, the drumbeat of misinformation about WMDs went vir tually unchallenged by the media. "Buying the War" examines the press coverage i n the lead-up to the war as evidence of a paradigm shift in the role of journali sts in democracy and asks, four years after the invasion, what's changed? "More and more the media become ... common carriers of administration statements," say s the Washington Post's Walter Pincus. "We've sort of given up being independent on our own." Note: You can view the highly revealing documentary "Buying the War" or read the transcript at the link above.

Terrorized by 'War on Terror' 2007-03-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR20070323016... The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administr ation's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy. Constant refe rence to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of th e policies they want to pursue. America today is not the self-confident and dete rmined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard f rom its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepre neurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum . The terror entrepreneurs ... are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new t hreats. "Security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality. Government at every le vel has stimulated the paranoia. The record is even more troubling in the genera l area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of f oreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notion s of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without . .. due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism. Note: This is an amazingly deep and powerful analysis of the use of fear by poli ticians, big business, and the media to promote their own agendas. Amazingly, th e article was written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Presi dent Carter. This is the same man who wrote in his book The Grand Chessboard, th at U.S. global primacy is not likely to be achieved "except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." Strange, but th e article is well worth reading in its entirety. For more, click here.

Fiscal mess awaits new defense chief: 'Worst-managed' federal agency 2006-12-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/13/MNG96MUHPF1.DTL Robert Gates will face ... the enormous task of cleaning up the Pentagon's tangl ed finances, which outside auditors lambaste as so chaotic that no one knows how much money is being spent on defense at any given time. The White House's Offic e of Management and Budget believes the Pentagon's financial management systems are in such a mess "that independent auditors still cannot certify the accuracy of the financial statements." David Walker, the U.S. Comptroller General, issued a devastating assessment of the Pentagon's finances, which include an annual bu dget of over $500 billion. The Pentagon's financial problems "are pervasive, com plex, long-standing and deeply rooted in virtually all business operations throu ghout the department," Walker told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Financia l problems like the Pentagon's "would put any civilian company out of business," said Kwai Chan, a former GAO auditor ... and author of a report entitled "Finan cial Management in the Department of Defense: No One is Accountable." Winslow Wh eeler, a former national security expert for the Senate Budget Committee, called the Defense Department "the worst-managed agency in the federal government, (th at) can't account for the half-trillion dollars it spends each year, and seeks t o produce weapons that are irrelevant or ineffective, or both." Note: For major media articles showing that more than $1 trillion of taxpayers m oney have gone missing at the Pentagon, click here. For the deeper reasons behin d this, a top U.S. general's explanation is available here.

It's still about oil in Iraq 2006-12-08, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-juhasz8dec08,0,4717508.story While the Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refu se to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence. Page 1, Chapter 1 ... lays out Iraq's importance: "It has the world's second-largest known oil reserves." The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room: that we are fighting, killin g and dying in a war for oil. Recommendation No. 63 ... calls on the U.S. to "as sist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enter prise." This is an echo of calls made [by] the U.S. State Department's Oil and E nergy Working Group, meeting between December 2002 and April 2003. Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war." Its preferred method of privatization was a form of oil contract called a produc tion-sharing agreement. These agreements are ... rejected by all the top oil pro ducers in the Middle East because they grant greater control and more profits to the companies than the governments. For any degree of oil privatization to take place ... Iraq has to amend its constitution. Recommendation No. 26 of the Iraq Study Group calls for a review of the constitution to be "pursued on an urgent basis." Petroleum Economist magazine later reported that U.S. oil companies cons idered passage of the new oil law more important than increased security. Furthe r, the Iraq Study Group would commit U.S. troops to Iraq for several more years to ... provide security for Iraq's oil infrastructure. We can thank the Iraq Stu dy Group for making its case publicly. It is now our turn to decide if we wish t o spill more blood for oil. Note: For more on corporate complicity in fomenting war exposed by a top U.S. ge neral, click here.

Losing bin Laden 2006-02-12, Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR20060209016... Despite a huge and costly effort by the media, the public still has an incomplet e picture of what really happened during the [war in Afghanistan] and of how Osa ma bin Laden survived it. Gary Berntsen's Jawbreaker provides a valuable new acc ount by a major participant that fills in many blanks. Berntsen was a top CIA fi eld commander in the most critical sector of a new kind of war; at various times , the CIA veteran had elements of the Delta Force, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and tactical air units reporting to him. Crown Publishers has chosen unnecessarily t o position it as a diatribe that the CIA tried to suppress. In fact, while the C IA dragged its feet in reviewing the manuscript for classified material and reda cted plenty of specifics, the book is hardly an attack on the CIA. In fact, the overall picture of the CIA here is far more flattering than that in The 9/11 Com mission Report. Still, to portray Jawbreaker as "the book the CIA doesn't want y ou to read" (as the cover puts it), the publisher has displayed the redactions t hroughout the book as large black lines. Contradicting Bush administration denia ls, Berntsen writes that his teams discovered bin Laden and the remnants of his entourage in the now famous Tora Bora Mountains along the lawless, rugged Afghan -Pakistani border. Berntsen recounts very credibly how he and others pleaded wit h Gen. Tommy Franks and the Pentagon brass to put in blocking forces so that bin Laden and the remnants of al Qaeda's leadership could not flee into Pakistan. B ut for reasons that remain unclear to Berntsen ... the Bush administration or Fr anks decided to depend instead on local Afghan warlords rather than put U.S. for ces on the ground to block bin Laden's escape. Note: To read a concise summary of reliable news reports that raise serious ques tions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

CIA Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away 2005-08-15, Newsweek magazine http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853000/site/newsweek/ During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled abo ut whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the w ar in Afghanistan. Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border. But in a for thcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that ... bin Lad en was holed up at Tora Bora ... and could have been caught. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't kn ow to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. [CIA Commander] Berntsen says Franks i s "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was." In his book t itled "Jawbreaker" the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's D efense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora. Berntsen ... has sued the agency over what he calls unacceptable delays in approving his book. "They' re just holding the book," which is scheduled for October release, he says. "CIA officers, Special Forces and U.S. air power drove the Taliban out in 70 days. T he CIA has taken roughly 80 days to clear my book." Note: For a concise summary of reliable, verifiable information questioning the official account of 9/11, click here.

U.S. Suppressed Footage of Hiroshima for Decades

2005-08-03, New York Times/Reuters http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-media-anniversary.html In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. author ities seized and suppressed film shot in the bombed cities by U.S. military crew s and Japanese newsreel teams to prevent Americans from seeing the full extent o f devastation wrought by the new weapons. It remained hidden until the early 198 0s and has never been fully aired. "Although there are clearly huge differences with Iraq, there are also some similarities," said Mitchell, co-author of "Hiros hima in America" and editor of Editor & Publisher. "The chief similarity is that Americans are still being kept at a distance from images of death, whether of t heir own soldiers or Iraqi civilians." The Los Angeles Times released a survey o f six months of media coverage of the Iraq war in six prominent U.S. newspapers and two news magazines -- a period during which 559 coalition forces, the vast m ajority American, were killed. It found they had run almost no photographs of Am ericans killed in action. "So much of the media is owned by big corporations and they would much rather focus on making money than setting themselves up for cri ticism from the White House and Congress,"said Ralph Begleiter, a former CNN cor respondent. In 1945, U.S. policymakers wanted to be able to continue to develop and test atomic and eventually nuclear weapons without an outcry of public opini on. "They succeeded but the subject is still a raw nerve." Note: If the article is no longer posted on the Times website, click here. And t o go much deeper into how the devastating effects of the bomb were covered up by various entities within government, click here.

Letter to Thomas Kean from Sibel Edmonds 2004-08-05, AsiaTimes ('Asia's most trusted news source') http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FH05Aa01.html Your commission ... has now issued its "9/11 Commission Report". After [9/11] we , the translators at the FBI's largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down, even stop, translation of critical information related to te rrorist activities. This issue has been confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Commit te. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, forged si gnatures on top-secret documents related to certain 9/11 detainees. Not only doe s the supervisor facilitating these criminal conducts remain in a supervisory po sition, he has been promoted. In April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset ... received information that: 1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist at tack in the United States targeting 4-5 major cities, 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes [and] the attack was going to be carried out soon. No action was taken. After 9/11, the agents and the translators were told to 'keep quiet' regarding this issue. The translator who was present ... reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing. Why did your report choose to exclude the inform ation ... despite the public confirmation by the FBI, witnesses provided to your investigators, and briefings you received directly? As you are fully aware, the se issues and incidents were found confirmed by a Senior Republican Senator, Cha rles Grassley, and a Senior Democrat Senator, Patrick Leahy. Even FBI officials 'confirmed all my allegations and denied none' during their unclassified meeting s with the Senate Judiciary staff. However, neither your commission's hearings, nor your commission's five hundred sixty seven-page report ... include these ser ious issues, major incidents, and systemic problems. Note: If the above link fails, click here. Sibel Edmonds is one of the great her oes of our day. She has been gagged directly by the U.S. Attorney General from t elling what she knows. The above letter was not published in any major U.S. medi a, though widely reported in alternative new sources. To understand how such vit al information is hidden from the public, click here. For lots more on Ms. Edmon

ds, click here.

The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis 1987-11-04, WantToKnow.info/PBS Documentary http://www.WantToKnow.info/050423secretgovernment The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spie s, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. The Russian s had been our ally against the Nazis, an expedient alliance for the sake of war . Now they were our enemy. To fight them we turned to some of the very men who h ad inflicted on humanity the horrors of Hitler s madness. We hired Nazis as America n spies. Admiral Gene La Rocque: That National Security Act of 1947 changed drama tically the direction of this great nation. It established the framework for a n ational security state. Never have we had a National Security Council so concern ed about the nation s security that we re always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was inven ted, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do. The National Security Act also gave us the Central Intelligence Agency." In 197 5 ... Congress took its first public look at the Secret Government. Senator Fran k Church chaired the Select Committee to study government operations. The hearin gs opened the books on a string of lethal activities. From the use of electric p istols and poison pellets, to Mafia connections and drug experiments. And they g ave us a detailed account of assassination plots against foreign leaders and the overthrowing of sovereign governments. This is a system easily corrupted. While freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends. Note: This highly revealing PBS documentary is available for free viewing on the Internet. For the link, written text, and much more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here.

Cluster bomb trade funded by world's biggest banks 2009-10-29, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/29/banks-fund-cluster-bomb-trade The deadly trade in cluster bombs is funded by the world's biggest banks who hav e loaned or arranged finance worth $20bn (12.5bn) to firms producing the controve rsial weapons, despite growing international efforts to ban them. HSBC, led by o rdained Anglican priest Stephen Green, has profited more than any other institut ion from companies that manufacture cluster bombs. The British bank ... has earn ed a total of 657.3m in fees arranging bonds and share offerings for Textron, whi ch makes cluster munitions described by the US company as "leaving a clean battl efield". HSBC will face protests outside its London headquarters today. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan and UK-based Barclays Bank are also named amon g the worst banks in a detailed 126-page report by Dutch and Belgian campaign gr oups IKV Pax Christi and Netwerk Vlaanderen. Goldman Sachs, the US bank which ma de 3.19bn proft in just three months, earned $588.82m for bank services and lent $250m to Alliant Techsystems and Textron. Last December 90 countries, including the UK, committed themselves to banning cluster bombs by next year. But the US w as not one of them. So far 23 countries have ratified the convention. The UK has yet to do so. Note: For many verifiable revelations of war profiteering by large corporations, click here.

CIA's black sites, illuminated 2009-08-31, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cia-detainee31-2009aug31... The secret overseas "black sites" where the CIA conducted the interrogations are empty now, if not already dismantled. They were never examined by a congression al committee, nor inspected by the international Red Cross. The black sites not only imprisoned men but reduced them to a near helpless state. The aim, as outli ned in one document, was to teach every detainee "to perceive and value his pers onal welfare, comfort and immediate needs more than the information he is protec ting." The prisoners' arrival -- almost always in diapers -- was engineered to a chieve that end. After being shaved, stripped and photographed nude, detainees w ere examined by CIA medical and psychological personnel. Then came a preliminary interrogation that would determine the prisoners' fate. Only those considered e xtremely cooperative would avoid a trio of techniques designed to produce a "bas eline, dependent" state: the deprivation of clothes, solid food and sleep. Follo w-up sessions would start with the prisoner standing with his back against a wal l and a towel or collar to prevent whiplash wrapped around his neck. He could be thrown against the wall just once "to make a point, or 20 to 30 times consecuti vely." Prisoners so abhorred the repeated slamming that they would remain in socalled stress positions, such as painful kneeling postures, for hours to avoid a return to the wall, according to one Dec. 30, 2004, memo that amounts to a CIA blueprint for breaking a detainee's will. Earlier this year, the Obama administr ation released a series of Justice Department memos laying out legal rationales for the array of coercive interrogation methods the CIA employed. Note: For further revelations from major media sources on the illegal methods us ed by the US government in its wars around the world, click here.

Abu Ghraib abuse photos 'show rape' 2009-05-28, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5395830/Abu-Ghraib... Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged. At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while anot her is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee. Further photograph s are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a trunc heon, wire and a phosphorescent tube. Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts. Detail of the conte nt emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conduc ted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Allegations of rape and abuse w ere included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never re vealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Tele graph. The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President s att empts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Ira q and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published. Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President s decisio n, adding: These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency. I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the conse quence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy , when we most need them. The mere description of these pictures is horrendous en ough, take my word for it.

Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by the C.I.A. 2009-04-17, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17detain.html?partner=rss&emc=r... The Justice Department ... made public detailed memos describing brutal interrog ation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sou ght to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be pros ecuted. In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into th e box to exploit their fears. The interrogation methods were authorized beginnin g in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A. s secret overseas pris ons. The United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators at war crimes tria ls after World War II for waterboarding and other methods detailed in the memos. Together, the four memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the C.I.A. s methods and the Justice Department s long struggle, in the face of graphic descri ptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Pa ssages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Conventio n Against Torture. The revelations may give new momentum to proposals for a full -blown investigation into Bush administration counterterrorism programs and poss ible torture prosecutions. Note: For many revealing reports from major media sources on increasing threats to civil liberties, click here.

Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots 2009-03-29, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/28/AR20090328020... When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to wat erboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they ... succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers arou nd the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot wa s foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said. M oreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that ma de clear they had [falsely accused] Abu Zubaida. Abu Zubaida was not even an off icial member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from c ourt documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcem ent and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues , and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan. Since 2006, Se nate intelligence committee members have pressed the CIA, in classified briefing s, to provide examples of specific leads that were obtained from Abu Zubaida thr ough the use of waterboarding and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests. The agency provided none, the officials said. Note: Was the torture of Abu Zubaida an error, or was it for some other purpose than extracting information from him? For many reports which raise similar quest ions about the so-called "Global War on Terror", click here.

Robot killers might be allowed to fire on their own 2009-03-29, Sacramento Bee (the leading newspaper of California's capital city) http://www.sacbee.com/838/story/1737623.html The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pak istan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killer s that operate with limited, if any, human control. The Defense Department is fi nancing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find a nd destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons. "The trend is clear: Warfar e will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct ," Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atl anta, wrote in a study commissioned by the Army. Autonomous armed robotic system s probably will be operating by 2020, according to John Pike, an expert on defen se and intelligence matters and the director of the security Web site GlobalSecu rity.org in Washington. This prospect alarms experts, who fear that machines wil l be unable to distinguish between legitimate targets and civilians in a war zon e. "We are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where an d when to kill," said Noel Sharkey, an expert on robotics and artificial intelli gence at the University of Sheffield, England. Human operators thousands of mile s away in Nevada, using satellite communications, control the current generation of missile-firing robotic aircraft, known as Predators and Reapers. Armed groun d robots, such as the Army's Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, also require a human decision-maker before they shoot. Note: For further reports from reliable sources on new weapons under development for future wars, click here.

Pentagon sets sights on public opinion 2009-02-05, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29040299/ The Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing the money it spends to win what it calls "the human terrain" of world public opinion. In the process, it is raising concerns of spreading propaganda at home in violation of federal law. A n Associated Press investigation found that over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to Department of Defen se budgets and other documents. That's almost as much as it spent on body armor for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006. This year, the Pentago n will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relatio ns almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department. The biggest chunk of funds about $1.6 billion goes into recruitment and adverti sing. Another $547 million goes into public affairs, which reaches American audi ences. And about $489 million more goes into what is known as psychological oper ations. Staffing across all these areas costs about $2.1 billion, as calculated by the number of full-time employees and the military's average cost per service member. That's double the staffing costs for 2003. Recruitment and advertising are the only two areas where Congress has authorized the military to influence t he American public. Far more controversial is public affairs, because of the pro hibition on propaganda to the American public. Note: For more revealing reports from reliable sources on the realities of the w ars in Afghanstan and Iraq, click here.

Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail 2008-04-06, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/05/AR20080405020... Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military inter rogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a questi on not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out? Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slit ting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting? Thes e assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspe cts as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depende d on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies." But none of t hat matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting as sault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the pre sident's ultimate authority as commander in chief. In the sober language of foot notes, case citations and judicial rulings, the memo explores a wide range of un savory topics, from the use of mind-altering drugs on captives to the legality o f forcing prisoners to squat on their toes in a "frog crouch." It repeats an ass ertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in "death, organ failure or serious im pairment of bodily functions." Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourt h and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unr easonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply o r are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinio ns to bolster his case.

What FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds found in translation 2008-02-17, Dallas Morning News (Dallas' leading newspaper) http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-sibe... Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistle-blower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington's highest levels sale of nuclear s ecrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics traff icking, money laundering, espionage. Ms. Edmonds' account is full of dates, plac es and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to I sraeli, Pakistani and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper ec helons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirm ed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to invest igators. But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shroude d Ms. Edmonds' case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so swe eping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with to p-secret security clearances. Ms. Edmonds' revelations have attracted corroborat ion in the form of anonymous letters apparently written by FBI employees. There have been frequent reports of FBI field agents being frustrated by the premature closure of cases dealing with foreign spying, particularly when those cases inv olve Israel, and the State Department has frequently intervened to shut down inv estigations based on "sensitive foreign diplomatic relations." Curiously, the st ate-secrets gag order binding Ms. Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, wa s not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon which employ ed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her a llegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary. Note: The author of this article, Philip Giraldi, is a retired career CIA office

r. For further powerful details of Sibel Edmonds' revelations, click here.

Stonewalled by the C.I.A. 2008-01-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02kean.html More than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commissio n. Soon after its creation, the president s chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission. The commission s mandate was swe eping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revel ations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives l eads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes and did not tell us about them obstructed our investigation. No one in the administratio n ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogat ions. We did ask, repeatedly, for the kind of information that would have been c ontained in such videotapes. Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of intelligence information ... that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 1 18 named individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, t wo senior Qaeda operatives, portions of whose interrogations were apparently rec orded and then destroyed. The C.I.A. gave us many reports summarizing informatio n gained in the interrogations. But the reports raised almost as many questions as they answered. So, in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A. s general counsel. The general counsel responded in writing with non-specif ic replies. The agency did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been re corded or that it had held any further relevant information, in any form. Govern ment officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Con gress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront t his country. We call that obstruction. Note: The authors of this op-ed, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, served as c hairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the 9/11 Commission.

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations 2007-10-04, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/washington/04interrogate.html?ex=1349150400... When the Justice Department publicly declared torture abhorrent in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assert ion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations. B ut soon after Alberto R. Gonzales s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document; according to officials briefed on it, [it was] an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central I ntelligence Agency. The new opinion ... for the first time provided explicit aut horization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid t emperatures. Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing cruel, inhuman a nd degrading treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation meth ods violated that standard. The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush s second term and Mr. Gonzales s tenure at th e Justice Department. Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But t he 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusion

s have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They s how how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

Iraq corruption whistleblowers face penalties 2007-08-25, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430153/ One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corrupti on in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. Or worse. For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance say s he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Bagh dad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods. He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers all of them being sold for cash, no receipts nec essary, he said. The buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Depa rtment workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees. The seller, he claimed , was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co. It was a W al-Mart for guns, he says. It was all illegal and everyone knew it. So Vance says h e blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn t know whom to trust in Iraq. For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared. If you do it, you will be destroyed , said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of TexasEl Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Rec onstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, Should I do this ? And my answer is no. If they re married, they ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything, Weaver said.

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency 2007-06-24, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/23/AR20070623008... Part One: 'A Different Understanding With the President': In less than an hour . .. Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Fo reign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to an y court -- civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined ind efinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military com missions." "What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell dem anded ... when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National sec urity adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witness es to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had play ed any part. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to f ight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous pre sidents did not assert. Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. [The] relationship [between Bush and Cheney] is op aque, a vital unknown in assessing Cheney's impact on events. Officials who see them together often, not all of them admirers of the vice president, detect a st rong sense of mutual confidence that Cheney is serving Bush's aims.

Note: This is an important, in-depth investigation of the Cheney vice-presidency . It is highly revealing and well worth reading it its entirety.

Ex-CIA official, contractor face new charges 2007-05-11, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18622361 New charges have been filed alleging that a former top CIA official pushed a pro posed $100 million government contract for his best friend in return for lavish vacations, private jet flights and a lucrative job offer. The indictment [brings ] charges ... against Kyle Dusty Foggo, who resigned from the spy agency a year ag o, and ... defense contractor Brent Wilkes. The charges grew from the bribery sc andal that landed former U.S. Rep. Randy Duke Cunningham in prison. The pair now f ace 30 wide-ranging counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering [including that] Foggo provided Wilkes with sensitive, internal information related to ... n ational security, including classified information, to help him prepare proposals for providing undercover flights for the CIA under the guise of a civil aviatio n company and armored vehicles for agency operations. Then, he pushed his CIA co lleagues to hire Wilkes companies without disclosing their friendship, prosecutor s allege. In a June 2005 e-mail to the head of CIA air operations quoted in the indictment, Foggo offered to use some EXDIR grease on Wilkes behalf. Foggo was the ag ency s executive director at the time. In return, Wilkes offered to hire Foggo aft er he retired from government service. [An] initial indictment in February charg ed the pair with 11 counts of the same charges in connection with a $1.7 million water-supply contract Foggo allegedly helped win for one of Wilkes companies whi le he was working as a logistics coordinator at a CIA supply hub overseas. Foggo , the former No. 3 official at the CIA, resigned from the spy agency after his h ouse and office were raided by federal agents. Note: Until just a few years ago, there was a virtual blackout in the media on a ny negative coverage of the CIA. The prosecution of the #3 man in the CIA is an external manifestation of huge shake-ups going on behind the scenes. Buzzy Krong ard, the previous #3 at the CIA has been linked to the millions of dollars in su spicious stock option trades made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, th ough this received little media coverage.

Nazis rode to war on GM wheels 2007-01-07, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/07/INGPHNCLHH1.DTL In the late spring of 1933, concentration camps such as Dachau were generating h eadlines reporting great brutality. Nonetheless, GM and Germany began a strategi c business relationship. General Motors World, the company house organ, covered [a 1934] May Day event glowingly in a several-page cover story, stressing Hitler 's boundless affinity for children. The next day, May 2, 1934, after practicing his sieg heil in front of a mirror, [President of GM Overseas Corp. James] Moone y ... went to meet Hitler. As Mooney traversed the long approach to Hitler's des k, he began to pump his arm in a stern-faced sieg heil. This was ... one of many contacts between the Nazis and GM officials that are spotlighted in thousands o f pages of little-known and restricted Nazi-era and New Deal-era documents. The biggest automotive manufacturer in Germany -- indeed in all of Europe -- was Gen eral Motors, which since 1929 had owned and operated the longtime German company Opel. A few weeks after the [Hitler meeting], General Motors World effusively r ecounted ... "Hitler is a strong man, well fitted to lead the German people. He is leading them, not by force or fear, but by intelligent planning." In 1937, al most 17 percent of Opel's Blitz trucks were sold directly to the Nazi military.

That military sales figure was increased to 29 percent in 1938. In 1938, just mo nths after the Nazi annexation of Austria, Mooney, head of GM's overseas operati ons, received the German Eagle with Cross, the highest medal Hitler awarded to f oreign commercial collaborators and supporters.

Opium, thugs bloom under U.S. policies in Afghanistan war 2006-12-17, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/17/ING08MTPMB1.DTL The Taliban ... briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U. S. diplomatic recognition and aid. When the Bush administration invaded Afghanis tan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the Americ an occupation ... poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall produc tion has increased exponentially ever since -- this year by 60 percent. Within A fghanistan, where perhaps 3 million people draw direct income from poppy, profit s may reach $3 billion this year. In-country profit adds up to an estimated 60 p ercent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, or more than half the country's annual income. Afghanistan provides 92 percent of the world's heroin. Through ma ny administrations, the U.S. government has been implicated in the Afghan drug t rade. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced a very small amount of opium for regional markets , and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army, it was the world's top producer of both drugs. The CIA made it all possible by providin g legal cover for these operations. The United States [encouraged] Islamist extr emists (then "our" soldiers) and ... set the stage for the Taliban. [Currently,] President Hamid Karzai['s] strategy is to avoid confrontation, befriend potenti al adversaries and give them offices, often in his Cabinet. The trade penetrates even the elected Parliament. Among the 249 members of the Wolesi Jirga (lower h ouse) are at least 17 known drug traffickers, in addition to 40 commanders of ar med militias, 24 members of criminal gangs, and 19 men facing serious allegation s of war crimes. Note: Could it be that some U.S. officials are turning a blind eye, or even supp orting this drug trade? For some very strong evidence of this from a former awar d-winning DEA agent turned journalist and author, click here.

Pentagon resists pleas for help in Afghan opium fight 2006-12-05, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-afghandrugs5dec05,... The Pentagon ... has resisted entreaties from U.S. anti-narcotics officials to p lay an aggressive role in the faltering campaign to curb the country's opium tra de. Military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some req uests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized c rime syndicates shipping the drug to Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States. Poppy cultivation has exploded, increasing by more than half this year. Afghanistan supplies about 92% of the world's opium. "It is surprising to me tha t we have allowed things to get to the point that they have," said ... a former top State Department counter-narcotics official. Outgoing Defense Secretary Dona ld H. Rumsfeld has said that Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade is a law enfo rcement problem, not a military one. The opium trade is one-third of the country 's economy. Several dozen kingpins ... have become more brazen, richer and power ful. [They] openly run huge opium bazaars and labs that turn opium into heroin. [The] head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said ... that the loc ation of major drug operations were "well-known to us and to the authorities." T he Pentagon has balked at drug interdiction efforts even when it had the resourc

es, said a former senior U.S. anti-drug official. "There were [drug] convoys whe re military people looked the other way," the former official said. "DEA would i dentify a lab to go hit or a storage facility and [the Pentagon] would find a re ason to ground the helicopters." A recent congressional report said the DEA aske d the Pentagon for airlifts on 26 occasions in 2005, and the requests were denie d in all but three cases. Note: Some observers and insiders believe the reason Afghanistan was attacked is because the Taliban had virtually stopped the opium trade in 2001. For reliable evidence supporting these allegations, click here.

Lifting the Censor's Veil on the Shame of Iraq 2005-05-05, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00914FC3C540C768CDDAC0894DD4... There was a close-up of a soldier who was holding someone's severed leg. There w ere photos of G.I.'s happily posing with the bodies of dead Iraqis. This is what happens in war. It's the sickening reality that is seldom seen in the censored, sanitized version of the conflict that Americans typically get from the governm ent and the media. Mr. Delgado, 23, is a former Army reservist who was repelled by the violence and dehumanization of the war. He completed his tour in Iraq. Bu t he sought and received conscientious objector status and was honorably dischar ged last January. Some of the most disturbing photos in his possession were take n after G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib opened fire on detainees who had been throwing rock s at guards during a large protest. Four detainees were killed. The photos show American soldiers posing and goofing around with the bodies of the detainees. In one shot ... a G.I. is leaning over the top of the body bag with a spoon in his right hand, as if he is about to scoop up a portion of the dead man's wounded f lesh. "These pictures were circulated like trophies," Mr. Delgado said. Some wer e posted in command headquarters. But while at work in a headquarters office, he said, he learned that most of the detainees at Abu Ghraib had committed only ve ry minor nonviolent offenses, or no offenses at all. (Several investigations wou ld subsequently reveal that vast numbers of completely innocent Iraqis were seiz ed and detained by coalition forces.) His goal, he said, is to convince his list eners that the abuse of innocent Iraqis by the American military is not limited to "a few bad apples," as the military would like the public to believe. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For more on war manipulations and the suffering of our soldiers by a highly decorated U.S. general, click here.

Lost: One H-Bomb. Call Owner 2005-04-17, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59703-2005Apr16 Just after midnight on Feb. 5, 1958, two U.S. Air Force jets, each traveling 500 mph, collided 35,000 feet over the Georgia countryside. Improbably, all four cr ew members survived and the accident might have passed into dim memory if not fo r the thermonuclear weapon jettisoned off Tybee Island, Ga. The bomb is still th ere. After a weeks-long search, it was "declared irretrievably lost on 16 April 1958," the Air Force reported four years ago in an assessment of whether to cond uct a new search and recovery mission. It concluded that "it is in the best inte rest of the public and the environment to leave the bomb in its resting-place." The Navy Supervisor of Salvage, the report noted, didn't think the bomb could be found. Energy Department engineers' best guess was that it lay "buried nose-dow n, probably 5-15 feet below the seabed." Clearly, the Air Force would have been glad to let it go at that. However, it did not count on the determination of Der

ek Duke, a 60-year-old retired Air Force officer who lives nearby and for more t han six years has been searching for the bomb in the waters around Tybee Island, about 16 miles from Savannah. Responding to Duke's claim that he had found an a rea of high radiation the Air Force returned last September to look again. The r eport on the new search has not been released. Any danger still presented by the Tybee bomb is from the 400 pounds of conventional explosives or from humans som ehow ingesting uranium that might escape from the bomb and its silt prison. Note: For another interesting article on this in USA Today on Oct. 19, 2004, cli ck here. For a much more in-depth article on this incident, click here.

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons 2004-10-04, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie "mirror" of ordinary matter -- in future weapons. The most powerful potential energy source presently thoug ht to be available to humanity, antimatter is a term normally heard in science-f iction films. But antimatter itself isn't fiction. During the Cold War, the Air Force funded numerous scientific studies of the basic physics of antimatter. Fol lowing an initial inquiry from The Chronicle this summer, the Air Force forbade its employees from publicly discussing the antimatter research program. Still, d etails on the program appear in numerous Air Force documents distributed over th e Internet prior to the ban. It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive fo rce available in a speck of antimatter. One millionth of a gram of positrons con tain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to t he explosion ... in Oklahoma City in 1995. Officials at Eglin Air Force Base ini tially agreed enthusiastically to try to arrange an interview with ... Kenneth E dwards, director of the "revolutionary munitions" team at the Munitions Director ate at Eglin. "We're all very excited about this technology," spokesman Rex Swen son [said] in late July. But Swenson backed out in August after he was overruled by higher officials in the Air Force and Pentagon. Reached by phone in late Sep tember, Edwards repeatedly declined to be interviewed. His superiors gave him "s trict instructions not to give any interviews personally. "I'm sorry about that -- this (antimatter) project is sort of my grandchild."

The Pakistan connection 2004-07-22, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1266520,00.html There is evidence of foreign intelligence backing for the 9/11 hijackers. Why is the US government so keen to cover it up? Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, is waiting to be hanged in Pakistan for a murder he almost certainly d idn't commit - of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. Both th e US government and Pearl's wife have since acknowledged that Sheikh was not res ponsible. Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of Gene ral Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) , wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Wa shington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White H ouse, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then h ead of the CIA. Why hasn't the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in co urt? [Another] witness is Sibel Edmonds ... former FBI translator of intelligenc

e. She tried to blow the whistle on the cover-up of intelligence that names some of the culprits who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, but is now under two gagging orders that forbid her from testifying in court or mentioning the names of the people or the countries involved. The FBI, illegally, [also] continues to refuse the to release of their agent Robert Wright's 500-page manuscript Fatal Betraya ls of the Intelligence Mission, and has even refused to turn the manuscript over to Senator Shelby, vice-chairman of the joint intelligence committee charged wi th investigating America's 9/11 intelligence failures. Note: The above article was written by Michael Meacher, who served as the U.K. M inster of Environment from 1997 to 2003. For lots more reliable information sugg esting a major cover-up around 9/11, click here.

Did LBJ Cover For Israel? 2003-10-23, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/23/national/main579649.shtml A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Is raeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former P resident Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident. Retired Capt. Ward Boston sa id Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy's inquiry to "conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to th e contrary." Boston was senior legal counsel to the Navy's original 1967 review of the attack. He said in the sworn statement that he stayed silent for years be cause ... "when orders come ... I follow them." The USS Liberty was an electroni c intelligence-gathering ship that was cruising international waters off the Egy ptian coast on June 8, 1967. Israeli planes and torpedo boats opened fire on the Liberty. It was "one of the classic all-American cover-ups," said Ret. Adm. Tho mas Moorer, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who spent a year investigati ng the attack as part of an independent panel he formed with other former milita ry officials. The panel also included a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins. David Lewis of Lemington, Vt., was on the Liberty when it was attac ked. In an interview, he said Israel had to know it was targeting an American sh ip. He said a U.S. flag was flying that day and Israel shot it full of holes. Th e sailors on the ship, he said, quickly hoisted another American flag, a much bi gger one, to show Israel it was a U.S. vessel. Note: For lots more on this major cover-up by a U.S. president and top military officers, click here. ABC producer James Bamford, who exposed the Operation Nort hwoods cover-up, also has an excellent chapter on this event in his highly revea ling book, Body of Secrets, about the National Security Agency.

This war on terrorism is bogus (by past U.K. Minister of Environment) 2003-09-06, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1036571,00.html At least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Tw o senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation. The li st they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested. In November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida an d Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly e nough. The BBC reported [that] a former Pakistan foreign secretary was told by s enior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military

action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Zacarias Mo ussaoui ... was arrested in August 2001. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, t hat Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers. US agents ... sou ght a warrant to search his computer. They were turned down by the FBI. [A] PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document ... which said the US must "discourage a dvanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership". The document also c alls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total cont rol of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet. It also hints that th e US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genoty pes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politic ally useful tool". The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the " global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pav e the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built a round securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whol e project. Note: This is one of the very few articles recommended as a must read. Michael M eacher was the U.K. Minister of Environment from May 1997 to June 2003. Mr. Meac her lays out a wealth of highly revealing information backed by reliable sources . To confirm most of his statements on our 9/11 timeline, click here. Mr. Meache r's cliams were reported on BBC News, as well, though the BBC mentioned amazingl y little on his claims of U.S. involvement in 9/11. To see the BBC article click here.

Maybe It Stands for War's Mission Disputed 2003-06-08, WantToKnow.info/Minneapolis Star Tribune http://www.WantToKnow.info/disappearededitorial "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass de struction." Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002 [White House website] "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produc e as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." President Bush, Jan . 28, 2003 [St. Petersburg Times website] "Intelligence gathered by this and oth er governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and con ceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." President Bush, March 17, 20 03 [White House website] "There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein po ssesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them." Gen. Tommy Franks, March 22, 2003 [Washington Post] "They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer." Donald Rumsfeld, May 27, 2003 [Washington Post website]"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issu e, weapons of mass destruction [as justification for invading Iraq] because it w as the one reason everyone could agree on." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfow itz, May 28, 2003 [CNN website] Note: This article was published on the front page of the editorial section in t he June 8, 2003 edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Yet within weeks of its publication it disappeared from their website. Why have the media so avoided th ese most important facts? For an enlightening answer to this question, a powerfu l article by a highly decorated U.S. general is available here.

Military waste under fire: $1 trillion missing 2003-05-18, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/18/MN251738.DTL The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat.

..couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, n ot to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes. The nonpartisan General Acco unting Office has raised the volume of its perennial complaints about the financ ial woes at Defense, which recently failed its seventh audit in as many years. " Overhauling DOD's financial management operations represent a challenge that goe s far beyond financial accounting," GAO chief David Walker told lawmakers. Recen t government reports suggest the Pentagon's money management woes have reached a stronomical proportions. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax tha t the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile com mand launch-units. When military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet "for pennies on the dollar," a GA O official said. "We are overhauling our financial management system," said Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's chief financial officer. "The Pentagon has failed to add ress financial problems that dwarf those of Enron," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Lo s Angeles. Gregory Kutz, director of GAO's financial management division [said] "I've been to Wal-Mart. They were able to tell me how many tubes of toothpaste w ere in Fairfax, Va. And DOD can't find its chem-bio suits." Opposition to defens e spending is portrayed as unpatriotic. Legislators are often more concerned abo ut winning Pentagon pork than controlling defense waste. Note: You can read the GAO Report (Page 17 on missing planes). Page two states, "To date, no major part of DOD has yet been able to pass the test of an independ ent audit." For an intriguing Online Journal article exposing the deep role of t he Pentagon's former CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Zakheim in this corruption, c lick here. Why wasn't and isn't this front page headlines? Why are newspaper edi tors keeping this most vital information from the public?

Bin Laden comes home to roost 1998-08-24, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101 At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply define d, this is the term describing an agent, an operative or an operation that has t urned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the pe rsonification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow. There are ti mes when the United States, faced with ... moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists i n Afghanistan during the 1980s ... was one of those times. Bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who ... has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests. Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as ... the MA K - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afgh an war. MAK was nurtured by Pakistan s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow s occupation. The CIA ... had conclusive evidence by the mid-19 80s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director Robert Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top ad visors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technolog ical capabilities. Given that context, a decision was made to provide America s po tential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of h ow to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a super power. That decision is coming home to roost. Note: The #2 man (who later became #1) at the CIA acknowledges that the CIA dece ived the president in order to forward its own confrontational objectives. How o

ften do you think this might happen? Who's really in charge here? For a highly r evealing documentary titled "Secrets of the CIA," click here.

Inside the CIA: An interview with former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman 1998-01-00, CNN http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/21/interviews/goodman/ Melvin Goodman was a senior analyst in Soviet affairs at the Central Intelligenc e Agency, where he worked for two decades (1966-1986). He currently is professor of international studies at the National War College. [In the CIA], not only do you have political assassinations -- attempts at least -- throughout the Fiftie s and the Sixties ... but you even have assassination attempts against internati onal leaders: the Mongoose operation in Cuba [and] assassination attempts in Chi le, where you were dealing with a country that wasn't even in the vital national interests or concerns of the United States. All of these assassination attempts were done with the authorization of the White House. I think the major problem at the CIA -- and it exists to this day -- is that you have two cultures. You ha ve an intelligence or analytical culture that must remain open. The opposite of that is the clandestine side: it's secret, it's a policy branch of the governmen t. The White House basically uses the operational component of the CIA to do its bidding. It's very useful to have a clandestine corps to carry out military or paramilitary actions very cheaply, without the hand of the United States or a pa rticular president being obvious. In many ways, you're getting worst-case assess ments, because quite often the contacts of the CIA are people on the CIA payroll , telling the CIA what these people believe the CIA wants to know -- in return f or payment. So the whole tradecraft is somewhat suspicious and somewhat corrupt from the very outset. Note: Melvin Goodman is one of many senior government officials who question the government's 9/11 story. For his comments on this, click here. For other senior officials with similar sentiments, click here.

Release of secret reports delayed 2009-11-29, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/11/29/declassifica... President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year. The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House s promises to int roduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, i ncluding domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials, that were publ icly outlined in a set of agency documents known as the "family jewels." The Whi te House has given the agencies ... an extension beyond Dec. 31 of an undetermin ed length - possibly years. It will be the third such extension: Clinton granted one in 2000 and Bush granted one in 2003. The documents, dating from World War II to the early 1980s, cover the gamut of foreign relations, intelligence activi ties, and military operations. The records in question are held by the Central I ntelligence Agency; the National Security Agency; the departments of Justice, St ate, Defense, and Energy; and other security and intelligence agencies. None of the agencies involved responded to requests for comment. Steven Aftergood, a spe cialist on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washin gton [said] "If binding deadlines can be extended more or less at will, then any new declassification requirements will be similarly subject to doubt or defianc e."

Note: These documents are all more than 25 years old. Why can't the public know what their government is trying to hide from them? For lots more on government s ecrecy, click here.

Patriot Act Provisions Get Obama Support 2009-09-15, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-supports-extending-patriot-act/story?id=... The Justice Department has indicated that the Obama administration is in support of renewing [three] controversial sections of the USA Patriot Act that expire l ater this year. The provisions that will expire in December include Section 206, that allows "roving" wiretaps so FBI agents can tap multiple phones or computer s (with court authorization) that a specific person (target) may use. Another ex piring provision, Section 215, is the so-called "library provision," which allow s investigators to obtain [library, medical, business, banking and other] record s with approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And the final provision which was nicknamed the "Lone Wolf" authorization, allows intelligence gathering of people not suspected of being part of a foreign government or know n terrorist organization. Critics of the Patriot Act protested loudly that the F BI could obtain individuals' library records under the legislation. [But] sectio n 215 is much more expansive than reviewing a suspected terrorist's summer readi ng list. [It] allows the FBI to obtain any business record, "any tangible things ," like credit card and bank statements and also allows access to medical and me ntal health records. The provision has been used to obtain communication and sub scriber information to help set up surveillance and monitoring of computers and telephones. Note: The American Library Association, the national organization of professiona l librarians, was the first and strongest defender of civil liberties after the passage of the PATRIOT Act. For a discussion of the concerns of professional lib rarians over this decision by the Obama administration, click here.

Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain cov ering it up to continue war on terror? 2009-09-11, Daily Mail (One of the UK's largest-circulation newspapers) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seve... [President] Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find [Osama bin Laden ]. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special for ces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror. Th is new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff? Wha t if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Weste rn allies to stir up support for the war on terror? Incredibly, this is the brea thtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts. Still more questions have been raised with t he publication in America and Britain of a book called Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? Written by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, ... it is provoking shock waves - for it goes into far more detail about his su pposed death and suggests there has been a cover-up by the West. The book claims that Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on December 13, 2 001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with

Waziristan. His burial took place within 24 hours, in line with Muslim religious rules, and in an unmarked grave, which is a Wahhabi custom. The author insists that the many Bin Laden tapes made since that date have been concocted by the We st to make the world believe Bin Laden is alive. Could it be that, for years, he 's just been smoke and mirrors? Note: Hundreds of scholars, officials and professionals have raised questions ab out bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and other aspects of the official conspiracy about the events of 9/11. Click here and here to read their concerns.

Kelly's Book of Secrets 2009-07-05, Daily Express (One of the UK's largest-circulation newspapers) http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/111971/Kelly-s-book-of-secrets Weapons inspector David Kelly was writing a book exposing highly damaging govern ment secrets before his mysterious death. He was intending to reveal that he warn ed Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the British and American invasion. He had several discussion s with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go witho ut breaking the law on secrets. Following his death, his computers were seized a nd it is still not known if any rough draft was discovered by investigators and, if so, what happened to the material. Dr Kelly was also intending to lift the l id on a potentially bigger scandal, his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa. US television investigators have spent fo ur years preparing a 90-minute documentary, Anthrax War, suggesting there is a g lobal black market in anthrax and exposing the mystery suicides of five government germ warfare scientists from around the world. Director Bob Coen said: The deeper you look into the murky world of governments and germ warfare, the more worryin g it becomes. We have proved there is a black market in anthrax. David Kelly was of particular interest to us because he was a world expert on anthrax and he was involved in some degree with assisting the secret germ warfare programme in apa rtheid South Africa. Dr Kelly was found dead in woods near his Oxfordshire home o n July 17 2003. His apparent suicide came two days after he was interrogated in the Commons over his behind-the-scenes role in exposing the flaws in the sexed-up Number 10 dossier which justified Britain going to war with Iraq. Conspiracy the orists have claimed he was murdered. Note: For more on the CBC documentary Anthrax War, click here. And to read about the strange deaths of 13 renowned microbiologists in the space of less than fiv e months, click here.

Pentagon Exam Calls Protests 'Low-Level Terrorism,' Angering Activists 2009-06-17, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,526972,00.html A written exam administered by the Pentagon labels "protests" as a form of low-le vel terrorism enraging civil liberties advocates and activist groups who say it s hows blatant disregard of the First Amendment. The written exam, given as part o f Department of Defense employees routine training, includes a multiple-choice qu estion that asks: Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism? Att acking the Pentagon IEDs Hate crimes against racial groups Protests. The correct answer, according to the exam, is "Protests." Its part of a pattern of equating dissent and protest with terrorism," said Ann Brick, an attorney with the Americ an Civil Liberties Union, which obtained a copy of the question after a Defense Department employee who was taking the test printed the screen on his or her com puter terminal. "It undermines the core constitutional values the Department of

Defense is supposed to be defending, Brick said, referring to the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. She said the ACLU has asked the Defense Department to remove the question and send out a correction to all employees who took the exam. There were other employees who were unhappy with it and disturbed by it, Bri ck said. Anti-war protesters, who say they have been targets of federal surveill ance for years, were livid when they were told about the exam question. That s ille gal, said George Martin, national co-chairman of United for Peace and Justice. Pro test in terms of legal dissent has to be recognized, especially by the authoriti es. It s not terrorism or a lack of patriotism. We care enough to be active in our government. Note: For lots more on the continually-escalating government threats to civil li berties, click here.

How MI5 blackmails British Muslims 2009-05-21, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exclusive-how-mi5-blackmails-b... Five Muslim community workers have accused MI5 of waging a campaign of blackmail and harassment in an attempt to recruit them as informants. The men claim they were given a choice of working for the Security Service or face detention and ha rassment in the UK and overseas. They have made official complaints to the polic e, to the body which oversees the work of the Security Service and to their loca l MP Frank Dobson. Now they have decided to speak publicly about their experienc es in the hope that publicity will stop similar tactics being used in the future . Three of the men say they were detained at foreign airports on the orders of M I5 after leaving Britain on family holidays last year. After they were sent back to the UK, they were interviewed by MI5 officers who, they say, falsely accused them of links to Islamic extremism. On each occasion the agents said they would lift the travel restrictions and threat of detention in return for their co-ope ration. When the men refused some of them received what they say were intimidati ng phone calls and threats. Two other Muslim men say they were approached by MI5 at their homes after police officers posed as postmen. Each of the five men, ag ed between 19 and 25, was warned that if he did not help the security services h e would be considered a terror suspect. A sixth man was held by MI5 for three ho urs after returning from his honeymoon in Saudi Arabia. He too claims he was thr eatened with travel restrictions if he tried to leave the UK." Note: For lots more on the "war on terror" from reliable sources, click here.

Wars, Endless Wars 2009-03-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/opinion/03herbert.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&... The U.S. economy is in free fall, the banking system is in a state of complete c ollapse and Americans all across the country are downsizing their standards of l iving. The nation as we ve known it is fading before our very eyes, but we re still pouring billions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with missions we a re still unable to define. Even as the U.S. begins plans to reduce troop commitm ents in Iraq, it is sending thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan. The strategic purpose of this escalation, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowl edged, is not at all clear. We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We don t even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest ass essment of the situation ... would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and q uagmire. Instead of cutting our losses, we appear to be doubling down. As for Ir aq, President Obama announced last week that substantial troop withdrawals will

take place over the next year and a half and that U.S. combat operations would c ease by the end of August 2010. But, he said, a large contingent of American tro ops, perhaps as many as 50,000, would still remain in Iraq for a period of transi tion. That s a large number of troops, and the cost of keeping them there will be h uge. I can easily imagine a scenario in which Afghanistan and Iraq both heat up and the U.S., caught in an extended economic disaster at home, undermines its fr agile recovery efforts in the same way that societies have undermined themselves since the dawn of time with endless warfare. Note: The strategic purpose of rs and power elite. A top U.S. ich we have a two-page summary le sources on the realities of keeping the wars going is well known by the banke general revealed it all in a powerful book, of wh available here. For revealing reports from reliab the Iraq and Afghan wars, click here.

A 'fraud' bigger than Madoff 2009-02-16, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/a-fraud-bigger-than-madoff-1... In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorit ies have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn ... in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report b y the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it m ay exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme. "I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US o fficials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad," said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003. Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. America n federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions of senior U S officers involved in the programme to rebuild Iraq. In the expanded inquiry by federal agencies, the evidence of a ... US businessman called Dale C Stoffel wh o was murdered after leaving the US base at Taiji north of Baghdad in 2004 is be ing re-examined. Before he was killed, Mr Stoffel, an arms dealer and contractor , was granted limited immunity from prosecution after he had provided informatio n that a network of bribery linking companies and US officials awarding contract s existed within the US-run Green Zone in Baghdad. He said bribes of tens of tho usands of dollars were regularly delivered in pizza boxes sent to US contracting officers. Note: To read a former Marine Corps general's exposure of the high-level crimina lity and profiteering that is the real purpose behind war, click here. For many powerful revelations from reliable sources of government corruption, click here.

You are being lied to about pirates 2009-01-05, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you... Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? The British Royal Navy backed by the ships of more than two dozen na tions, from the US to China is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we st ill picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. But behind ... this ta le there is an untold scandal. In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since and the uglies t forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas. Yes: nuclear wa

ste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appea ring off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and ma lformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. At the same time, other European ships have been looting So malia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300mworth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawle rs. The local fishermen are now starving. This is the context in which the "pira tes" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dum pers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them.

Coming to the Battlefield: Stone-Cold Robot Killers 2009-01-04, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR20090102021... Armed robotic aircraft soar in the skies above Pakistan, hurling death down. Soo n -- years, not decades, from now -- American armed robots will patrol on the gr ound as well, fundamentally transforming the face of battle. The detachment with which the United States can inflict death upon our enemies is surely one reason why U.S. military involvement around the world has expanded over the past two d ecades. The Future Combat Systems program is aimed at developing an array of new vehicles and systems -- including armed robots. These killers will be utterly w ithout remorse or pity when confronting the enemy. Armed robots will all be snip ers. Stone-cold killers, every one of them. They will aim with inhuman precision and fire without human hesitation. They will not need bonuses to enlist or hous ing for their families or expensive training ranges or retirement payments. Comm anders will order them onto battlefields that would mean certain death for human s, knowing that the worst to come is a trip to the shop for repairs. Note: For lots more on developing war technologies from reliable sources, click here.

The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep. 2008-12-21, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/19/AR20081219027... We no longer have a civilian-led government. The most unnerving legacy of the Bu sh administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striki ng number of aspects of civilian government. Our Constitution is at risk. Presid ent-elect Barack Obama's selections of James L. Jones, a retired four-star Marin e general, to be his national security adviser and, it appears, retired Navy Adm . Dennis C. Blair to be his director of national intelligence ... could complete the silent military coup d'etat that has been steadily gaining ground below the radar screen of most Americans and the media. While serving the State Departmen t in several senior capacities over the past four years, I witnessed firsthand t he quiet, de facto military takeover of much of the U.S. government. The first a ssault on civilian government occurred in faraway places -- Iraq and Afghanistan . As military officers sought to take over the role played by civilian developme nt experts abroad, Pentagon bureaucrats quietly populated the National Security Council and the State Department with their own personnel ... to ensure that the Defense Department could keep an eye on its rival agencies. The encroachment wi thin America's borders continued with the military's increased involvement in do mestic surveillance and its attempts to usurp the role of the federal courts in reviewing detainee cases. The Pentagon also resisted ceding any authority over i

ts extensive intelligence operations to the ... director of national intelligenc e. Now the Pentagon has drawn up plans to deploy 20,000 U.S. soldiers inside our borders by 2011. Note: The author of this piece, Thomas A. Schweich, served the Bush administrati on as ambassador for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan and deputy assistant secre tary of state for international law enforcement affairs.

One Man s Military-Industrial-Media Complex 2008-11-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/washington/30general.html?partner=rss&emc=r... Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the inter section of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired genera ls, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and d efense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged a ccess to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes obli vious to possible conflicts of interest. Few illustrate the submerged complexiti es of this world better than Barry McCaffrey. General McCaffrey, 66, has long be en a force in Washington s power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated poli ticians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at Wes t Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war. But it was 9/11 that thrust Genera l McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering c risp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for spe eches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times. His influence is such that President Bush and Congressional leaders from both parties have invited him for war consultations. At the same time, Gene ral McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism. Note: This in-depth article on the "military-industrial-media complex" is worth reading in its entirety. For lots more on war profiteering from reliable sources , click here.

Known Unknowns: Uncoventional "Strategic Shocks" in Defense Strategy Development 2008-11-01, U.S. Army Website, Strategic Studies Institute http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB890.pdf Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense estab lishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and h uman security. Deliberate employment of weapons of mass destruction or other cat astrophic capabilities, unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning politi cal and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive pub lic health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters are all pat hs to disruptive domestic shock. An American government and defense establishmen t lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rap idly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapid ly expanding human insecurity at home. Already predisposed to defer to the prima cy of civilian authorities in instances of domestic security and divest all but the most extreme demands in areas like civil support and consequence management, DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranqui

lity. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military f orce against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority i n a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance. Note: For an analysis which deconstructs the opaque military jargon in which thi s revealing strategic document is written, click here. Use of military forces to maintain domestic order has been forbidden since 1878 by the Posse Comitatus Ac t. The Pentagon appears to be planning to abrogate this key support of civil lib erties.

4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images 2008-07-26, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/world/middleeast/26censor.html?partner=rssu... The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Ma rines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has undersc ored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to c ontrol graphic images from the war. Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took ima ges of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web sit e, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the co untry. After five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead Americ an soldiers. Opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists arg ue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans wh o choose to do so have the right to see in whatever medium the human cost of a w ar that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans. Journalists say it is now harder ... to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. And while publ ishing photos of American dead is not barred under the embed rules in which journa lists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military. "It is absolutely censorship , Mr. Miller said. I took pictures of something they didn t like, and they removed m e. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don t see a clearer definition of ce nsorship." Note: For more coverage of war censorship and the realities of the Iraq and Afgh anistan wars, click here.

Pentagon Auditors Pressured To Favor Contractors, GAO Says 2008-07-24, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/23/AR20080723014... Auditors at a Pentagon oversight agency were pressured by supervisors to skew th eir reports on major defense contractors to make them look more favorable instea d of exposing wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page rep ort released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. The Defense Cont ract Audit Agency, which oversees contractors for the Defense Department, "impro perly influenced the audit scope, conclusions and opinions" of reviews of contra ctor performance, the GAO said, creating a "serious independence issue." The rep ort does not name the projects or the contractors involved, but staff members on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee who were briefe d on the findings cited seven contractors, some of whom are among the biggest in the defense industry: Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Fluor, Parker Hannifin, Sparta, SRS Technologies and a subsidiary of L3 Communications. Supervisors at DCAA att empted to intimidate auditors, prevented them from speaking with GAO investigato

rs and created a "generally abusive work environment," the report said. It cited incidents of "verbal admonishments, reassignments and threats of disciplinary a ction" against workers who "raised questions about management guidance." The GAO said it launched the two-year inquiry after complaints on a fraud hotline. Its investigators conducted more than 100 interviews of 50 people involved in audits between 2003 and 2007. Note: For eye-opening reports on government corruption from reliable sources, cl ick here.

General Accuses White House of War Crimes 2008-06-18, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/06/18/BL2008061801546.... The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee ab use at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calli ng for accountability. In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anth ony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton c riminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "system ic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in The New Yorker, he was rew arded for his honesty by being forced into retirement. Now, in a preface to a Ph ysicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detaine es, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation. The new report, he writes, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our cust ody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regi me of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the r est of these individual's lives on their bodies and minds. The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told wh y they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that to rture is ever justified. In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cru elty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the fi eld whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. Th ere is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committe d war crimes." Note: For many revealing reports on the brutal realities of the Iraq and Afghani stan wars, click here.

Guantanamo: Policy goals trumped law 2008-06-18, Miami Herald/McClatchy Newspapers http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/574074.html The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of Americ an military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers. It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tosse d out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations. The quin tet of lawyers, who called themselves the War Council," drafted legal opinions th at circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and Ame rica's international treaties in order to prevent anyone ... from being held acc ountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes. The international conventions ... to which [the US is] a party, were abandoned in s

ecret meetings among the five men in one another's offices: ... David Addington, the ... longtime legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney [whose] primary motive, according to several former administration and defense officials, was t o push for an expansion of presidential power that Congress or the courts couldn 't check; Alberto Gonzales, first the White House counsel and then the attorney general; William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel; former Justi ce Department lawyer John Yoo, [and] Timothy E. Flanigan, a former deputy to Gon zales. Note: Virtually no major media other than the Herald picked up this key story.

Documents indicate U.S. hid terror suspects from Red Cross 2008-06-17, Miami Herald/McClatchy Newspapers http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/574075.html The U.S. military hid the locations of ... detainees and concealed harsh treatme nt to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, accord ing to documents that a Senate committee released. "We may need to curb the hars her operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any cont roversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm t hat U.S. officials at another detention facility Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees. "True, but officially it is n ot happening," she is quoted as having said. [Another] person at the meeting, Jo nathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclos ed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world. "In the past when the ICR C has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC," Fredman said. The document, a long with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relen tlessly for tougher interrogation methods. Fredman of the CIA also appeared to b e advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military fie ld guides. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," the minutes report Fre dman saying at one point. Note: For many revealing reports on the brutal realities of the Iraq and Afghani stan wars, click here.

Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir 2008-06-17, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/washington/17contractor.html?partner=rssuse... The Army official who managed the Pentagon s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in qu estionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, hou sing and other services to American troops. The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the A rmy would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations. Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to si gn off on the payments to the company. They had a gigantic amount of costs they c ouldn t justify, he said in an interview. But he was suddenly replaced, he said, an d his successors after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor t

o consider KBR s claims approved most of the payments he had tried to block. Mr. S mith s account fills in important gaps about the Pentagon s handling of the KBR cont ract, which has cost more than $20 billion so far and has come under fierce crit icism from lawmakers. Mr. Smith ... is giving his account just as the Pentagon h as recently awarded KBR part of a 10-year, $150 billion contract in Iraq. Note: For a summary of US Marine Corps General Smedley Butler's book on war prof iteering, click here.

Was Press a War Enabler ? 2 Offer a Nod From Inside 2008-05-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/washington/30press.html?partner=rssuserland... In his new memoir, What Happened, Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, said the national news media neglected their watchdog role in the run -up to the invasion of Iraq, calling reporters complicit enablers of the Bush admi nistration s push for war. Surprisingly, some prominent journalists have agreed. K atie Couric, the anchor of CBS Evening News, said ... that she had felt pressure f rom government officials and corporate executives to cast the war in a positive light. Speaking on The Early Show on CBS, Ms. Couric said the lack of skepticism s hown by journalists about the Bush administration s case for war amounted to one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism. She also said she sensed p ressure from the corporations who own where we work and from the government itsel f to really squash any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning of it. At the t ime, Ms. Couric was a host of Today on NBC. Another broadcast journalist also weig hed in. Jessica Yellin, who worked for MSNBC in 2003 and now reports for CNN, sa id ... that journalists had been under enormous pressure from corporate executive s, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consist ent with the patriotic fever in the nation. For five years, antiwar activists and media critics have claimed that the national news media failed to keep the Whit e House accountable before the invasion. Greg Mitchell, the author of So Wrong f or So Long, a book about press and presidential failures on the war, argues that some media organizations have yet to come to terms with their role. Note: For a powerful overview of the media cover-up by top, award-winning journa lists, click here.

Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation' 2008-04-09, ABC News http://www.abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4583256 In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior B ush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high -value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agenc y, sources tell ABC News. The so-called Principals who participated in the meeti ngs also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using differ ent techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- o n [captives] who proved difficult to break, sources said. The high-level discuss ions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sou rces said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of na tional security policy. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice Pres ident Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secreta ry Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director

George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Rice chaired the meetings, whic h took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by mo st of the principals or their deputies. According to multiple sources, it was me mbers of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and spe cific interrogation methods, but approved them. The Principals also approved int errogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the [infamous] 2002 memo.

Veterans recall horrors of war in live broadcast 2008-03-16, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/03/16/veterans_recall_horrors_... Jeffery Smith recalled how his Army unit beat and humiliated Iraqi prisoners. Fo rmer Marine Bryan Casler recounted how fellow Marines urinated and defecated int o food and gave it to Iraqi children. Former Marine Matthew Childers talked abou t how he used to humiliate Iraqi civilians during predawn raids on their homes. When he described turning away an Iraqi father who was asking American troops to help the badly burned baby he carried in his arms, Jackson began to weep silent ly. "These soldiers are saying: 'I'm complicit,' " said [Liz] Jackson, 29, a com munity organizer from Cambridge. "But every American citizen who saw this happen and isn't out there protesting is complicit. I include myself." Hundreds of sol diers and Marines from across the country are testifying this weekend in the "Wi nter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan" hearings, a four-day event held at the Natio nal Labor College in Silver Spring, Md. The event is named after the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings in which Vietnam War veterans testified in a Detroit hotel abo ut war crimes they had participated in or witnessed. The hearings, which began T hursday and end today, were organized by the Iraq Veterans Against War, a nation al antiwar organization, and broadcast live in locations across the country. The veterans who testified called for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Ira q. On Friday, more than a dozen Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from Massachusetts drove to Silver Spring to observe and participate in the hearings. One of them, Ian J. Lavallee, an Iraq war veteran from Jamaica Plain, said in a phone interv iew, "We dehumanized people. The way we spoke about them, the way we destroyed t heir livelihoods, their families, doing raids, manhandling them, throwing the me n on the ground while their family was crying. I became a person I never thought I would become," he said. Note: To listen to audio archives of the live Winter Soldier broadcasts, click h ere. For a powerful essay by a former highly decorated U.S. general on how war i s meant to dehumanize both soldiers and civilians, click here.

The three trillion dollar war 2008-02-23, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/articl... The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers [forecast] a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone co uld have imagined. The cost of direct US military operations - not even includin g long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korea n War. And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almo st ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost o f the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our hi story which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fo

ught in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after a djusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion. Most Americans have yet to feel th ese costs. The price in blood has been paid by our voluntary military and by hir ed contractors. The price in treasure has, in a sense, been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for it - in fact, taxes on the ric h have actually fallen. Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of eco nomics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter. But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of the war are real even if they have been def erred, possibly to another generation. From the unhealthy brew of emergency fund ing, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources require d to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spen ding - and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arr ive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assu mptions. Note: For many reports from major media sources which reveal massive war profite ering, click here.

U.S. Payments To Pakistan Face New Scrutiny 2008-02-21, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/20/ST2008022002819... Once a month, Pakistan's Defense Ministry delivers 15 to 20 pages of spreadsheet s to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. They list costs for feeding, clothing, bille ting and maintaining 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistani troops in the volatile tribal a rea along the Afghan border. No receipts are attached. In response, the Defense Department has disbursed about $80 million monthly, or roughly $1 billion a year for the past six years, in one of the most generous U.S. military support progr ams worldwide. But vague accounting, disputed expenses and suspicions about over billing have recently made these payments to Pakistan highly controversial -- ev en within the U.S. government. Questions have already been raised about where th e money went and what the Bush administration got in return. In perhaps the most disputed series of payments, Pakistan received about $80 million a month in 200 6 and 2007 for military operations during cease-fires with pro-Taliban tribal el ders along the border, including a 10-month truce in which troops returned to th eir barracks. U.S. officials say the payments to Pakistan -- which over the past six years have totaled $5.7 billion -- were cheap compared with expenditures on Iraq, where the United States now spends at least $1 billion a week on military operations alone. Congressional officials and others are concerned that the adm inistration has been so eager to prop up Musharraf that it overlooked U.S. forei gn aid and accounting standards. A congressional oversight subcommittee is also set to begin an investigation next month, while the Government Accountability Of fice plans to finish its own inquiry in April.

How the spooks took over the news 2008-02-11, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/how-the-spooks-took-over-the-news-780... On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and a larming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's l eadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war. The story went on to news agency wires and, w ithin 24 hours, it was running around the world. There is very good reason to be lieve that that letter was a fake and a significant one because there is equally

good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since t he terrorist attacks of September 2001. For the first time in human history, the re is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media a re operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expos e it. The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work refl ects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our new s. The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were s aid to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news me dia. This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who con tinue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new ... structure of "s trategic communications" which was originally designed ... in the Pentagon and N ato. Note: This article is an edited excerpt from investigative journalist Nick Davie s' new book, Flat Earth News: an award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, disto rtion and propaganda in the global media. To read about or purchase it, click he re. For a highly revealing two-page summary of 20 award-winning journalists desc ribing how huge stories they tried to report were shut down by corporate media o wnership, click here.

CIA director investigating watchdog 2007-10-12, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/12/MNP1SOQI9.DTL CIA Director Michael Hayden has mounted a highly unusual challenge to his agency 's chief watchdog, ordering an internal investigation of an inspector general wh o has issued a series of reports sharply critical of top CIA officials. Hayden i s seeking to rein in an inspector general who has used the office to bring ... s crutiny upon CIA figures from former Director George Tenet to undercover operati ves running secret overseas prison sites. The investigation is focused on ... CI A Inspector General John Helgerson and his office, particularly whether they wer e fair and impartial in their scrutiny of the agency's terrorist detention and i nterrogation programs. Officials said that the investigation also will span othe r subjects and that it already has expanded since its start months ago. U.S. int elligence officials concerned about the inquiry said it is unprecedented and cou ld threaten the independence of the inspector general position. The investigatio n "could at least lead to appearances he's trying to interfere with the IG, or i ntimidate the IG, or get the IG to back off," one U.S. official familiar with th e investigation said. Frederick Hitz, who served as the CIA's inspector general from 1990 to 1998, said the move will be perceived as an attempt by Hayden "to c all off the dogs." "What it would lead to is an undercutting of the inspector ge neral's authority and his ability to investigate allegations of wrongdoing," Hit z said. "The rank and file will become aware of it, and it will undercut the ins pector general's ability to get the truth from them." Hayden has been a staunch defender of the Bush administration's counterterrorism programs. Note: What does it say about an agency when they accuse their own internal inves tigator of being corrupt?

New revelations in attack on American spy ship 2007-10-02, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday/chi-lib... Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the

Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone. "I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething with anger!" Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fou rth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War. Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by The Trib une cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping. Their anger has be en stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the firs t time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's positi on that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel. The documents also s uggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel's reputation and preser ve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its partic ipants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation. In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gathe rer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of con siderable controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said, " to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material," available at http://www.nsa.gov/liberty. Note: For photos, a BBC documentary, and more excellent information on this majo r cover-up, click here.

Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire. 2007-07-08, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/AR20070706019... The most intriguing secrets of the "war on terror" have nothing to do with al-Qa eda and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today. In April, Director of Nati onal Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably d elayed -- and suddenly classified a national secret. What McConnell doesn't want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign gov ernment has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show. Over the past fi ve years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intellig ence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune ... of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals [say] that more than 50 percent of the National Cland estine Service (NCS) -- the heart, brains and soul of the CIA -- has been outsou rced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. These firms recruit spies, create non-official cover identities and co ntrol the movements of CIA case officers. They also provide case officers and wa tch officers at crisis centers and regional desk officers who control clandestin e operations worldwide. As The Los Angeles Times first reported last October, mo re than half the workforce in two key CIA stations -- Baghdad and Islamabad, Pak istan -- is made up of industrial contractors, or "green badgers," in CIA parlan ce. Intelligence insiders say that entire branches of the NCS have been outsourc ed to private industry.

Nuking Iran: The Republican Agenda? 2007-06-06, Washington Post

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/06/nuking_iran_the_republica... At the Republican debate, almost all the candidates said that they would not rul e out a nuclear attack on Iran as a means to prevent it from getting its own nuc lear weapons. Only one [candidate] would say that attacking Iran -- indeed even threatening to nuke Iran -- is not the right strategy. "We have to come to our s enses about this issue of war and preemption," he said. The audience applauded, but he didn't get much support from his fellow candidates. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California was the starkest: "I would authorize the use of tactical nuclear wea pons if there was no other way to preempt those particular centrifuges," he said . Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ... added that "you can't rule out anyt hing and you shouldn't take any option off the table." Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore also [stated] "all options are on the table" with regard to Iranian nucl ear weapons. Said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: "I wouldn't take any op tions off the table." After the debate, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who did not particpate, added his name to the list of candidates who would consi der a preemptive attack against Iran. Only Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the "Dennis t he Menace" of his party, said he opposed a nuclear strike on moral grounds and b ecause he believed Iran "has done no harm to us directly and is no threat to our national security." The Iraq war and the war against terrorism are the central battles of our time, these candidates say. They all profess their faith in God a nd the United States, and speak of a moral struggle between good and evil, betwe en the United States and "radical Islam." Yet they are not willing to say that n uclear weapons have no place in modern confrontations. Note: For what a top US general has to say about war manipulations, click here.

Pentagon restricting testimony in Congress 2007-05-10, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/05/10/pentagon_res... The Pentagon has placed unprecedented restrictions on who can testify before Con gress, reserving the right to bar lower-ranking officers, enlisted soldiers, and career bureaucrats from appearing before oversight committees or having their r emarks transcribed. The guidelines, described in an April 19 memo to the staff d irector of the House Armed Services Committee, adds that all field-level officer s and enlisted personnel must be "deemed appropriate" by the Department of Defen se before they can participate in personal briefings for members of Congress or their staffs. In addition, according to the memo, the proceedings must not be re corded. Any officers who are allowed to testify must be accompanied by an offici al from the administration. Veterans of the legislative process -- who say they have never heard of such guidelines before -- maintain that the Pentagon has no authority to set such ground rules. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the guid elines are new. The memo has fueled complaints that the Bush administration is t rying to restrict access to information about the war in Iraq. [A] special House oversight panel, according to aides, has written at least 10 letters to the Pen tagon since February seeking information and has received only one official repl y. Nor has the Pentagon fully complied with repeated requests for all the monthl y assessments of Iraqi security forces. Note: When the military begins to control the legislative, democracy begins to s hift towards dictatorship. And for reliable information how the Pentagon cannot account for hundreds of billions of dollars, click here.

A monstrous war crime 2007-03-28, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2044345,00.html Our collective failure has been to take our political leaders at their word. Thi s week the BBC reported that the government's own scientists advised ministers t hat the Johns Hopkins study on Iraq civilian mortality was accurate and reliable . Published in the Lancet ...it estimated that 650,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the American and British led invasion in March 2003. Immediately after pub lication, the prime minister's official spokesman said that the Lancet's study " was not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate". The foreign secretary ... said that the Lancet figures were "extrapolated" and a "leap". President Bush sa id: "I don't consider it a credible report". Scientists at the UK's Department f or International Development thought differently. They concluded that the study' s methods were "tried and tested". Indeed, the Johns Hopkins approach would like ly lead to an "underestimation of mortality". The Ministry of Defence's chief sc ientific adviser ... recommended "caution in publicly criticising the study". Wh en these recommendations went to the prime minister's advisers, they were horrif ied. Tony Blair was advised to say: "The overriding message is that there are no accurate or reliable figures of deaths in Iraq". At a time when we are celebrat ing our enlightened abolition of slavery 200 years ago, we are continuing to com mit one of the worst international abuses of human rights of the past half-centu ry. Two hundred years from now, the Iraq war will be mourned as the moment when Britain violated its delicate democratic constitution and joined the ranks of na tions that use extreme pre-emptive killing as a tactic of foreign policy. Note: This article is written by Richard Horton, the editor of the highly esteem ed British medical journal Lancet.

Carlyle Changes Its Stripes 2007-02-12, BusinessWeek http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_07/b4021001.htm In the two decades since private equity firms first stormed the business world, they've been called a lot of things, from raiders to barbarians. But only [the C arlyle Group] has been tagged in the popular imagination with warmongering, trea son, and acting as cold-eyed architects of government conspiracies. Carlyle, fou nded 20 years ago in the shadow of Washington's power centers, long went about i ts business far from the public eye. Its ranks were larded with the politically connected, including former Presidents, Cabinet members, even former British Pri me Minister John Major. It used its partners' collective relationships to build a lucrative business buying, transforming, and selling companies -- particularly defense companies that did business with governments. Carlyle's radical makeove r has turned the firm into the biggest fund-raising juggernaut the private equit y world has ever seen. By the end of this year it expects to have an unprecedent ed $85 billion in investor commitments under management, up sixfold from 2001 an d more than any other firm. [Founder David] Rubenstein sees the total swelling t o as much as $300 billion by 2012. Make no mistake--Carlyle is already massive. It owns nearly 200 companies that generate a combined $68 billion in revenue and employ 200,000 people. Last year it bought a new company approximately once eve ry three days and sold one almost once a week -- all while dabbling in increasin gly esoteric investments. Since its founding in 1987 it has generated annualized after-fee returns of 26%, compared with the industry average in the mid-teens. Note: With former presidents including George H.W. Bush and many other top world politicians helping to sway huge military contracts, could this be considered a form of insider trading? Those 26% yearly returns are placing our tax monies in the hands of individuals and companies that are already among the wealthiest in the world. For lots more on manipulation of your tax money, click here. And for a Washington Post article showing Osama Bin Laden's brother met with George H.W

. Bush at a Carlyle meeting one day before 9/11, click here.

House Panel Questions Monitoring of Cash Shipped to Iraq 2007-02-07, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/washington/07bremer.html?ex=1328504400&en=a... A House committee report on Tuesday questioned whether some of the billions of d ollars in cash shipped to Iraq after the American invasion mostly in huge, shrin k-wrapped stacks of $100 bills might have ended up with the insurgent groups now battling American troops. Democrats sharply questioned the former American civi lian administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, about lax management of the near ly $12 billion in cash shipped to Iraq between May 2003 and June 2004. Mr. Breme r defended his performance as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Ira q, noting that the United States had to bring tons of American dollars into Iraq because the country had no functioning banking system. Government auditors have repeatedly criticized the American and Iraqi governments for failing to monitor the money once it reached Iraq. We have no way of knowing if the cash that was s hipped into the Green Zone ended up in enemy hands, [Committee Chairman Henry Wax man] said. We owe it to the American people to do everything we can to find out w here the $12 billion went. Mr. Waxman, whose panel is pursuing investigations of fraud and abuse by the federal government and its contractors in Iraq, said he f ound it remarkable that the Bush administration had decided to send billions of dollars of American currency into Iraq so quickly after the United States occupi ed the country. The committee calculated that the $12 billion in cash, most of i t in the stacks of $100 bills, weighed 363 tons and had to been flown in on wood en pallets aboard giant C-130 military cargo planes. Who in their right mind woul d send 360 tons of cash into a war zone? Mr. Waxman said. Note: Think about Bremer's assertion that Iraq needed U.S. dollars as the bankin g system had collapsed. Banking systems have collapsed in numerous countries in the last century, yet that has never stopped the country from functioning, nor h as the U.S. ever offered to send huge amounts of cash to help out in the past.

How US lost billions in Wild West gamble to rebuild Iraq 2007-01-26, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article720217.ece An audit of US reconstruction spending in Iraq has uncovered spectacular misuse of tens of millions of dollars in cash, including bundles of money stashed in fi ling cabinets, a US soldier who gambled away thousands, and stacks of newly mint ed notes distributed without receipts. The audit ... by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction describes a country in the months after the ove rthrow of Saddam Hussein awash with dollars, and a Wild West atmosphere where ev en multimillion-dollar contracts were paid for in cash. The findings come after a report last year by the inspector general which stated that nearly $9 billion (5 billion) of Iraq s oil revenue disbursed by the US-led Coalition Provisional Aut hority ... cannot be accounted for. The huge sums in cash were paid out with lit tle or no supervision, and often without any paperwork. In one case, a US soldie r gambled away more than $40,000 while accompanying the Iraqi Olympic boxing tea m to the Philippines. In others, one contracting officer kept approximately $2 mi llion in cash in a safe in his office bathroom , the report says, while a paying ag ent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker . More than 160 vehicles worth about $3.3 million could not be traced because there was no prope r documentation. Another project, a $473,000 contract to install an internet ser vice in Ramadi, was cancelled because officials could not oversee it. But the co ntractor had already been paid.

Note: With all of the computers the military and contractors brought into Iraq, shouldn't it be possible to track these monies? Shouldn't we as taxpayers demand accountability?

Mind Games 2007-01-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR20070110013... A community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their mi nds ... may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just tha t. An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the ide a of [such] a weapon. "The signal can be a 'message from God' that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender." In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone's head. The patent was based on human experimentatio n in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit p hrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. T he official U.S. Air Force position is that there are no non-thermal effects of microwaves. Yet ... the military's use of weapons that employ electromagnetic ra diation to create pain is well-known. In 2001, the Pentagon declassified one ele ment of this research: the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses electromagne tic radiation to heat skin and create an intense burning sensation. While its ex act range is classified, Doug Beason, an expert in directed-energy weapons, puts it at about 700 meters, and the beam cannot penetrate a number of materials, su ch as aluminum. Given the history of America's clandestine research, it's reason able to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or l ong-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the po ssibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categoric ally dismissed. Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on the little-known, yet cr itical topic of nonlethal weapons, click here. For an excellent two-page summary of government mind control programs, click here.

Does Israel have the bomb or not? Olmert: Yes, we do. 2006-12-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=15archive/&entry_id=11779 For decades, Israel coyly has refused to confirm or deny what, since 1986, the w hole world has known for sure: that is that the Jewish state is the one country in the Middle East that has a well-developed, nuclear arsenal. It was 20 years a go that Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear facilit y in the Negev Desert, informed Britain's Sunday Times about the weapons program , leading "defense analysts to rank the country as the [world's] sixth largest n uclear power." Vanunu was jailed for 18 years for revealing state secrets. Israe l calls its refusal to deny or confirm the existence of its nuclear arms its "nu clear ambiguity" policy. Why? Explains the Times (U.K.): "For many years, Israel was the only country outside the five declared nuclear powers to have built an atomic weapon ... It wanted its enemies in the region to know that it had nuclea r capability if threatened. But it also wanted to keep the existence secret so t hat it did not fall [a]foul of international action designed to halt the prolife ration of nuclear weapons, particularly strict U.S. laws which could have jeopar dized billions of dollars in annual aid." The Jerusalem Post notes that "Nuclear ambiguity was a comfortable arrangement for both Israeli and U.S. administratio ns, designed to allow Israel to get on with whatever it was doing ... without to

o much international pressure, and [to allow] the U.S. to not seem too hypocriti cal by not demanding its Middle East ally sign the [Non-proliferation Treaty]. A mbiguity might have worked for four decades, but ... it is now hopelessly outdat ed." Note: The media has been quite reluctant to discuss these issues openly. Could i t be they fear people might question the amount of U.S. aid? Israel's population is 6.5 million. Official U.S. yearly foreign aid to Israel has been about $2.5 to 3.0 billion for many years. If you do the math, U.S. taxpayers are giving eve ry man, woman, and child in Israel about $400/year -- over ten times the per cap ita rate paid to any other country. That's quite a yearly gift! A Christian Scie nce Monitor article says if all forms of aid are considered, the figures are eve n higher.

Industry 'paid top cancer expert' 2006-12-08, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6220440.stm The scientist who first linked smoking to lung cancer was [later] paid by a chem icals firm while investigating cancer risks in the industry. Professor Sir Richa rd Doll held a consultancy post with US firm Monsanto for more than 20 years. Th e BBC has seen private letters which show that Sir Richard ... received a US$1,5 00-a-day consultancy fee from Monsanto in the mid-1980s. During that time he inv estigated the potential cancer causing properties of the powerful herbicide Agen t Orange, made by the company. Sir Richard [argued] that there was no evidence t hat Agent Orange caused cancer. Professor Lennart Hardell, of the Oncology Depar tment at University Hospital Orebro, Sweden, has also studied the potential haza rds posed by Agent Orange. He was one of the scientists whose work was dismissed by Sir Richard. He said: "It's quite OK to have contacts with industry, but you should be fair and say 'well, I'm [working] as a consultant for Monsanto." Furt her documents obtained by The Guardian newspaper allegedly show that Sir Richard was also paid a 15,000 fee by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and chemic als companies Dow Chemicals and ICI for a review of vinyl chloride, used in plas tics, which largely cleared the chemical of any link with cancers apart from liv er cancer. Sir Richard's views on the chemical were used by the manufacturers' t rade association to defend it for more than a decade.

Robbery, not reconstruction, in Iraq 2006-04-18, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/18/r... We have heard various individual cases of overcharging and fraud by American fir ms in the reconstruction of Iraq. A year ago, an audit by the inspector general found no evidence of work done or goods delivered on 154 of 198 contracts. Sixty cases of potential swindles are under investigation. Halliburton and its hundre ds of millions of dollars of overcharges or baseless costs are well known. But m illions more were taken by companies that promised to build or restore libraries or police facilities, or deliver trucks and construction equipment. US governme nt investigators can account for only a third of the $1.5 billion given by the C PA to the interim government and it appears that a substantial portion of the $8 billion given to Iraqi ministries went to "ghost employees." Because of the way the United States set things up after the invasion, contractors are immune from prosecution by Iraqis. This is robbery, not reconstruction. It has been three y ears and all Iraq has become is a "free-fraud zone," according to one of the att orneys for whistleblowers in Iraqi swindles. Recently, the Army found that Halli burton had $263 million of exaggerated or unexplainable costs on a $2.4 billion

no-bid contract, yet still paid Halliburton $253 million of the $263 million.

Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon 2005-11-21, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4443934.stm Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such a s the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technol ogy which still leads the way today, but at a cost. Major-General Hugh Knerr, de puty commander of the US Air Force in Europe, wrote: "Occupation of German scien tific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alar mingly backward in many fields of research. "If we do not take the opportunity t o seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it...we will remain several years behind." Thus began Project Paperclip, the US operation which saw von Brau n and more than 700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the U S's allies. Its aim was simple: "To exploit German scientists for American resea rch and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union." President Tru man authorised Paperclip in August 1945 and, on 18 November, the first Germans r eached America. All of these men were cleared to work for the US, their alleged crimes covered up and their backgrounds bleached by a military which saw winning the Cold War, and not upholding justice, as its first priority.

Rove leak is just part of larger scandal 2005-07-15, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0715/p09s02-cods.html The underlying issue in the Karl Rove controversy is not a leak, but a war and h ow America was misled into that war. In 2002 President Bush, having decided to i nvade Iraq, was casting about for a casus belli. The weapons of mass destruction theme was not yielding very much until a dubious Italian intelligence report .. . provided reason to speculate that Iraq might be trying to buy so-called yellow cake uranium from the African country of Niger. the CIA sent Joseph Wilson, an o ld Africa hand, to Niger to investigate. Mr. Wilson spent eight days talking to everyone in Niger possibly involved and came back to report no sign of an Iraqi bid for uranium. Ignoring Wilson's report, Cheney talked on TV about Iraq's nucl ear potential. And the president himself, in his 2003 State of the Union address no less, pronounced: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein re cently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Wilson directly ch allenged the administration with a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed headlined, "What I didn't find in Africa," and making clear his belief that the president d eliberately manipulated intelligence in order to justify an invasion. Three days later, Bob Novak's column appeared giving Wilson's wife's name, Valerie Plame, and the fact she was an undercover CIA officer. Enough is known to surmise that the leaks of Rove, or others deputized by him, amounted to retaliation against s omeone who had the temerity to challenge the president of the United States. The role of Rove and associates added up to a small incident in a very large scanda l - the effort to delude America into thinking it faced a threat dire enough to justify a war.

Halliburton operates in Iran despite sanctions 2005-03-07, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7119752 in January, Halliburton won a contract to drill at a huge Iranian gas field call

ed Pars, which an Iranian government spokesman said "served the interests" of Ir an. "I am baffled that any American company would want to have employees operati ng in Iran," says Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. "I would think they'd be ashamed. " Halliburton says the operation videotaped by NBC News is entirely legal. It's run by a subsidiary called "Halliburton Products and Services Limited," based ou tside the U.S. In fact, the law allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to do business in Iran under strict conditions. Other U.S. oil services compani es, like Weatherford and Baker Hughes, also are in Iran. And foreign subsidiarie s of NBC's parent company, General Electric, have sold equipment to Iran. For Ha lliburton to have done this legally, the foreign subsidiary operating in Iran mu st be independent of the main operation in Texas. Yet, when an NBC producer appr oached managers in Iran, he was sent to company officials in Dubai. But they sai d only Halliburton headquarters in Houston could talk about operations in Iran.

C.I.A. Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files 2005-01-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/international/europe/30nazis.html?ex=126482... The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sought by a government working group under a 1998 law that re quires full disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals. Some made public last year showed a closer relationship between the United States go vernment and Nazi war criminals than had previously been understood, including t he C.I.A.'s recruitment of war criminal suspects or Nazi collaborators. For near ly three years, the C.I.A. has interpreted the 1998 law narrowly and rebuffed re quests for additional records. The dispute has not previously been made public. The American government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators , allowing many of them to live in the United States after World War II. Histori ans who have studied the documents made public so far have said that at least fi ve associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's campa ign to exterminate Jews, had worked for the CIA. The records also indicate that the CIA tried to recruit two dozen more war criminals or Nazi collaborators. Amo ng former Nazis who were given refuge in the United States was Wernher von Braun , the German scientist who developed the V-2 rocket in World War II for the Nazi s and played a major role in the development of the American space program. Note: Operation Paperclip involved secretly importing hundreds of Nazi scientist s into the U.S. and providing them with aliases and influential work in U.S. gov ernment and intelligence services. Some of them were known experts in mind contr ol techniques. For more reliable information, click here.

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power 2004-09-25, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financia l backers of Nazi Germany. Newly discovered files in the US National Archives [c onfirm] that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. His business dealings...continued until his comp any's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it ina ccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war...he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that fi nanced Hitler's rise to power. Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with German

y has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the docum entation involving him. But now [a] multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publicatio n of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson. Three sets of archives spell o ut Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the e fficient US archive system. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he wen t to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive an d influential Skull and Bones student society.

The Secret War 2002-10-27, WantToKnow.info/Los Angeles Times http://www.wanttoknow.info/021027latimes The Defense Department is dramatically expanding its 'black world' of covert ope rations. The Bush administration has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "blac k world" to press the war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The incr easingly dominant role of the military ... reflects the desire of Secretary of D efense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of the war on terror. "Ou r task is to find and destroy the enemy before they strike us." Though covert ac tion can bring quick results, because it is isolated from the normal review proc esses it can just as quickly bring mistakes and larger problems. The epicenter o f the Pentagon's covert operations remains the North Carolina-based Joint Specia l Operations Command, often referred to as Delta Force. The super-secret command is still not officially acknowledged to exist. Rumsfeld's influential Defense S cience Board ... recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, a n organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to br ing together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception. This body would launch secret operations aimed at "stim ulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destru ction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposin g themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces. The Air Force is design ing its own Global Response Task Force ... capable of delivering a "worldwide at tack within an hour." Note: For an amazing expos by a highly decorated U.S. general on the hidden reaso ns behind war, click here.

Live rats driven by remote control 2002-05-05, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,708454,00.html Scientists have turned living rats into remote-controlled, pleasure-driven robot s which can be guided up ladders, through ruins and into minefields at the click of a laptop key. The project ... is funded by the US military's research arm. A nimals have often been used by humans in combat and in search and rescue, but no t under direct computer-to-brain electronic control. The advent of surgically al tered roborats marks the crossing of a new boundary in the mechanisation, and po tential militarisation, of nature. In 10 sessions the rats learned that if they ran forward and turned left or right on cue, they would be "rewarded" with a buz z of electrically delivered pleasure. Once trained they would move instantaneous ly and accurately as directed, for up to an hour at a time. The rats could be st eered up ladders, along narrow ledges and down ramps, up trees, and into collaps ed piles of concrete rubble. Roborats fitted with cameras or other sensors could be used as search and rescue aids. In theory, be put to some unpleasant uses, s uch as assassination. [For] surveillance ... you could apply this to birds ... i

f you could fit birds with sensors and cameras. Michael Reiss, professor of scie nce education at London's Institute of Education and a leading bioethics thinker ... said he was uneasy about humankind "subverting the autonomy" of animals. "T here is a part of me that is not entirely happy with the idea of our subverting a sentient animal's own aspirations and wish to lead a life of its own." Note: Remember that secret military projects are almost always at least a decade in advance of anything you read in the media. For lots more on this little-know n subject, click here.

U.S. Forces Out Head of Chemical Arms Agency 2002-04-23, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E0D91E3FF930A15757C0A9649C... The United States succeeded today in ousting the director of the global agency c harged with ridding the world of chemical weapons after an intense diplomatic ca mpaign that made a number of countries uncomfortable. Jos M. Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat who was unanimously re-elected last year as the director general of th e 145-nation Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was voted out of office today after refusing repeated demands by the United States that he st ep down. ''I clearly made some people in Washington very uncomfortable because I was too independent,'' Mr. Bustani said afterward. ''They want somebody more ob edient.'' Diplomats said ... it had opened the door further for other internatio nal bodies to come under attack. The United States, which is responsible for 22 percent of the agency's budget, had threatened to cut off funding until Mr. Bust ani left. ''I think a lot of people swallowed this because they thought it was b etter for Bustani to be removed than have the U.S. pull out and see the organiza tion collapse,'' said one European diplomat at the meeting. The firing of Mr. Bu stani follows the removal last week of Robert Watson, a British-born climatologi st who had been outspoken on the threat of global warming, as the chairman of th e Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was removed after pressure from Washington and at least one American oil company. Note: If Bustani had not been removed, it is very likely that the accusations of WMD in Iraq would never have stood, and the war would not have happened. For a powerful two-page essay by a highly decorated U.S. general alleging that war is a racket orchestrated to line the pockets of the corporations, click here.

Chemical Coup d'etat 2002-04-16, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4394862,00.html The US wants to depose the diplomat who could take away its pretext for war with Iraq. On Sunday, the US government will launch an international coup. It has be en planned for a month. It will be executed quietly, and most of us won't know w hat is happening until it's too late. It is seeking to overthrow 60 years of mul tilateralism in favour of a global regime built on force. The coup begins with i ts attempt ... to unseat the man in charge of ridding the world of chemical weap ons. If it succeeds, this will be the first time that the head of a multilateral agency will have been deposed in this manner. The coup will also shut down the peaceful options for dealing with the chemical weapons Iraq may possess, helping to ensure that war then becomes the only means of destroying them. The Organisa tion for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) enforces the chemical weapon s convention. Its director-general is a workaholic Brazilian diplomat called Jos e Bustani. He has, arguably, done more in the past five years to promote world p eace than anyone else on earth. His inspectors have overseen the destruction of

2 million chemical weapons and two-thirds of the world's chemical weapon facilit ies. In May 2000, as a tribute to his extraordinary record, Bustani was re-elect ed unanimously by the member states for a second five-year term. Last year Colin Powell wrote to him to thank him for his "very impressive" work. But now everyt hing has changed. [But now] the man celebrated for his achievements has been den ounced as an enemy of the people. In January, with no prior warning or explanati on, the US state department asked the Brazilian government to recall him. Note: The "coup" was successful. The New York Times, though reporting few of the details above, stated six days after the above article, "Jos M. Bustani ... was voted out of office today after refusing repeated demands by the United States t hat he step down because of his 'management style.'" For why this highly reveali ng story received no media coverage in the U.S., click here. For a top U.S. gene ral's comments, click here.

Tsunami bomb - NZ's devastating war secret 1999-09-25, New Zealand Herald (New Zealand's leading newspaper) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=14727 Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfe ct a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal. United States defence chiefs sa id that if the project had been completed before the end of the war it could hav e played a role as effective as that of the atom bomb. Details of the tsunami bo mb, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53-year-old documents released by th e Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Papers stamped "top secret" show the US and British military were eager for Seal to be developed in the post-war years too. The experiments involved laying a pattern of explosives underwater to creat e a tsunami. It is unclear what happened to Project Seal once the final report w as forwarded to Wellington Defence Headquarters late in the 1940s. The bomb was never tested on a full scale. "Whether it could ever be resurrected ... Under so me circumstances I think it could be devastating."

C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan 2009-12-04, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/world/asia/04drones.html The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A. s drone program in Pakis tan s lawless tribal areas. More C.I.A. drone attacks have been conducted under Pr esident Obama than under President George W. Bush. The political consensus in su pport of the drone program ... and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robo ts to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country wh ere the United States is not officially at war. The drone warfare pioneered by t he C.I.A. in Pakistan and the Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan is the leading e dge of a wave of push-button combat that will raise legal, moral and political q uestions around the world, said P. W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institu tion and author of the book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. So far, only the United States and Israel have used the pla nes for strikes, but that number will grow. It is impossible to judge whether th e program violates international law without knowing whether Pakistan permits th e incursions, how targets are selected and what is done to minimize civilian cas ualties. Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the realities behind t he "war on terror," click here.

The Secret US War in Pakistan 2009-11-23, The Nation magazine http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091207/scahill At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Comman d (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted ass assinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan. The B lackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a sec ret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus. The previously unreported program, the military intellig ence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program. "This is a par allel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." Bl ackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody ha s cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Def ense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contrac t] approved on a rolling basis. Some of these strikes are attributed to [the CIA ], but in reality it's JSOC. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes." Note: Don't miss this key report in it's entirety. Why haven't other major media outlets mentioned the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) drone operations in Pakistan, running parallel to the CIA's?

Mum's the Word for NASA's Secret Space Plane X-37B 2009-10-22, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,569143,00.html You would think that an unpiloted space plane built to rocket spaceward from Flo rida atop an Atlas booster, circle the planet for an extended time, then land on autopilot on a California runway would be big news. But for the U.S. Air Force X-37B project seemingly, mum's the word. There is an air of vagueness regarding next year's Atlas Evolved Expendable launch of the unpiloted, reusable military space plane. This Boeing Phantom Works craft has been under development for year s. Several agencies have been involved in the effort, NASA as well as the Defens e Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and various arms of the U.S. Air For ce. The tight-lipped factor surrounding the space plane, its mission, and who is in charge is curious. Such a hush-hush factor seems to mimic in pattern that my stery communications spacecraft lofted last month aboard an Atlas 5 rocket, simp ly called PAN. Its assignment and what agency owns it remains undisclosed. "The problem with it [X37-B] is whether you see it as a weapons platform," said There sa Hitchens, former head of the Center for Defense Information's Space Security Program, now Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research ( UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland. "It then becomes, if I am not mistaken, a Global Strike platform. There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about Global Strike as a concept," Hitchens [said].

U.S. aid often misses targets in Afghanistan 2009-10-04, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/04/MN8L19NHRM.DTL

When built in 2004, the agricultural storage facility in Nangarhar province was supposed to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. The U.S. government p aid for its construction along with several other so-called "market centers" tha t would enable farmers to store crops and boost exports to nearby Pakistan. But construction and design flaws left it unusable, one of many dozens of similar fa ilures in the country, critics say. Opponents say the Nangarhar project is just one example of massive waste of taxpayer dollars in aid programs since the U.S.led invasion ousted the Taliban government in 2001. A Washington, D.C., company, Chemonics International, won the bid for [a] $145 million program - known as Re building Agricultural Markets Program, or RAMP - that ran from 2003 to 2006. Che monics then subcontracted the training and construction work to other Americans, who in turn subcontracted to numerous Afghan companies who did the work. At eac h level, the subcontractors deducted costs for salaries, office expenses and sec urity. Only a small percentage of the original RAMP contract money actually reac hed farmers and other intended recipients. The exact percentage may never be kno wn because neither Chemonics nor the U.S. government tracks such figures. Moreov er, opponents note, many constructed market centers have deteriorated or are not being used for their original purpose. Afghanistan's foreign minister, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, sharply criticized how U.S. aid is spent in his country. He estim ates that only "$10 or $20" of every $100 reaches its intended recipients. Note: For lots more on corporate corruption from reliable sources, click here.

Doctors demand inquest into death of Dr David Kelly 2009-07-13, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5811102/Doctors-demand-inquest-into-de... A group of 13 doctors who believe that Dr David Kelly, the Government scientist, did not commit suicide, but was murdered, are launching a legal campaign to dem and an inquest. The original inquest into Dr Kelly's death six years ago in wood s near his Oxfordshire home was suspended by Lord Falconer, then the Lord Chance llor. He designated the Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the we apons inspector's death as "fulfilling the function of an inquest". Dr Kelly die d shortly after he was exposed as the source for a story claiming the Government "probably knew" that a claim Iraq could attack with weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was not true. A team of doctors unconvinced by the findings of th e Hutton Report has compiled a dossier which claims that a cut to the ulnar arte ry in Dr Kelly's wrist could not have killed him. The 12-page document concludes : "The bleeding from Dr Kelly's ulnar artery is highly unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death." Among the doctors is ... i s David Halpin, 69, a former lecturer in anatomy at King's College, London, and a former consultant in orthopaedic and trauma surgery at Torbay Hospital, who la ter went into general practice. Dr Halpin said they had argued their case in the legal document in "microscopic" detail and added: "We reject haemorrhage as the cause of death and see no contrary opinion which would stand its ground. I thin k it is highly likely he was assassinated." The doctors have been working closel y with Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP, who believes the scientist was mur dered by enemies he made in the course of his work as a weapons inspector. Note: For a trove of revelatory reports on assassinations as a tool of state, cl ick here.

Military spending sets new record 2009-06-08, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8086117.stm

Global military spending rose 4% in 2008 to a record $1,464bn (914bn) - up 45% sin ce 1999, according to the Stockholm-based peace institute Sipri. "The global fin ancial crisis has yet to have an impact on major arms companies' revenues, profi ts and order backlogs," Sipri said. Peace-keeping operations - which also benefi t defence firms - rose 11%. Missions were launched in trouble spots such as Darf ur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "Another record was set, with the t otal of international peace operation personnel reaching 187,586," said Sipri. A s the world's aerospace and defence industry prepares for next week's Paris air show centenary, it seems much of the focus is set to shift away from troubled ci vilian aircraft makers, which are struggling with reduced orders from recessionhit airlines, towards the companies that make fighter jets and other military ha rdware. In total, the 100 leading defence manufacturers sold arms worth $347bn d uring 2007, the most recent year for which reliable data are available. Almost a ll the companies were American or European. "Since 2002, the value of the top 10 0 arms sales has increased by 37% in real terms," Sipri said. US military spendi ng accounted for 58% of the total global spending increase during the decade, wi th extra funds set aside to fight the "war on terror". "The idea of the 'war on terror' has encouraged many countries to see their problems through a highly mil itarised lens, using this to justify high military spending," said Sam Perlo-Fre eman, head of the military expenditure project at Sipri. Note: With all of the government cost-cutting in so many sectors, why aren't mor e people calling for military cutbacks? For a top U.S. general's insight into th e profiteering that drives war (and "peacekeeping" operations as well), click he re.

U.S. Accidentally Releases List of Nuclear Sites 2009-06-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/03nuke.html The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marke d highly confidential, that gives detailed information about hundreds of the natio n s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locati ons of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons. The publication of the document w as revealed Monday in an online newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. It ... prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document had been made public. On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New York Time s, the document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site. The in formation, considered confidential but not classified, was assembled for transmi ssion later this year to the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of a pro cess by which the United States is opening itself up to stricter inspections in hopes that foreign countries, especially Iran and others believed to be clandest inely developing nuclear arms, will do likewise. President Obama sent the docume nt to Congress on May 5 for Congressional review and possible revision, and the Government Printing Office subsequently posted the draft declaration on its Web site. Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientis ts in Washington, revealed the existence of the document on Monday in Secrecy Ne ws, an electronic newsletter he publishes on the Web. Mr. Aftergood expressed ba fflement at its disclosure, calling it a one-stop shop for information on U.S. nu clear programs. The report lists many particulars about nuclear programs and faci lities at the nation s three nuclear weapons laboratories Los Alamos, Livermore an d Sandia as well as dozens of other federal and private nuclear sites. Note: For lots more on government secrecy from reliable sources, click here.

Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage Cyberspace Wars

2009-05-29, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace ... stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive comp uter warfare. White House officials say Mr. Obama has not yet been formally pres ented with the Pentagon plan. But he is expected to sign a classified order in c oming weeks that will create the military cybercommand, officials said. It is a recognition that the United States already has a growing number of computer weap ons in its arsenal and must prepare strategies for their use as a deterrent or a longside conventional weapons in a wide variety of possible future conflicts. [A ] main dispute has been over whether the Pentagon or the National Security Agenc y should take the lead in preparing for and fighting cyberbattles. Under one pro posal still being debated, parts of the N.S.A. would be integrated into the mili tary command so they could operate jointly. A classified set of presidential dir ectives is expected to lay out the military s new responsibilities and how it coor dinates its mission with that of the N.S.A., where most of the expertise on digi tal warfare resides today. The decision to create a cybercommand is a major step beyond the actions taken by the Bush administration, which authorized several c omputer-based attacks but never resolved the question of how the government woul d prepare for a new era of warfare fought over digital networks. Officials decli ned to describe potential offensive operations, but said they now viewed cybersp ace as comparable to more traditional battlefields. Note: Combine this with the BBC's revealing article on US plans to fight the Int ernet, and there is reason for concern. For lots more on new developments in mod ern war planning, click here.

Barstow Who? 2009-04-24, Newsweek blog http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2009/04/24/barstow-who.aspx We missed this story from earlier this week, but think it's still worth sharing. Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com wrote an interesting column on Tuesday about the lack of cable news coverage related to New York Times journalist David Barst ow's Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism. Barstow wrote two fascinating, deeply researched stories last year about how retired generals, acting as milit ary analysts for cable channels, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to push their line on the war. He also discovered that the generals had, as the Pulitzer comm ittee describes it "undisclosed ties to companies than benefited from the polici es they defended." Greenwald notes that there was a virtual moratorium on discus sing Barstow's prize on TV. Brian William at NBC just said that the NYT had won five awards, and CNN's write-up didn't even mention Barstow's name. You can read Greenwald's piece here. Note: For lots more on major media cover-ups, click here.

Gonzales Said to Have Intervened on Wiretap 2009-04-24, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/us/politics/24harman.html?partner=rss&emc=r... The director of the Central Intelligence Agency concluded in late 2005 that a co nversation picked up on a government wiretap was serious enough to require notif ying Congressional leaders that Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of Californ ia, could become enmeshed in an investigation into Israeli influence in Washingt on, former government officials said Thursday. But Attorney General Alberto R. G

onzales told the director of the agency, Porter J. Goss, to hold off on briefing lawmakers about the conversation, between Ms. Harman and an Israeli intelligenc e operative, despite a longstanding government policy to inform Congressional le aders quickly whenever a member of Congress could be a target of a national secu rity investigation. One reason Mr. Gonzales intervened, the former officials sai d, was to protect Ms. Harman because they saw her as a valuable administration a lly in urging The New York Times not to publish an article about the National Se curity Agency s program of wiretapping without warrants. The accounts provided new details about tension between senior C.I.A. officials and the attorney general over what to make of the wiretapped conversations involving Ms. Harman, which th e former government officials said first occurred in spring 2005. In the wiretap ped conversation, Ms. Harman was overheard agreeing to a request made by an Isra eli intelligence operative that she try to obtain leniency for two pro-Israel lo bbyists in exchange for help in securing the chairmanship of the House Intellige nce Committee, former officials said. Note: For lots more on government corruption from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

Report Outlines Medical Workers Role in Torture 2009-04-07, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/world/07detain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pag... Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, a nd their participation was a gross breach of medical ethics, a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded. Based on statements b y 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frig id cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said. Facilitating s uch practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medi cal ethics even if the medical workers intentions had been to prevent death or pe rmanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and t hat the professionals had condoned and participated in ill treatment. At times, ac cording to the detainees accounts, medical workers gave instructions to interrogat ors to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods. The Red Cross report wa s completed in 2007. It was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalist who has writte n extensively about torture, and posted Monday night with an article by Mr. Dann er on the Web site of The New York Review of Books. Note: Much of content of the Red Cross report was revealed in a March article by Mr. Danner and in a 2008 book, The Dark Side, by Jane Mayer, but the reporting of the Red Cross investigators conclusions on medical ethics and other issues are new.

Israel soldier calls order during Gaza assault 'murder' 2009-03-21, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-gaza-israeli-troops21-200... Israelis on Friday got a fuller dose of rank-and-file angst over their army's wi nter assault on the Gaza Strip, as newspapers elaborated on allegations that com manders created a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians. Soldiers'

accounts of two killings of women and children appeared Thursday in Haaretz and Maariv. Both papers followed up Friday with lengthy excerpts of the soldiers com ments about confusion and doubt over the rules of engagement during the 22-day o ffensive, which left an estimated 1,400 Palestinians dead. The accounts came fro m a Feb. 13 discussion at a military preparatory academy. AVIV: At first the spe cified action was to go into a house ... with an armored personnel carrier ... a nd start shooting inside. I call this murder. We were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified, we were supposed to shoot. I initially ask ed myself, "Where is the logic?" They said it was permissible because anyone who remained in the sector was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn' t fled. I didn't really understand. They don't have anywhere to flee to. ... Thi s scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence I try to explain to the guy t hat not everyone in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three ch ildren and four mothers, we'll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. I t ried to explain why we had to let them leave. It didn't really help. This is rea lly frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want. Note: For many revelations of the realities of the wars in the Middle East and A fghanistan, click here.

How Israelis, Islamists dehumanize each other 2009-03-21, Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/606064 Two Israeli newspapers published disturbing accounts this week about misconduct by Israeli soldiers during this country's January offensive in Gaza and one stat ement ... conveyed an over-riding state of mind, one that enabled at least some Israeli soldiers to carry out some thoroughly loathsome deeds while they were de ployed in Gaza including, it seems, the cold-blooded murder of Palestinian civil ians. "I don't know how to describe it," said the soldier in question, a squad l eader who is clearly troubled by much of what he saw. "The lives of Palestinians , let's say, is something much, much less important than the lives of our soldie rs." Psychologists have at least a couple of terms for the tendency of humans to view their adversaries as springing from a lower order of being. Known either a s pseudo-speciation or dehumanization, the phenomenon is as ancient as the Bible and as common nowadays as olive trees in the Holy Land. If there is one man in this country who has explored the dark side of Israel's heart, it is Yehuda Shau l, director of Breaking the Silence, an organization that collects and publishes accounts by Israeli soldiers about their sometimes brutal behaviour while on du ty in the Palestinian territories. Shaul says ... "The soldiers say: `Everyone i s an enemy. Everyone here is a legitimate target.' That was the notion." Note: For a former Marine Corps general's analysis of the purposes served by the dehumanizaton of the "enemy" inculcated in soldiers by their officers, click he re.

U.S. to pull 12,000 troops from Iraq as withdrawal begins 2009-03-09, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-troops-violence9-200... The U.S. will reduce its military presence in Iraq by 12,000 troops over the nex t six months as part of the first major drawdown since President Obama announced his plan to end combat operations in the country next year, U.S. military offic ials in Baghdad [announced]. The drawdown reflects ... a major shift in prioriti es for the U.S. military, which is increasingly focused on efforts to arrest the

deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The plan would reduce U.S. troop streng th by nearly 10%. The plan calls for the number of U.S. brigade combat teams to drop from 14 to 12. Two brigade teams that had been scheduled to redeploy in the next six months will not be replaced. When the American move is completed, it w ould reduce the U.S. military presence in Iraq to about 128,000 troops. The Iraq withdrawals are crucial to the administration's plans to devote more military r esources to Afghanistan. Senior U.S. national security officials are nearing com pletion of a strategic review of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, a step that Ob ama has described as an effort "to stabilize a deteriorating situation." Seven y ears after the U.S. invasion, Afghanistan's stability is threatened by a renewed Taliban insurgency. Last month, Obama announced plans to send 17,000 additional U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan -- deployments that would more than of fset the troop reductions in Iraq. Note: So President Obama withdraws 12,000 troops from Iraq, yet sends 17,000 tro ops to Afghanistan. What kind of withdrawl is this? Could it be that even Obama supports the war machine? To find out more, click here.

Secret Bush Anti-Terror Memos Revealed 2009-03-02, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/02/national/main4839662.shtml The Obama administration threw open the curtain on years of Bush-era secrets Mon day, revealing anti-terror memos that claimed exceptional search-and-seizure pow ers and divulging that the CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other treatment of terror suspects. The Justice Department released nine le gal opinions showing that, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration determined that certain constitutional rights would not appl y during the coming fight. Within two weeks, government lawyers were already dis cussing ways to wiretap U.S. conversations without warrants. An October 2001 mem o by the Justice Department's John Yoo authorized the use of the U.S. military w ithin the United States in combating terrorists. Yoo defined the 9/11 attacks as "war" and therefore concluded the President could employ the military domestica lly in a "military action" rather than a police action. Under Posse Comitatus Ac t, the American armed forces are forbidden from operating domestically. A March 2003 memo gave the President broad powers to transfer captured al Qaeda and Tali ban prisoners to third countries. It also stipulated that the torture provisions of the Geneva Convention did not apply, because these prisoners were "non state " enemy combatants and therefore not entitled to Geneva protections. The Obama a dministration also acknowledged in court documents Monday that the CIA destroyed 92 videos involving terror suspects, including interrogations - far more than h ad been known. Note: For key reports from major media sources on the hidden realities of the wa r on terror, click here.

Letter from the Grave 2009-01-12, The New Yorker magazine http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2009/01/letter-from-the.html [On January 8] Lasantha Wickramatunga, who was fifty-two years old and the edito r of a Sri Lankan newspaper called The Sunday Leader, was assassinated on his wa y to work by two gunmen riding motorcycles. The Leader's investigative reporting had been fiercely critical of the government and of the conduct of its war agai nst Tamil separatists; Wickramatunga had been attacked before. He knew that he w as likely to be murdered and so he wrote an essay with instructions that it be p

ublished only after his own death. Read it in full below: "No other profession c alls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed f orces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the in dependent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honor to belong to all those categories and now especially the last. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no boun ds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes l ower. Note: Click on the link above to read this deeply moving letter from a martyr fo r truth in its entirety.

Eight Years of Madoffs 2009-01-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11rich.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pag... Three days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bern ie Madoff s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelat ion of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to Amer ican taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent ( as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incom petence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad. T he source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by t he Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Po nzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing st eady dividends on their investment in a new Iraq. The $50 billion ... pales next t o other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-fr om-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have defined deviancy down in terms o f how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials. Note: To read the draft of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction's report, click here. To read the New York Times analysis of this important document, click here.

Gaza attack could prompt Israel to pull out 2009-01-07, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/06/MNQ2154NVN.DTL Middle East observers felt a sense of deja vu Tuesday as Israeli tank shells sla mmed into a U.N. school near Gaza City, killing at least 30 Palestinians who had taken refuge there from the war raging around their homes. In 1982, a massacre carried out by a Christian militia group at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps killed hundreds of Palestinians; the camps had been under Israeli control. In 1 996, there were 118 people killed at a U.N. compound by Israeli artillery in the town of Qana, and in 2006, an Israeli air strike killed 56 in an apartment comp lex in the same town. All three events spelled the beginning of the end of Israe

li campaigns into Lebanon. Until now, the international community - including Eg ypt - has given Israel a long leash to strike a heavy blow against Hamas. But wi th the shelling of the U.N. school in the northern Gaza town of Jebaliya on Tues day, the clock might start ticking for Israel to withdraw its troops. Dr. Bassam Abu Warda, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told reporters that 36 people were killed in the strike on the school. The United Nations confirmed that 30 were k illed and 55 injured by tank shells. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political sc ience at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said the strike against the U.N. scho ol and ensuing diplomatic pressure it could create were not only foreseen but di scussed in advance by Israeli policymakers. "There were many meetings on how to deal with this before the fighting started. It happens every time," said Steinbe rg. Note: For many revealing reports on the realities of war from reliable sources, click here.

Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials 2008-12-12, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR20081211019... A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donal d H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibi lity for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their deci sions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere. In the most comprehensiv e critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Arm ed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his de puties of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the report states. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive tech niques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and author ized their use against detainees." Human rights and constitutional law organizat ions have urged further action, ranging from an independent commission to prosec utions of those involved in authorizing the interrogations. Michael Ratner, pres ident of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has helped defend detainees at Guantanamo, said the committee report is valuable because "it's official, it 's bipartisan. It's open and explicit, going right to Rumsfeld and having Rice i nvolved," Ratner said. "It breaks new ground in saying that the [torture] techni ques basically don't work . . . that they're actually designed to elicit false c onfessions." Note: To read the full report, click here. For many key reports from major media sources detailing US torture and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here .

Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda 2008-11-10, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/washington/10military.html?partner=rssuserl... The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other mil itants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere. These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that De fense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approva l of President Bush. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack

the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate t o conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States. In 2006, fo r example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants compound in the Bajaur r egion of Pakistan. Some of the military missions have been conducted in close co ordination with the C.I.A.. In others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-dire cted operations. Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. The new authority was spelled out in a classified document called Al Qaeda Network Exord, or execute order. The 2004 order identifies 15 to 2 0 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Pe rsian Gulf states. Note: For key reports on government secrecy from major media sources, click here .

Packs of robots will hunt down uncooperative humans 2008-10-22, New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/packs-of-robots-w... The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. They are looking for contr actors to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots " search for and detect a non-cooperative human". Given that iRobot last year stru ck a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on its military robots, how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with pa ralysing weapons? Or could the packs even be lethally armed? Steve Wright of Lee ds Metropolitan University is an expert on police and military technologies. "Th e giveaway here is the phrase 'a non-cooperative human subject'," he told me: "W hat we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hu nt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reason ably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed. We can also e xpect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices incl uding sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a hu man heart beat. These are technologies already developed." Noel Sharkey, an AI a nd robotics engineer at the University of Sheffield, says "This is a clear step towards one of the main goals of the US Army's Future Combat Systems project, wh ich aims to make a single soldier the nexus for a large scale robot attack. Inde pendently, ground and aerial robots have been tested together and once the bits are joined, there will be a robot force under command of a single soldier with p otentially dire consequences for innocents around the corner." Note: For many revealing reports of new weaponry technologies in the planning an d development stages, click here.

Madness and Shame 2008-07-22, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/opinion/22herbert.html?partner=rssuserland&... In her important new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Ter ror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, ... the lead architect of the Bush admi nistration s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror. In the view of Mr. Ad dington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or t he Geneva Conventions might say was all right. That included torture, rendition,

warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it. Ms. Maye r wrote: "The legal doctrine that Addington espoused that the president, as comm ander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known le gal boundaries rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars s hared." Ms. Mayer mentioned a study conducted by attorneys and law students at t he Seton Hall University Law School. "After reviewing 517 of the Guantnamo detain ees cases in depth," she said, "they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged t o have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have eng aged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority all but 5 percent had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters." The Dark Side is essential reading for those who think they can stand the truth. Note: For lots more on the realities behind the "war on terror", click here.

BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions 2008-06-10, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7444083.stm A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (11.75bn) may have been lost, sto len or just not properly accounted for in Iraq. The BBC's Panorama programme has used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contract ors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding. A US gagging order is preven ting discussion of the allegations. The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies. While President George W Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted. To date, no major US c ontractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq. Henry Waxman, who chai rs the House committee on oversight and government reform, said: "It may well tu rn out to be the largest war profiteering in history." In the run-up to the inva sion, one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth $7bn that was given to Halliburton, a T exan company which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president . Only Halliburton got to bid. The search for the missing billions also led ... to a house in ... west London where Hazem Shalaan lived until he was appointed t o the new Iraqi government as minister of defence in 2004. He and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2bn out of the ministry. They bought old military equi pment from Poland but claimed for top-class weapons. Meanwhile they diverted mon ey into their own accounts. Judge Radhi al-Radhi of Iraq's Commission for Public Integrity investigated. He said: "I believe these people are criminals." Note: For many other reports on war profiteering, click here.

The truth is out there 2008-06-07, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8d66e778-3128-11dd-ab22-000077b07658.html

When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound th rough the church with some of Kings cadence. A time comes, declares the former US swoman from Georgia, when silence is betrayal. Before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American governm ents war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict ... began on S eptember 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through. According to a show of hands that Fe bruary afternoon, several hundred people in the immaculate church believe this t o be true. They had all come to hear the message of Architects, Engineers & Scie

ntists for 9/11 Truth, one of the dozens of [9/11 truth] groups across the US. L ast winter, Investigate 9/11 banners seemed to be popping up all over the place. Bill Clinton was heckled by truthers in Denver while campaigning for his wife. Country mus c star Willie Nelson ... described as naive the notion that the implosion of the Twin Towers was caused by crashing jets. Meanwhile the European Parliament screened t he Italian documentary Zero, in which Gore Vidal, Italian playwright Dario Fo, a nd Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa blame the US government, not al-Qaeda, for 9/11. The following month, Japanese MP Yukihisa Fujita raised his own doubts about th e official story at a seminar in Sydney. A busy season for the 9/11 Truth movement. Note: This extensive story in The Financial Times shows that the 9/11 movement i s having a major impact. For a detailed two-page summary of many questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control 2008-06-05, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/revealed-secret-plan-to-k... A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidenti al election in November. The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occu py permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunit y from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay th e basis for unending conflict in their country. But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through b y the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the l ong-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nomine e, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November. T he timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCai n. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term u se of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immuni ty from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out ar rests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad gov ernment. The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until n ow.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships 2008-06-02, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights/ The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an a ttempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees. Details of ships whe re detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across t he world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifi es on both sides of the Atlantic. Information about the operation of prison ship s has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US mili tary, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonie s of prisoners. The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of re ndition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had st opped. According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as ma ny as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboa

rd the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations. Ships t hat are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu . A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territo ry of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base b y the UK and the Americans. Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, sai d: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from th e prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost p risoners with their legal rights." Note: For many other investigations of the reality of the "war on terror", click here.

Online warfare research outlined 2008-05-15, Washington Times http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080515/FOREIGN/586297... Procurement documents released by the U.S. Air Force give a rare glimpse into Pe ntagon plans for developing an offensive cyber-war capacity that can infiltrate, steal data from and, if necessary, take down enemy information-technology netwo rks. The Broad Area Announcement, posted ... by the Air Force Research Laborator y's Information Directorate, outlines a two-year, $11 million effort to develop capabilities to "access ... any remotely located open or closed computer informa tion systems," lurk on them "completely undetected," "stealthily exfiltrate info rmation" from them and ultimately "be able to affect computer information system s through Deceive, Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, Destroy (D5) effects." "Of interest," the announcement says, "are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root-l evel access to both fixed [and] mobile computing platforms ... [and] methodologi es to enable access to any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware." The announcement is the latest stage in the Air Force's effort t o develop a cyber-war capability and establish itself as the service that delive rs U.S. military power in cyberspace. Last year, the Air Force announced it was setting up a Cyberspace Command ... and was developing military doctrine for the prosecution of cyber-war operations. The developments highlight the murky legal territory on which the cyber-wars of the future will be fought. More important, because of the difficulties in identifying attackers and immediately quantifyin g damage from a cyber-attack, it can be hard to determine when such attacks cons titute an act of war as opposed to crime or even vandalism.

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon s Hidden Hand 2008-04-20, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?ex=1366344000&en... In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of critic ism over Guantnamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded the gulag of ou r times by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure. The admin istration s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, th ey put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated to ur of Guantnamo. To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, p resented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as military analysts w hose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgmen ts about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the ad ministration s wartime performance. The effort, which began with the buildup to th

e Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and mili tary allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts ha ve ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked t o assess on air. Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the v iewers. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senio r executives, board members or consultants. Note: This excellent article should be read in its entirety. For a related video presentation, click here. For an analysis, click here.

Economists Debate Link Between War, Credit Crisis 2008-04-15, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/14/AR20080414026... For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the connection between the Iraq conflict and the U.S. economic downturn is simple: "The president has taken us into a failed war ," [she] said recently. "He's taken us deeply into debt, and that debt is taking us into recession." Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who wro te the new book The Three Trillion Dollar War, contends that the connection is r eal. Even with a growing energy demand from China, the United States and elsewhe re, oil traders anticipated before the war that the price of oil would remain ab out $25 a barrel. Instead, it has soared to more than $100 a barrel. Iraqi oil p roduction has not risen with demand, in part because investment in the Middle Ea st has been stunted by war-related unrest. Those price increases are self-perpet uating, Stiglitz argues. Oil-rich Persian Gulf states are so awash in money that they are not sure what to do with it all. That cash, through state-owned sovere ign wealth funds, has flowed into stocks, bonds and other investments, creating incentives for lenders to offer low-interest loans, many of which have now gone sour. But that is only one factor, by Stiglitz's accounting. The federal governm ent has sunk deeply into debt, first with tax cuts, then with accelerating war e xpenditures that have easily topped half a trillion dollars. So the Federal Rese rve Board used low interest rates and the free flow of money to keep the economy growing. Cheap credit sparked rash loans, a housing bubble and the current cris is. "The war played a very important role," Stiglitz said. The analysis is polit ically powerful because people believe it. A CNN poll last month found that 71 p ercent of Americans say government spending in Iraq is a factor in the economic downturn. Note: For a powerful personal account of the economic underpinnings of modern wa r by a US Marine Corps general, click here.

Inside the Black Budget 2008-04-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/science/01patc.html?ex=1364702400&en=f406ed... Skulls. Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Snakes. Swords. Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. A dragon holding the Earth in its claws. No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy. It is ... part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon s classified, or black, budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy armies of high-tech warriors. [A new] book offers a glimpse of this dark world through a revealing lens patches t he kind worn on military uniforms. Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer fin ishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has man aged to document some of this hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reve al a bizarre mix of high and low culture. Oderint Dum Metuant, reads a patch for a

n Air Force program that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence , according to Mr. Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first -century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates Let them hate so lo ng as they fear. Wizards appear on several patches. The one hurling lightning bol ts comes from a secret Air Force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas in a secluded valley. Mr. Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separat e star as a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced air craft and, U.F.O. buffs say, captured alien spaceships. What sparked his interes t, Mr. Paglen recalled, were Vice President Dick Cheney s remarks as the Pentagon and World Trade Center smoldered. We ve got to spend time in the shadows, Mr. Cheney said. It s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, t o achieve our objective. Note: The webpage at the link above includes color photos of several of these re vealing patches. To read reviews or purchase the book by Trevor Paglen, I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me, click here.

Fight Violence with Nonviolence 2008-03-27, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0327/p09s01-coop.html Over the past 25 years nonviolent peacekeepers have been going into zones of som etimes intense conflict with the aim of bringing a measure of peace, protection, and sanity to life there. Rather than use threat or force, unarmed peacekeepers deploy strategies of protective accompaniment, moral and/or witnessing "presenc e," monitoring election campaigns, creating neutral safe spaces, and in extreme cases putting themselves physically between hostile parties. Civilian unarmed pe acekeeping has had dramatic, small-scale, quiet, and unglamorous successes: resc uing child soldiers, protecting the lives of key human rights workers and of who le villages, averting potentially explosive violence, and generally raising the level of security felt by citizens in many a tense community. Recently a village on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines was under threat by two armed grou ps who had come within 200 meters of each other. The village elders called for h elp from the Nonviolent Peaceforce stationed there, who intervened and by commun icating with all sides persuaded the armed group to back away. Thanks to mediati on, no violence erupted, no lives were lost. Why haven't you heard about this ex citing work? Because it is terribly underfunded, for one thing. There is also a prevailing prejudice that only governments or armed forces including those of th e United Nations have the responsibility or means to contain conflict. But the b iggest obstacle by far is the widespread and rarely examined belief that politic al power grows out of the barrel of a gun. It is the belief that there is only o ne kind of power; threat power, which in the end can be relied upon to get other s to change their minds or, failing that, at least their actions. That may chang e. The new global norm of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) should inspire the u se of civil society and nonviolent means.

Top Iraq contractor skirts US taxes offshore 2008-03-06, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2008/03/06/top_iraq_contractor_skir... Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dol lars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through she ll companies based in [the Cayman Islands]. More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a p

alm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or ph one number in the Cayman Islands. The Defense Department has known since at leas t 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employee s of Cayman Islands shell companies. With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor. The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq's oi l infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Hallib urton's chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with Pre sident Bush in 2000. The largest of the Cayman Islands shell companies - called Service Employers International Inc., which is now listed as having more than 20 ,000 workers in Iraq, according to KBR - was created two years before Cheney bec ame Halliburton's chief executive. But a second Cayman Islands company called Ov erseas Administrative Services, which now is listed as the employer of 1,020 mos tly managerial workers in Iraq, was established two months after Cheney's appoin tment. Note: To read a powerful personal statement about the reality of war profiteerin g by a highly decorated Marine Corps general, click here.

Fraud Crackdown Comes With a Loophole 2008-02-13, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4279612 A Bush administration plan to crack down on contract fraud has a multibillion-do llar loophole: The proposal to force companies to report abuse of taxpayer money will not apply to work overseas, including projects to secure and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. For decades, contractors have been asked to report internal fra ud or overpayment on government-funded projects. Compliance has been voluntary, and over the past 15 years the number of company-reported fraud cases has declin ed steadily. Now, the Justice Department wants to force companies to notify the government if they find evidence of contract abuse of more than $5 million. Fail ure to comply could make a company ineligible for future government work. The pr oposal, now in the final approval stages, specifically exempts "contracts to be performed outside the United States," according to a notice published last month in the Federal Register. Critics including the watchdog group Taxpayers Against Fraud said the overseas exemption raises suspicions. "I hate to sound cynical, but what lobbyist working for a contractor in Iraq wanted this get-out-of-jail c ard?" asked Patrick Burns, spokesman for the government watchdog group. "I'm not saying that's the way it went - I'm just suggesting that's the most logical lin e to draw. I think somebody's got some explaining to do." After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. poured billions of dollars into projects [in] th ose nations. With the money came the fraud. At least $14 million has been lost i n bribes alone over the past five years in Iraq and Afghanistan. An estimated $3 50 billion is spent on government contracts annually, according to the White Hou se Office of Federal Procurement Policy. Note: For many additional reports from reliable sources on war profiteering, cli ck here.

From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld . . . 2007-11-01, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR20071031030... In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary D onald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the ne

ed to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper stick er statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war. The me mos [reveal] a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to res hape public opinion of the Iraq war. In a 2004 memo on the deteriorating situati on in Iraq, Rumsfeld concluded that the challenges there are "not unusual." Pess imistic news reports ... simply result from the wrong standards being applied, h e wrote in one of the memos obtained by The Washington Post. Under siege in Apri l 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resig nation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference ca ll with military analysts. "Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the A merican people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote. People will "rally" to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. "They ar e looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory." The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him "go out and push people back, rather th an simply defending" Iraq policy and strategy. "I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can't win on the defense," he wrote. "We can't just k eep taking hits." Rumsfeld suggested that the public should know that there will be no "terminal event" in the fight against terrorism like the signing ceremony on the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered to end World War II. "It is going to be a long war," he wrote. In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfe ld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency ." The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism , to drive the non-radicals from the world."

Cheney's Law 2007-10-16, Frontline (PBS) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cheney/etc/synopsis.html For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-close d-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finall y, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a n umber of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer Da vid Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and ex traordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrog ate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial revi ew. "The vice president believes that Congress has very few powers to actually c onstrain the president and the executive branch," former Justice Department atto rney Marty Lederman tells Frontline. "He believes the president should have the final word -- indeed the only word -- on all matters within the executive branch ." After Sept. 11, Cheney and Addington were determined to implement their visio n -- in secret. The vice president and his counsel found an ally in John Yoo, a lawyer at the Justice Department's extraordinarily powerful Office of Legal Coun sel. In concert with Addington, Yoo wrote memoranda authorizing the president to act with unparalleled authority. "There were extravagant and unnecessary claims of presidential power that were wildly overbroad to the tasks at hand," [former Assistant Attorney General Jack L. Goldsmith] says. As the White House and Cong ress continue to face off over executive privilege, the terrorist surveillance p rogram, and the firing of U.S. attorneys, Frontline tells the story of what's fo rmed the views of the man behind what some view as the most ambitious project to reshape the power of the president in American history. Note: To watch this revealing Frontline video, click here.

Supreme Court denies hearing for fired 'honk for peace' teacher 2007-10-02, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/02/MNEASHSN0.DTL

An elementary-school teacher who was dismissed after telling her class on the ev e of the Iraq war that "I honk for peace" lost [her] U.S. Supreme Court appeal. The justices ... denied a hearing to Deborah Mayer, who had appealed lower-court decisions upholding an Indiana school district's refusal to renew her contract in June 2003. The most-recent ruling, by a federal appeals court in Chicago, sai d teachers in public schools have no constitutional right to express personal op inions in the classroom. A teacher's speech is "the commodity she sells to an em ployer in exchange for her salary," the [court] said in January. "The Constituti on does not enable teachers to present personal views to captive audiences again st the instructions of elected officials." The appellate ruling is ... one of a series of recent decisions taking a narrow view of free speech for teachers, oth er government employees and students. Mayer, who now teaches sixth grade in Flor ida, was distraught. "I don't know why anybody would want to be a teacher if you can be fired for saying four little words," she said Monday. "I'm supposed to t each the Constitution to my students. I'm supposed to tell them that the Constit ution guarantees free speech. How am I going to justify that?" She said her clas s of fourth- through sixth-graders was discussing an article in the children's e dition of Time magazine, part of the school-approved curriculum, on protests aga inst U.S. preparations for an invasion of Iraq in January 2003. When a student a sked her whether she took part in demonstrations, Mayer said, she replied that s he blew her horn whenever she saw a "Honk for Peace" sign, and that peaceful sol utions should be sought before going to war. After a parent complained, the prin cipal ordered Mayer never to discuss the war or her political views in class. Note: To read further reliable reports of threats to our civil liberties, click here.

Report Says Firm Sought to Cover Up Iraq Shootings 2007-10-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/washington/02blackwater.html?ex=1348977600&... Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2 005, in [the] vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles w ithout stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded, according to a new repo rt from Congress. In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims family members w ho complained, and sought to cover up other episodes, the Congressional report s aid. It said State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of kee ping the shootings quiet. In one case last year, the department helped Blackwate r spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while dr unk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve. Th e report ... adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military o fficers and Blackwater s competitors that company guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless di sregard for Iraqi life. But the report is also harshly critical of the State Dep artment for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private secu rity company s 861 employees in Iraq. There is no evidence in the documents that th e committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackw ater or the company s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contract ors for investigation, the report states. Based on 437 internal Blackwater incide nt reports as well as internal State Department correspondence, the report said Blackwater s use of force was frequent and extensive, resulting in significant casu alties and property damage. The State Department ... has paid Blackwater more tha n $832 million for security services in Iraq and elsewhere, under a diplomatic s ecurity contract it shares with two other companies, DynCorp International and T riple Canopy.

Bleakonomics 2007-09-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Stiglitz-t.html?ex=1348804800&... The Shock Doctrine is [Naomi] Klein s ambitious look at the economic history of th e last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. Disa ster capitalism, as she calls it, is a violent system that ... requires terror to do its job. Extreme capitalism loves a blank slate, often finding its opening a fter crises or shocks. Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists. She interviews Gail Kastner, a victim of covert C.I.A. experiments in interrogation techniques that were carried out by t he scientist Ewen Cameron in the 1950s. His idea was to use electroshock therapy to break down patients. Once complete depatterning had been achieved, the patient s could be reprogrammed. For Klein the larger lessons are clear: Countries are sh ocked by wars, terror attacks, coups d tat and natural disasters. Then they are shock ed again by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy. People who dare to re sist are shocked for a third time, by police, soldiers and prison interrogators. Kl ein offers an account of Milton Friedman she calls him the other doctor shock . In the 1950s, as Cameron was conducting his experiments, the Chicago School was dev eloping the ideas that [dominate capitalist planning today]. She quotes the Chil ean economist Orlando Letelier on the inner harmony between the terror of the Pino chet regime and its free-market policies. Letelier said that Milton Friedman sha red responsibility for the regime s crimes, rejecting his argument that he was onl y offering technical advice. Letelier was killed in 1976 by a car bomb planted in Washington [DC]. For Klein, he was another victim of the Chicago Boys who wanted t o impose free-market capitalism on the region. In the Southern Cone, where contem porary capitalism was born, the war on terror was a war against all obstacles to t he new order, she writes. Note: For highly revealing, verifiable information on government mind control pr ograms, click here.

Doctors accuse US of 'unethical practices' at Guantanamo Bay 2007-09-07, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article2938962.ece More than 260 doctors from around the world have launched an unprecedented attac k on the American medical establishment for its failure to condemn unethical pra ctices by medical practitioners at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. In a letter to The Lancet, the doctors from 16 countries, including Britain and Ameri ca, say the failure of the US regulatory authorities to act is "damaging the rep utation of US military medicine". They compare the actions of the military docto rs, whom they accuse of being involved in the force-feeding of prisoners at Guan tanamo Bay and of turning a blind eye to evidence of torture in Iraq and elsewhe re, to those of the South African security police involved in the death of the a nti-apartheid activist Steve Biko 30 years ago. The group highlighted the forcefeeding of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last year and suggested the physicians in volved should be referred to their professional bodies for breaching internation ally accepted ethical guidelines. The doctors wrote: "No healthcare worker in th e War on Terror has been charged or convicted of any significant offence despite numerous instances documented including fraudulent record-keeping on detainees who have died as a result of failed interrogations ... The attitude of the US mi litary establishment appears to be one of 'See no evil, hear no evil, speak no e vil'." The US introduced the policy of force-feeding, in which prisoners are str apped to a chair and a tube is forced down the throat into the stomach, after mo

re than 100 prisoners went on hunger strike in 2005. "Fundamental to doctors' re sponsibilities in attending a hunger striker is the recognition that prisoners h ave a right to refuse treatment," the doctors wrote.

U.S. Military May Implant Chips In Troops' Brains 2007-08-02, KUTV (CBS affiliate in Salt Lake City, Utah) http://www.kutv.com/local_story_215001119.html Imagine a day when the U.S. government implants microchips inside the brains of U.S. soldiers. Well you don't have to think too far into the future. The defense department is studying the idea now. The chip would be the size of a grain of r ice. How far is too far when it comes to privacy? The department of defense rece ntly awarded $1.6 million to Clemson University to develop an implantable biochi p. It would go into the brain using a new gel that prevents the human body from rejecting it. The overall idea is to improve the quality and speed of care for f allen soldiers. "It's just crazy. To me, it's like a bad sci-fi movie," says Yel ena Slattery [from] the website www.WeThePeopleWillNotBeChipped.com. Slattery sa ys, "Soldiers can't choose not to get certain things done because they become go vernment property once they sign up. When does it end? When does it become an in fringement on a person's privacy?" Once the chip is in, she says, could those so ldiers be put on surveillance, even when they're off-duty? A spokesman for veter ans of foreign wars also urged caution. Joe Davis said, "If you have a chip that 's holding a gigabyte, or 10 gigs, like an iPod, what kind of information is goi ng to be on there? How could this be used against you if you were taken captive? " Note: For a treasure trove of recent and reliable information on the increasing penetration of microchips into our lives, click here.

Destabilizing Iraq, Broadly Defined 2007-07-23, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/22/AR20070722011... Be careful what you say and whom you help -- especially when it comes to the Ira q war and the Iraqi government. President Bush issued an executive order last we ek titled "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Effor ts in Iraq." It could be interpreted as targeting the financial assets of any Am erican who directly or indirectly aids someone who has committed or "poses a sig nificant risk of committing" violent acts "threatening the peace or stability of Iraq" or who undermines "efforts to promote economic reconstruction and politic al reform" in the war-torn country. The text of the order, if interpreted broadl y, could cast a far bigger net to include not just those who commit violent acts or pose the risk of doing so in Iraq, but also third parties -- such as U.S. ci tizens in this country -- who knowingly or unknowingly aid or encourage such peo ple. The targeting of not just those who support perpetrators of violence but al so those who support individuals who "pose a significant risk" of committing vio lence goes far beyond normal legal language related to intent and could be appli ed in a highly arbitrary manner, said Bruce Fein, a senior Justice Department of ficial in the Reagan administration. Fein also questioned the executive order's inclusion of third parties, such as U.S. citizens who assist, sponsor or make "a ny contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services" to assist people on t he Treasury list. "What about a lawyer hired to get someone off the list?" Fein asked. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control keeps a "Speci ally Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons" roll that includes those covered by several such executive orders. It most recently ran to 276 pages.

Note: To read the full text of the Executive Order, "Blocking Property of Certai n Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq," click here.

Is this the real president of the United States? 2007-07-23, Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2132603,00.html Obscurity has been Cheney's hallmark since he took office in January 2001, and t hat's the way he likes it. "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" he quipped in 2004. "It's a nice way to operate, act ually." Cheney is ... the most powerful vice- president in American history. "He has expanded the power of the vice-president fiftyfold," says Bruce Fein, a law yer who served in the Reagan administration. So dominant has he been in a tradit ionally submissive role that some commentators are now wondering whether it is t ime to drop the "V" from his title. "Cheney is de facto president in all areas o f policy, bar just a few aspects of the domestic agenda," Fein says. It was obvi ous the Cheney vice-presidency was never going to stick to convention from the d ay in July 2000 George Bush announced his running mate. After all, the man who r ecommended Cheney for the job was ... Cheney. The Bush cabinet was formed in Che ney's image. Figures who were to become seminal -- Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowi tz, John Bolton, Scooter Libby -- were all Cheney's people. September 11 2001 .. . was the moment for which Cheney had been preparing for many years. Since his d ays as White House chief-of-staff to Gerald Ford, living with the fallout of Nix on's destruction, Cheney had harboured ambitions to hit back at Congress and rei nstate the untrammelled authority of the president. Within hours of the attacks on New York and Washington, while Bush was still floundering around in Air Force One, Cheney had assembled a legal team within his own office and was actively p lanning how to roll back the restraints on the president's executive power that had been introduced in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate.

Special Operations Prepared for Domestic Missions 2007-06-22, washingtonpost.com http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/06/special_operations_prepar... The U.S. Northern Command, the military command responsible for "homeland defens e," has asked the Pentagon if it can establish its own special operations comman d for domestic missions. The request ... would establish a permanent sub-command for responses to incidents of domestic terrorism as well as other occasions whe re special operators may be necessary on American soil. The establishment of a d omestic special operations mission, and the preparation of contingency plans to employ commandos in the United States, would upend decades of tradition. Militar y actions within the United States are the responsibility of state militias (the National Guard), and federal law enforcement is a function of the FBI. Employin g special operations for domestic missions sounds very ominous, and NORTHCOM's r equest earlier this year should receive the closest possible Pentagon and congre ssional scrutiny. There's only one problem: NORTHCOM is already doing what it ha s requested permission to do. When NORTHCOM was established after 9/11 to be the military counterpart to the Department of Homeland Security, within its headqua rters staff it established a Compartmented Planning and Operations Cell (CPOC) r esponsible for planning and directing a set of "compartmented" and "sensitive" o perations on U.S., Canadian and Mexican soil. In other words, these are the very special operations that NORTHCOM is now formally asking the Pentagon to beef up into a public and acknowledged sub-command.

'USS Liberty' veterans demand investigation 2007-06-03, Arizona Republic (Arizona's leading newspaper) http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/0603liberty0603.... In demanding a congressional investigation into the aborted rescue during the at tack of the USS Liberty and subsequent alleged cover-up [the following] conclusi ons [were] submitted in October 2003 to the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defe nse by the USS Liberty Veterans Association, Inc.: 1. That on June 8, 1967 ... I srael launched a two-hour air and naval attack against USS Liberty ... inflictin g 34 dead and 173 wounded American servicemen; 2. That ... unmarked Israeli airc raft dropped napalm canisters on USS Liberty's bridge and fired 30mm cannons and rockets into [the] ship; 3. That the torpedo boat attack involved not only the firing of torpedoes, but the machine-gunning of Liberty's firefighters and stret cher-bearers as they struggled to save their ship and crew; the Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty's life r afts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriou sly wounded; 4. That there is compelling evidence that Israel's attack was a del iberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew; evidence o f such intent is supported by statements from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Unde rsecretary of State George Ball, former CIA Director Richard Helms, former NSA D irectors Lt. Gen. William Odom, USA (Ret.), Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, USN (Ret.), an d Marshal Carter; former NSA deputy directors Oliver Kirby and Maj. Gen. John Mo rrison, USAF (Ret.); 6. The White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy fro m coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack. Note: To view the BBC documentary about the USS Liberty attack, "Dead in the Wat er," click here. For more information about the USS Liberty, click here.

Tenet Says He Was Made a Scapegoat Over Iraq War 2007-04-27, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/26/AR20070426022... Former CIA director George J. Tenet bitterly complains in a forthcoming televisi on interview that White House officials set him up as a scapegoat when they reve aled that he had assured President Bush the intelligence on Iraq's suspected wea pons arsenal was a "slam dunk." Tenet, who was one of the longest-serving CIA di rectors in U.S. history, resigned abruptly in June 2004 after administration inf ighting over the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom six months later. Tenet then remained publicly silent about his role in the presentation of prewar intelligence that turned out to be wrong. CBS News's "60 Minutes" released excerpts of its Tenet interview. In the interview, Tenet acknowledged that he used the phrase "slam dunk" during a conve rsation with Bush and other key advisers in December 2002. But Tenet said the ph rase was an offhand remark used to describe the ease with which a public case fo r war could be made. Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward firs t wrote about the conversation between Tenet and Bush in his 2004 book "Plan of Attack." Bush told Woodward then that Tenet's "slam dunk" assurance had been "ve ry important" as he weighed decisions about the invasion. In the television inte rview, Tenet takes special exception with Bush's comments. Tenet initially denie d having used the phrase "slam dunk." But, in a 2005 speech at Kutztown Universi ty in Pennsylvania, he said he regretted using the phrase to describe the case a gainst Iraq. "Those were the two dumbest words I ever said," Tenet said. Note: The head of the CIA admits he lied about something as vital as the use of a phrase involving gross manipulation of the public in support of war. Who else is lying here?

CIA Recruited Japanese War Criminals 2007-02-24, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/24/AR20070224005... Col. Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunt ed after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians. And then he became a U .S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records ... document more fully than ever how Ts uji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligen ce in the early days of the Cold War. The records [were] declassified in 2005 an d 2006 under an act of Congress in tandem with Nazi war crime-related files. In addition to Tsuji ... conspicuous figures in U.S.-funded operations included [a] mob boss and war profiteer [and] former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the w artime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948. The assessments ... show evidence that other U.S. agencies, such as the Air Force, were also looking int o using some of the same people as spies, and that the CIA itself had contacts w ith former Japanese war criminals. Historians long ago concluded that the Allies turned a blind eye to many Japanese war crimes, particularly those committed ag ainst other Asians. Some of Japan's most notorious wartime killers [came] under U.S. sponsorship. Tsuji, for instance, was wanted for involvement in the Bataan Death March of early 1942, in which thousands of Americans and Filipinos perishe d. The U.S. Air Force attempted unsuccessfully to recruit him after he was taken off the war crimes list in 1949. The Army considered him a potentially valuable source. [Yet] a CIA assessment from 1954 ... says: "Tsuji is the type of man wh o, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings." Note: Those who claimed the U.S. government had links to former Nazi and Japanes e war criminals were once called "conspiracy theorists." Why does it take over 5 0 years for the truth to come out? For more, click here.

Safety Second? 2007-02-23, WXYZ - Detroit's ABC News Affiliate http://www1.wxyz.com/wxyz/ys_investigations/article/0,2132,WXYZ_15949_5373880... The Pentagon has said it, the President has said it, everybody says it: "Our tro ops deserve nothing but the best when we send them into combat." It s a goal that isn t always met. Did a retired Marine colonel s connections count more than the bes t design for a new vehicle for the troops? Jerry Bazinski has made a career of d esigning and helping to develop new vehicles here in Detroit for years. So when the Marines called for new vehicle small enough to load into an Osprey helicopte r but lean and mean enough to allow soldiers to move quickly and launch attacks deep into enemy territory, Jerry and a team of veteran Detroit vehicle designers came up with [a model that] met or exceeded all the specifications. It was desi gned to provide for bullet-proof protection from enemy gunfire. It included a st urdy built-in roll-cage. And the Marines were impressed, as you can see from the report card that shows a whole list of many strengths ... and "no significant w eaknesses." Well, here s what the Marines ultimately bought ... a model known as t he Growler that sort of looks like a dune buggy with a machine gun. Though it ma y seem it should have a lower sticker price, it s turned out to cost us upwards of $127,000 a copy. Former Colonel Terry Crews ... sold the Marines on the Growler . [Investigative Reporter Steve] Wilson to Wayne Blake/Growler Plant Manager: Th at s how he got this contract, he had some friends, didn t he? Blake: Yeah, he lives 15 miles from the Pentagon. And the military version is $127,000. And if you bo ught it as a civilian version? 17,000. Note: This article has disappeared from the website, though you can try this Goo gle cache version. For a highly revealing, two-page summary by a top U.S. genera

l on major war corruption, click here.

Auditors: Billions of U.S. tax dollars wasted in Iraq 2007-02-16, CNN News/Associated Press http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/16/iraq.reconstruction.ap The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their revi ew of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that ... about $10 billion has been sq uandered by the U.S. government on Iraq reconstruction aid because of contractor overcharges and unsupported expenses. Of the $10 billion in overpriced contract s or undocumented costs, more than $2.7 billion were charged by Halliburton Co., the oil-field services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Feder al investigators warned Thursday that significantly more taxpayer money is at ri sk. More than one in six dollars charged by U.S. contractors were questionable o r unsupported, nearly triple the amount of waste the Government Accountability O ffice estimated last fall. "There is no accountability," said David M. Walker, w ho heads the auditing arm of Congress. "Organizations charged with overseeing co ntracts are not held accountable. Contractors are not held accountable. The indi viduals responsible are not held accountable." The investigators urged the Penta gon to reconsider its growing reliance on outside contractors. Layers of subcont ractors, poor documentation and lack of strong contract management are rampant. Walker complained that GAO investigators have difficulty getting basic detail ab out reconstruction contracts such as expenses and subcontractors involved becaus e many Pentagon divisions fail to consistently track or fully report them. Notin g that auditors still have $300 billion of Iraq spending to review, Waxman said the total amount of waste, fraud and abuse "could be astronomical." Note: To understand how so much money can go missing, read what a top U.S. gener al has to say here. And for major media articles claiming hundreds of billions o f dollars are missing, click here.

An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 2007-02-09, The Daily Mail (The U.K.'s second most popular newspaper) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article... A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Am ericans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. Thi s proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story. [The] accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie, [Loose Change, which is] so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched [it]. Why were no military a ircraft scrambled in time to head off the attacks? How could a rookie pilot - as one of the terrorists was - fly a Boeing 757 aircraft so precisely into the Pen tagon? The movie's assertions are being explored by a number of commentators in America and Britain. Former Labour Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher ... has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery." These words were written in a foreword for Prof essor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour. Griffin ... i s emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a res pected philosopher. Together, the book and the movie have raised the question: c ould the attack be a carbon copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan by Pre sident Kennedy to stage terror attacks in America and blame them on Communist Cu ba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro? Initially ... Pro fessor Griffin dismissed claims the attacks could have been an inside job. It wa s only a year later ... that the professor was sent a 'timeline' on the day's ev ents based entirely on newspaper and television accounts. It was then that he ch

anged his mind. Note: The timeline which opened Prof. Griffin's eyes was the two-page 9/11 timel ine from WantToKnow.info available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up. T his is the most supportive article yet by the mainstream media. The word is spre ading. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on 9/11, click here.

Ex-Iraq expert: Britain saw no threat before war 2006-12-15, CNN/Associated Press http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/15/iraq.uk.report Britain's former top Iraq expert at the United Nations said in previously secret testimony that most government officials did not believe Iraq posed a threat in the months leading to the U.S.-led invasion. Carne Ross ... told a House of Com mons committee that he and other analysts believed that Iraq had only a "very li mited" ability to mount an attack of any kind, including one using weapons of ma ss destruction. The committee published Ross' testimony after assuring him that parliamentary privilege would protect him from prosecution under the Official Se crets Act. "It was the commonly held view among officials that the threat had be en contained," Ross said in the written testimony. "Iraq's ability to launch a W MD or any form of attack was very limited. Iraq's air force was depleted to the point of total ineffectiveness; its army was but a pale shadow of its earlier mi ght; there was no evidence of any connection between Iraq and any terrorist orga nization that might have planned an attack," he wrote. During the months leading up to the war, he said, there was no new evidence that Saddam Hussein posed a t hreat. "What changed was the government's determination to present available evi dence in a different light," he testified. Ross told the committee that he resig ned from the government in September 2004 because of his misgivings over the war . John Major, Britain's former prime minister, raised concerns ... that other is sues remain to be resolved, including the distribution of oil revenues. Note: This recently released testimony was given in 2004, but kept secret for re asons of "national security."

President Bush is trying to pardon himself 2006-09-27, CNN The Situation Room http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0609/27/sitroom.02.html BLITZER: Let's check in with Jack Cafferty right now. JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: The House just passed President Bush's bill to redefine the treatment of detain ees, and the Senate's expected to do the same thing tomorrow. Buried deep inside this legislation is a provision that will pardon President Bush and all the mem bers of his administration of any possible crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of detainees dated all the way back to September 11, 2001. At leas t President Nixon had Gerald Ford to do his dirty work. President Bush is trying to pardon himself. Under the War Crimes Act, violations of the Geneva Conventio ns are felonies. In some cases, punishable by death. When the Supreme Court rule d the Geneva Conventions applied to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, President Bu sh and his boys were suddenly in big trouble. They had been working these prison ers over pretty good. In an effort to avoid possible prosecution, they're trying to cram this bill through Congress before the end of the week when Congress adj ourns. The reason there's such a rush to do this, if the Democrats get control o f the House in November, well, this kind of legislation probably wouldn't pass. You want to know the real disgrace of what these people are about to do or are i n the process of doing? Senator Bill Frist and Congressman Dennis Hastert and th eir Republican stooges apparently don't see anything wrong with this. I really d

o wonder sometimes what we're becoming in this country. The question is this: Sh ould Congress pass a bill giving retroactive immunity to President Bush for poss ible war crimes? Note: To watch a video clip of this broadcast, click here.

Sickened Iraq Vets Cite Depleted Uranium 2006-08-13, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2307268 A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through but ter. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billi on years. Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium f or nuclear weapons and energy plants. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Wash ington, D.C., [Herbert Reed] ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and an other. They began to talk. [They] all have depleted uranium in their urine. The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, cla iming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks. T he Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe. Military re search on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations. Fifteen years aft er it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitori ng veterans exposed to depleted uranium. Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. D epleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War Syndrome, from which no trea tment has emerged. About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in t he first Gulf War still suffer [this] baffling array of symptoms. Depleted urani um has long been suspected as a possible contributor. It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange...was linked to [major diseas e and] sufferings. It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World Wa r II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb . Note: Why isn't the media reporting more on this health disaster? For lots more on how veterans suffer from corporate and governmental denial and manipulations, see what a highly decorated U.S. General has to say on the suffering of soldier s at http://www.WantToKnow.info/warcoverup. For an amazingly revealing documenta ry with interviews from top sources on the depleted uranium cover-up, click here .

The Bullying of the Press 2006-02-26, London Times http://timesonline.typepad.com/mick_smith/2006/02/the_bullying_of.html I reported on eight of the [Downing Street] memos while working at the Daily Tel egraph in September 2004. I then moved to the Sunday Times, where I obtained the other two memos. Why did the US newspapers take so long to pick up on the story ? The memos were so momentous in what they told us about how Bush and Blair went to war...that they surely had to be reported. They were not only the smoking gun that proved all the lies; they also proved the lack of planning for the aftermat h; the fraudulent use of the UN to make the war legal; and...the way in which th e allies began the war...months before they went to the UN or Congress to get ba cking for war. The memo actually says...that the Prime Minister agreed at Crawfo rd in April 2002 to go to war, so the British needed to "create the conditions" which would make the war legal under international law. In the wake of 9/11, the US media were initially prevented from any criticism of the administration. The

n when the need to criticize became unavoidable, they were cowed by administrati on claims that it helped the terrorists. There is something grotesque about Bush saying that his administration is setting a forward strategy for freedom around t he world while it is attempting at the same time to bully the US press back into submission at home. I don t for one moment believe it will succeed. But none of u s can afford to be complacent.

MI6 protected Nazi who killed 100 British agents 2005-05-14, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1611185,00.html ONE of Hitler s top intelligence officers, who ordered the murders of more than 10 0 British secret agents in concentration camps, was spared execution as a war cr iminal and selected to work for MI6. Newly opened papers contain startling evide nce that...British Intelligence turned Horst Kopkow, faked his death and used him to fight the Cold War. The Atkins documents have been corroborated by newly decl assified secret papers in the British and American National Archives. Britain ha s denied that it engaged in the dark arts used by the Americans, whose employmen t of Nazis to catch Communists has been well-documented. British intelligence so urces pointed out that Kopkow was not in the league of the butcher of Lyons , a ref erence to Klaus Barbie, the most notorious war criminal employed by the American s. The Kopkow case is uniquely chilling because the MI6 men who spared him were colleagues and handlers of his victims. Among those whose torture and death he san ctioned were men and women of the SOE and MI6 agents.

True Tales Odd Enough to Stop a Farm Animal's Heart 2005-04-07, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01EFDD163EF934A35757C0A9639C... At the start of the twisted treasure hunt that is "The Men Who Stare at Goats," the journalist Jon Ronson appears to be looking for furtive, paranoid quacks who play mind games. Take the goats of the title: Mr. Ronson cites a hundred of the m. They have been used in top-secret experiments by psychic spies whose existenc e is not officially acknowledged by the United States Army. Military psychics ar e so well hidden that they aren't covered by the Army's coffee budget. It makes them cranky to have to bring their own coffee to work. "The damn psychic spies s hould be keeping their damn mouths shut, instead of chitchatting all over town a bout what they did." So says retired Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III, the fi rst of the many characters redolent of "Dr. Strangelove" who are found in this j aw-dropper of a -- hard to believe, but, yes -- nonfiction story. Some of these experts contend that a goat's heart can be stopped by the intense gaze of a cert ain kind of supersoldier. "Goat didn't have a chance," one of these tough guys [ says]. Mr. Ronson ... describes the effort to deploy a Moscow scientist who had previously sent subliminal messages to Red Army troops ... in the Branch Davidia n standoff. This scientist didn't work out because he was unwilling to transmit ... a bogus voice of God. He finds a prologue in MK-ULTRA, the real C.I.A. "Manc hurian Candidate" research of the 1950's, which involved the disastrous use of L SD as a potential truth serum. And somehow Mr. Ronson is able to keep his book b oth light and nightmarish. [He] remains terrifically adept at capturing the horr or of these developments without losing track of their lunacy. Note: For the above article and lots more reliable information on these mind con trol programs, click here. For another excellent book by Ronson titled "Them: Ad venture with Extremists," click here.

RNC [Republican National Convention] to Feature Unusual Forms of Sound 2004-08-25, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99472 Outside the convention hall, New York City police plan to control protesters usi ng a device that directs sound for up to 1,500 feet in a spotlight-like beam. Me anwhile, a display of former Republican presidents inside the hall will feature campaign speeches that are funneled to listeners through highly focused audio be ams. Both technologies feature unprecedented manipulation of sound, but for very different purposes. And while both technologies have unique, "gee-whiz" factors , some remain uneasy with the idea of using sound to control crowds. When in wea pon mode, LRAD blasts a tightly controlled stream of caustic sound that can be t urned up to high enough levels to trigger nausea or possibly fainting. LRAD ... has been used by the U.S. military in Iraq and at sea as a non-lethal force. In these settings, operators can use the device not only to convey orders, but also as a weapon. In tests, police have shown how they can convey orders in a normal voice to someone as far as four blocks away. The sound beam is even equipped wi th a viewfinder so the operator can precisely target the audio by finding a pers on in cross hairs. Rather than using pure volume to throw sound far, the LRAD re aches distant ears by focusing the audio beam. Wherever the beam makes contact w ith air, the air molecules interact in a way that isolates the original audible sound. So if you're standing in front of the ultrasonic sound wave, you can hear the sound. If you're a few inches away, you hear nothing. Already, some Coca-Co la machines in Japan are equipped with the technology so passers-by hear the ent icing sound of soda being poured into a glass of ice. Note: For more reliable information on these "non-lethal weapons," click here.

Ex-minister attacks US over war 2003-09-06, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3085656.stm Former minister Michael Meacher has blamed the Iraq war on the US desire for wor ld domination. Mr Meacher also suggested the Americans might have failed to prev ent 11 September as it gave a pretext for military action. Mr Meacher was enviro nment minister until three months ago and has already spoken out in opposition t o the war. Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Mr Meacher said the 11 September a ttacks gave an invaluable excuse for attacking Afghanistan. And he said the US G overnment intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Sa ddam Hussein was in power because of its need for further secure oil supplies. I n his piece Mr Meacher wrote: "It seems that the so-called war on terrorism is b eing used largely as a bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action ag ainst Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 11 September. The global war on terrorism has all the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the w ay for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around s ecuring by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole proje ct." Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said this agenda had been out lined by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) - a thinktank associate d with leading neoconservative hawks within the US administration. In his articl e, Mr Meacher also said the US had passed up opportunities to catch Osama Bin La den and other senior al-Qaeda figures. Note: Mr. Meacher's comments were actually much stronger than the BBC reports. H e stated publicy on the front page of the Guardian his belief that the U.S. gove rnment was very possibly behind the 9/11 attacks. To verify this, see the Guardi an article mentioned in the BBC article above available here.

US grants N Korea nuclear funds 2002-04-02, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1908571.stm The US Government has announced that it will release $95m to North Korea as part of an agreement to replace the Stalinist country's own nuclear programme, which the US suspected was being misused. In releasing the funding, President George W Bush waived the Framework's requirement that North Korea allow inspectors to e nsure it has not hidden away any weapons-grade plutonium from the original react ors. President Bush argued that the decision was "vital to the national security interests of the United States". The head of the Non-proliferation Policy Educa tion Centre in Washington, a critic of the Agreed Framework, has warned that eve n when the new reactors are completed they may not be tamper-proof. "These react ors are like all reactors, They have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we're trying to prevent it acquiring," Henry Sokolski told the Far Easte rn Economic Review. Note: Though this article is from 2002, one must ask why on earth President Bush would waive the requirement for inspectors who would ensure no nuclear weapons development? Wasn't this one of three countries he had already labeled as the ax is of evil? For answers to these questions, click here.

DOD Inspector General's Report to Congress 2001-09-10, Defense Link (U.S. Department of Defense website) http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2001/s20010910-secdef.html Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, The Pentagon, S eptember 10, 2001: The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a seriou s threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating fiveyear plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. The adversary [is] the Pen tagon bureaucracy. An average American family works an entire year to generate $ 6,000 in income taxes. Here we spill many times that amount every hour by duplic ation and by inattention. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 tril lion in transactions. This is not just about money. It's not about waste. It's a bout our responsibility to the men and women in uniform who put their lives at r isk. It's about respect for taxpayers' dollars. A cab driver in New York City ou ght to be able to feel confident that we care about those dollars. Note: Is it possible that this is more than just problems with a bureaucracy? Wh en we are talking about trillions of dollars, could it be that major corruption at very high levels may be involved? For a couple striking examples of major cor ruption not adequately covered by the media from highly respected sources, click here.

A Missing H-Bomb Ruffles Japanese 1989-05-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/11/world/a-missing-h-bomb-ruffles-japanese.html

Japan's Foreign Minister said today that his country was ''seriously concerned'' about the loss of a hydrogen bomb off Okinawa 24 years ago, and said Japan woul d press for ''full details'' about the incident from the United States. The comm ents by the official, Sosuke Uno, came after the Government was sharply criticiz ed both by the Japanese press and by some civic and anti-nuclear groups for play ing down reports that the lost bomb is still under the ocean 80 miles from a Jap anese island. Over the last two days the Pentagon has provided the first details of the 1965 accident, admitting for the first time that the accident happened o ff Japan's shores rather than 500 miles from land, as it originally contended. T he aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, which was carrying the weapon when it was lost overboard with an A-4 aircraft, was reportedly heading to Yokosuka, the naval ba se south of Tokyo, from Vietnam. This morning the Asahi Shimbun, the most libera l of Japan's major dailies, castigated the Japanese Foreign Ministry for ignorin g the first reports of the accident. In an editorial, the newspaper said that '' an unexpectedly profound gap'' exists between ''the people's feelings'' about th e presence of nuclear weapons and the Government's willingness to ignore the pre sence of the weapons in the interest of avoiding strains with the United States.

Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids 2009-12-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/us/politics/11blackwater.html Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C. clandestine raids with agency officers against pe I.A. s most sensitive activities ople suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials. The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing ce ntral roles in what company insiders called snatch and grab operations. Several fo rmer Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so r outine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the m ilitary and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in miss ions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raise s questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield. The secret missio ns illuminate a far deeper relationship between the spy agency and the private s ecurity company than government officials had acknowledged. Blackwater s ties to t he C.I.A. have emerged in recent months, beginning with disclosures in The New Y ork Times that the agency had hired the company as part of a program to assassin ate leaders of Al Qaeda and to assist in the C.I.A. s Predator drone program in Af ghanistan and Pakistan. Note: After this report was published, the CIA acts with Blackwater. The reality is that many ided under classified contracts, with both the ons Command, so the denial of "contracts" with announced it had terminated contr of Blackwater's services are prov CIA and the Joint Special Operati Blackwater may be deceptive.

US builds up its bases in oil-rich South America 2009-11-22, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-builds-up-its-bases-in-oi... The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuc lear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freed om of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia. The new US push is part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recen tly at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing

to accept Washington's political and economic tutelage. President Rafael Correa , for instance, has refused to prolong the US armed presence in Ecuador, and US forces have to quit their base at the port of Manta by the end of next month. So Washington turned to Colombia. The country has received military aid worth $4.6 bn (2.8bn) from the US since 2000, despite its poor human rights record. Colombia n forces regularly kill the country's indigenous people and other civilians, and last year raided the territory of its southern neighbour, Ecuador, causing at l east 17 deaths. This being US foreign policy, a tell-tale trail of oil is eviden t. The fact that the US gets half its oil from Latin America was one of the reas ons the US Fourth Fleet was re-established in the region's waters in 2008. The f leet's vessels can include Polaris nuclear-armed submarines a deployment seen by some experts as a violation of the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which bans nuclear w eapons from the continent. With or without nuclear weapons, the bilateral agreem ent on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region. Note: American dependence on foreign oil fuels not only US wars in the Middle Ea st and Central Asia but an ever escalating global militarization. For many promi sing reports from reliable sources on alternatives to oil for many purposes, cli ck here.

Report: Blackwater Sent $1M Bribe to Iraq 2009-11-11, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/11/national/main5611339.shtml [Four] former top executives at Blackwater Worldwide say the U.S. security contr actor sent about $1 million to its Iraq office with the intention of paying off officials in the country who were angry about the fatal shootings of 17 civilian s by Blackwater employees. Iraqis had long complained about ground operations by the North Carolina-based company, now known as Xe Corp. Then the shooting by Bl ackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007 left 17 civilians d ead, further strained relations between Baghdad and Washington and led U.S. pros ecutors to bring charges against the Blackwater contractors involved. The State Department has since turned to DynCorp and another private security firm, Triple Canopy, to handle diplomatic protective services in the country. But Xe continu es to provide security for diplomats in other nations, most notably in Afghanist an. The former executives told the [New York Times] that the payments were appro ved by the company's then-president, Gary Jackson. They did not know if he came up with the idea. Any payments would have been illegal under the U.S. Foreign Co rrupt Practices Act, which bans bribes to foreign officials. Two of the former e xecutives said they were directly involved in discussions about paying Iraqi off icials, and the other two said they were told about the discussions by others at Blackwater. Note: For lots more from reliable sources on corporate corruption, click here.

Court to reconsider CIA torture flight ruling 2009-10-28, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/28/BAMQ1AB9KF.DTL A federal appeals court granted the Obama administration's request ... to rehear a case over a Bay Area company's alleged participation in CIA torture flights, setting the stage for a critical test of government claims of secrecy and nation al security. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had reinst ated a suit in April by five men who accused the company, Jeppesen Dataplan of S an Jose, of taking part in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program that led to

their imprisonment and torture. The 3-0 ruling rejected arguments by the Bush a nd Obama administrations that the case concerned secrets too sensitive to disclo se in court. The full appeals court set aside that ruling. President Obama criti cized the practice [of extraordinary rendition] but refused to disavow it, promi sing only that no prisoners would be tortured. Ben Wizner, an ACLU attorney, sai d ... that he was "disappointed that the Obama administration continues to stand in the way of torture victims having their day in court. This case is not about secrecy. It's about immunity from accountability," Wizner said. In the April ru ling reinstating the lawsuit, the three-judge appeals court panel said the gover nment and Jeppesen could take steps to protect national secrets as the case proc eeded. The panel said the administration's argument, if accepted, would "cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its contractors from the demands and limits of the law." Note: For many reports from major media sources of growing government threats to civil liberties, click here.

Pakistan kept billions in US aid from military 2009-10-05, Boston Globe/Associated Press http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2009/10/05/pakistan_kept_billi... The United States has long suspected that [many] of the billions of dollars it h as sent Pakistan to battle militants has been diverted to the domestic economy a nd other causes, such as fighting India. Now the scope and longevity of the misu se is becoming clear: Between 2002 and 2008 ... only $500 million of the $6.6 bi llion in American aid actually made it to the Pakistani military, two army gener als said. At the time of the siphoning, Pervez Musharraf, a Washington ally, ser ved as chief of staff and president, making it easier to divert money intended f or the military to bolster his image at home through economic subsidies. "The ar my itself got very little,'' said Mahmud Durrani, a retired general who was Paki stan's ambassador to the United States under Musharraf. "It went to things like subsidies, which is why everything looked hunky-dory." Generals and ministers sa y the diversion of the money hurt the military in several ways. Helicopters crit ical to the battle in rugged border regions were not available. At one point in 2007, more than 200 soldiers were trapped by insurgents in the tribal regions wi thout a helicopter lift to rescue them. Equipment was broken, and training was l acking. The details on misuse of American aid come as Washington again promises Pakistan money. Legislation to triple general aid to Pakistan cleared Congress l ast week. "We don't have a mechanism for tracking the money after we have given it to them,'' said Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman. Note: For lots more on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.

American embassy contractors in Kabul accused of ritual abuse 2009-09-02, Times of London (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6817921.ece Security contractors at the giant US Embassy in Kabul were accused yesterday of fostering a Lord of the Flies environment built on abuse and humiliating initiatio n rituals. The allegations, made by the independent Project On Government Oversi ght, are contained in a report submitted to Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State. The report is based on e-mails, some of which describe the alleged abuse of Afghan nationals. Among those implicated are Britons employed by ArmorGroup North America, the contractor providing security at the embassy, where nearly 1, 000 diplomats and support staff work. The report quotes an e-mail from a guard c urrently working for the contractor, describing scenes of guards and supervisors

peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks and drinking vodka s hots out of [buttock] cracks . In another incident, a male Afghan caterer complain ed last month of being grabbed by a supervisor and told: You are very good for f* **ing. The supervisor, who was in only his underwear, also brandished bottles of alcohol. The allegations at the Kabul embassy come in the wake of scandals surro unding Blackwater, another security contractor, in Afghanistan and Iraq, where i t has been accused of fraud, abuse and involvement in civilian deaths. Note: For lots more on the illegal activities of military contractors in Afghani stan and Iraq, click here.

Steroids, drink and paranoia: the murky world of the private security contractor 2009-09-01, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/steroids-drink-and-parano... Paranoid, competitive and fuelled by guns, alcohol and steroids. That is how one senior contractor in Baghdad describes the private security industry operating in the city's Green Zone. It was the world to which Danny Fitzsimons, a 29-yearold former soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia, a nd with an extensive criminal past, returned three weeks ago. Despite rules agai nst alcohol, his ArmorGroup colleagues welcomed him with a drinking session. A f ight broke out and he shot and killed two of them a Briton, Paul McGuigan, and a n Australian, Darren Hoare then wounded an Iraqi, Arkhan Mahdi. He faces a preme ditated murder charge and execution if found guilty. Mr Fitzsimons's family is d etermined to save him and say he was suffering from severe psychiatric problems after a brutal career in the Army and in the security industry. But those on the ground hold little hope. They are already resigned to Mr Fitzsimons's execution and say that he is a tiny pawn in a huge, expensive and vicious game of chess. They say the private security business in Iraq is in a vice-like crush. The gold rush that began with the conflict in 2003 is drying up. Contracts are not as lu crative, the trend is towards employing Iraqis instead of Westerners and, crucia lly, the Iraqi authorities ... are clamping down. "We are loathed out here. We a re the single most hated entity in Iraq," said Ethan Madison, a security contrac tor who has worked in Baghdad for five years. Note: For lots more on the illegal activities of US military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

Blackwater Tapped Foreigners on Secret CIA Program 2009-08-31, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=8450594 When the CIA revived a plan to kill or capture [alleged] terrorists in 2004, the agency turned to the well-connected security company then known as Blackwater U SA. With Blackwater's lucrative government security work and contacts arrayed in hot spots around the world, company officials offered the services of foreigner s supposedly skilled at tracking [people] in lawless regions and countries where the CIA had no working relationships with the government. But the CIA's use of the private contractor as part of its now-abandoned plan to dispatch death squad s skirted concerns now re-emerging with recent disclosures about Blackwater's ro le. Blackwater's later hiring of several senior CIA officials who were involved in or aware of the secret program, including one of the men who ran the operatio n, showed the blurred lines of using a private contractor for such a highly clas sified and dangerous project. The 2004 decision by CIA officials to entrust the North Carolina-based company with such a sensitive overseas operation struck som e former agency officials as highly unusual. "The question remains: Why do we ne

ed Blackwater?" said Charles Faddis, a former department chief at the CIA's Coun terterrorism Center who retired in 2008 and was not involved in the secret progr am. "I remain mystified. This is quintessential CIA work. You wonder what it mea ns that the CIA has to rely on Blackwater? Why are we still funding the CIA?" Th e former senior CIA official who had knowledge of the program explained that "yo u wouldn't want to have American fingerprints on it." Note: For lots more on government corruption, click here.

Afghanistan Contractors Outnumber Troops 2009-08-22, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125089638739950599.html Even as U.S. troops surge to new highs in Afghanistan they are outnumbered by mi litary contractors working alongside them, according to a Defense Department cen sus due to be distributed to Congress -- illustrating how hard it is for the U.S . to wean itself from the large numbers of war-zone contractors that proved cont roversial in Iraq. The number of military contractors in Afghanistan rose to alm ost 74,000 by June 30, far outnumbering the roughly 58,000 U.S. soldiers on the ground at that point. As the military force in Afghanistan grows further, to a p lanned 68,000 by the end of the year, the Defense Department expects the ranks o f contractors to increase more. Military contractors' personnel for a time outnu mbered U.S. troops in Iraq. The large contractor force was accompanied by issues ranging from questionable costs billed to the government to shooting of civilia ns by armed security guards. A September 2007 shooting incident involving Blackw ater Worldwide guards working for the U.S. State Department, in which 17 Iraqis were killed, forced the U.S. to aggressively rework oversight of security firms. Yet in Afghanistan as in Iraq, the Pentagon has found that the military has shr unk so much since the Cold War ended that it isn't big enough to sustain operati ons without using companies to directly support military operations. Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the use of private contractors by t he US military in its wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

A Window Into C.I.A.'s Embrace of Secret Jails 2009-08-13, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/13foggo.html In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of t he agency's main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world's most threatening terror ists. Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, ... agreed to the assignment. With that, Mr. F oggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to h ouse about a half-dozen detainees. The existence of the network of prisons to de tain and interrogate [captives] has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former int elligence officials have provided a fuller account. Mr. Foggo acknowledged a rol e, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fr aud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided ot her supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Ken tucky prison. Eventually, the agency's network would encompass at least eight de tention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanis tan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. ha s never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100. Mr. Foggo's success in Frankfu rt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. I

n November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.'s executive director, in effect its day -to-day administrative chief. "It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him h e now runs the regiment," said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.'s executive director f rom 2001 to 2004. "It popped people's eyes." Note: Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's case is highly unusual. Very few high-level CIA offic ers have ever been imprisoned for corruption. His predecessor as Executive Direc tor of the CIA, quoted in the article above, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who held the office on 9/11, had been the chief executive of a branch of the investment comp any which placed the still unexplained "put options" on American and United Airl ines stocks the week before the attacks, resulting in hundreds of millions of do llars of profits to "unknown" parties.

U.S. battling CIA rendition case in 3 courts 2009-08-10, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/09/BAHQ195SJR.DTL The Obama administration is fighting on multiple fronts - in courts in San Franc isco, Washington and London - to keep an official veil of secrecy over the treat ment of a former prisoner who says he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay. The admini stration has asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco to reconsider its ru ling allowing Binyam Mohamed and four other former or current prisoners to sue a Bay Area company for allegedly flying them to overseas torture chambers for the CIA. Most recently, a British government lawyer told her nation's High Court la st month that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had threatened to limit U.S. intelligence-sharing with Great Britain if the court disclosed details of M ohamed's treatment in Guantanamo. The British court declared in August 2008 that there was evidence Mohamed had been tortured, but deleted the details from its public version of the ruling at the Bush administration's insistence. Mohamed, 3 0, an Ethiopian refugee and British resident, ... and four other men have sued J eppesen Dataplan, a San Jose subsidiary of the Boeing Co., for its alleged role in arranging their flights for the CIA. A Council of Europe report in 2007 descr ibed Jeppesen as the CIA's aviation services provider. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Co urt of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated the suit in April, rejecting argument s originally made by the Bush administration that the case posed grave risks to national security. Obama administration lawyers endorsed those arguments at a he aring in February and have asked the court for a rehearing. Mohamed's lawyers, C live Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour of the British human-rights group Repriev e, were threatened with jail after drafting a letter to Obama in February urging him to release the evidence of their client's treatment in U.S. custody or to a uthorize Britain to do so. Note: For many illuminating reports from major media sources on government secre cy, click here.

Torture, the painful truth 2009-06-15, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ehrenreich15-2009jun15,0,512919.story Perhaps we protest too much. Torture, after all, is a venerable American traditi on. If not quite as homespun as apple pie or lynching, it is at least as old as our imperial aspirations. We were waterboarding captives in one of our earliest wars of occupation, the Philippine-American War, which cost as many as 1 million civilian lives. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt himself wrote with laconic praise of " the old Filipino method." Other techniques, crude or sophisticated, have filled the war bag since. CIA interrogation manuals from the 1960s, which lay out the b

asic stress-position and sleep- and sensory-deprivation techniques later applied at Bagram and Guantanamo, have been public since 1997. Despite our protestation s, we have little to be surprised about. Now, when President Obama vows that "th e United States does not torture" and spars with the former vice president over details, he crosses his fingers behind his back and saves himself a loophole. Vi a "extraordinary rendition" -- a Clinton administration innovation -- our govern ment is still free to outsource torture and claim it doesn't know. The Obama adm inistration has been relying increasingly on foreign intelligence services to de tain and interrogate our suspects for us. Despite hundreds of front-page stories , we pretend we didn't know, that it was all somehow kept secret from us. This b lindness serves a function. By declaring torture anomalous, by pushing it once a gain to the margins of legality, we can preserve a vision of U.S. military power -- and of American empire -- that is essentially benevolent. [But] maintaining military and economic hegemony over the planet remains an inherently bloody affa ir. Empire is a synonym for subjugation, and hence for violence on a massive sca le. Note: For a retired Marine Corps general's understanding of the real reasons beh ind both torture and mass slaughter of civilian populations by the US military, click here.

To meet June deadline, US and Iraqis redraw city borders 2009-05-19, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0519/p06s05-wome.html On a map of Baghdad, the US Army's Forward Operating Base Falcon is clearly with in city limits. Except that Iraqi and American military officials have decided i t's not. As the June 30 deadline for US soldiers to be out of Iraqi cities appro aches, there are no plans to relocate the roughly 3,000 American troops who help maintain security in south Baghdad along what were the fault lines in the secta rian war. "We and the Iraqis decided it wasn't in the city," says a US military official. The base on the southern outskirts of Baghdad's Rasheed district is an example of the fluidity of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) agreed to late last year, which orders all US combat forces out of Iraqi cities, towns, and vi llages by June 30. Although the mission for most brigades and battalions is not expected to substantially change after June 30, US military officials have stopp ed using the term forward operating base in favor of the more benign-sounding co ntingency operating site. The SOFA and a wider strategic framework agreement set out a relationship between the US and Iraq very different from that of the mili tary occupation of the past six years. One of the challenges of that new relatio nship is how the US can continue to wield influence on key decisions without bei ng seen to do so. "For so long we have been one of the driving forces here ... i t is such a hard habit to break," says a senior US State Department official. "I think we need to do everything we can not to make ourselves an issue. It has to be seen here as doing it quietly ... so that you are not doing things for the I raqis, the Iraqis are doing things for themselves but with your help and we rema in in the shadows.... It's a very delicate choreography," adds the State Departm ent official. Note: For a trove of revealing reports on the deceptive strategies used by the U S to advance its wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

Hints That Detainees May Be Held on U.S. Soil 2009-05-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/us/politics/01gitmo.html

As many as 100 detainees at the prison at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, could end up held without trial on American soil, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates suggested Thur sday, a situation that he acknowledged would create widespread if not unanimous opposition in Congress. The estimate was the most specific yet from the Obama ad ministration about how many of the 241 prisoners at Guantnamo could not be safely released, sent to other countries or appropriately tried in American courts. Mr . Gates said discussions had started this week with the Justice Department about determining how many of the Guantnamo detainees could not be sent to other count ries or tried in courts. He did not say which detainees might be in that group, but independent experts have said it probably would include terrorism suspects w hom the military has not yet brought charges against, among them detainees from Yemen and the Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to brutal interrogati on in secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency. He did not say ... under what law they would be held. The Obama administration is debating how to e stablish a legal basis for incarcerating detainees deemed too dangerous to be re leased but not appropriate to be tried because of potential problems posed by th eir harsh interrogations, the evidence against them or other issues. Mr. Gates s aid he had asked for $50 million in supplemental financing in case a facility ne eded to be built quickly for the detainees. Note: Ironically, it would seem from these plans revealed by Gates that closing the prison in Guantanamo is going to be used as the pretext to establish indefin ite detention, without the right of habeas corpus, on American soil. But the rea son for the widespread demand to close the prison is precisely to end such deten tions! Do they think no one will notice? For many revealing reports from reliabl e sources on government attempts to erode civil liberties, click here.

Waterboarding, Interrogations: The CIA's $1,000 a Day Specialists 2009-04-30, ABC News http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=7471217 According to current and former government officials, the CIA's secret waterboar ding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington. Bruce Jes sen and Jim Mitchell, former military officers, together founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates. Both men declined to speak to ABC News citing non-disclosure ag reements with the CIA. But sources say Jessen and Mitchell together designed and implemented the CIA's interrogation program. "It's clear that these psychologis ts had an important role in developing what became the CIA's torture program," s aid Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. Former U .S. officials say the two men were essentially the architects of the CIA's 10-st ep interrogation plan that culminated in waterboarding. Associates say the two m ade good money doing it, boasting of being paid a $1,000 a day by the CIA to ove rsee the use of the techniques on top al Qaeda suspects at CIA secret sites. Bot h Mitchell and Jessen were previously involved in the U.S. military program to t rain pilots how to survive behind enemy lines and resist brutal tactics if captu red. But it turns out neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any experience in conducti ng actual interrogations before the CIA hired them. The new documents show the C IA later came to learn that the two psychologists' waterboarding "expertise" was probably "misrepresented" and thus, there was no reason to believe it was "medi cally safe" or effective. The waterboarding used on al Qaeda detainees was far m ore intense than the brief sessions used on U.S. military personnel in the train ing classes. Note: For lots more on CIA torture and other recent government attacks on civil liberties, click here.

Pentagon to Release Detainee Photos 2009-04-25, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/us/politics/24web-prison.html?partner=rss&e... The Pentagon has agreed to release dozens of previously undisclosed photographs depicting the abuse by American military personnel of captives in Iraq and Afgha nistan. The pictures, showing incidents at a half-dozen prisons in addition to t he notorious Abu Ghraib installation in Iraq, will be made available by May 28, the Defense Department and the American Civil Liberties Union said. These photogr aphs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrati onal but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib, said Amrit Sing h, a staff attorney with the A.C.L.U., which sued for release of the pictures un der the Freedom of Information Act. There were early reports that at least some of the new pictures show detainees being intimidated by American soldiers, somet imes at gunpoint, but Ms. Singh said it is not yet clear what kinds of scenes we re captured, and by whose cameras. Disclosure of the latest pictures is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such a buse, said Ms. Singh, who argued the case before the United States Court of Appea ls for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. The Pentagon s decision to release the pi ctures came after the A.C.L.U. prevailed at the Federal District Court level and before a panel of the Second Circuit. The Pentagon had fought the release of th e photographs, connected with investigations between 2003 and 2006, on the groun ds that the release could endanger American military personnel overseas and that the privacy of detainees would be violated. Note: For many revealing reports on the horrific realities of the US wars on Ira q and Afghanistan, click here.

NATO Meeting to Highlight Strains on Afghanistan 2009-04-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html?partner=rss&emc=rs... NATO leaders gathered here Friday to celebrate the 60th anniversary of [the] all iance ... also must face the harsh reality that NATO s first military mission outs ide Europe is failing in a way that risks fracturing the alliance. Obama, [by] i ncreasing American troops in Afghanistan to some 68,000 by the end of the year f rom 38,000 today, is also likely to significantly Americanize an operation that in recent years had been divided equally between American troops and allied forc es. By year s end, American troops will outnumber allied forces by at least two to one. His NATO allies are giving ... him very few new troops on the ground, unde rlining the fundamental strains in the alliance. The allies will offer more fund s but no more than several thousand new personnel members, according to alliance military planners. Many of those will not be soldiers, but police trainers to m eet a central pillar of the president s new Afghan strategy, which focuses on an e xpansion of Afghan security forces. But even for the small numbers of European c ombat reinforcements, check the fine print: Nearly all will be sent to provide s ecurity for Afghanistan s elections this summer, and will not be permanently deplo yed. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and his British counterpart, John Hutton, have publicly warned that the performance of some European troops demonstrates that NATO risks slipping toward a two-tiered alliance. In that event, it would b e divided between those that can and will fight, like Britain, Canada, France an d Poland, and those that cannot or will not because of public opinion at home. Note: Why does the U.S. need a strong presence in Afghanistan? Obama is clearly giving in to the military/industrial complex by pouring billions of tax dollars into operations in this country where military contractors can reap huge profits

. For the comments of a top U.S. general revealing the deeper reasons behind war , click here. For further important revelations from reliable sources about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

Former Gitmo guard recalls abuse, climate of fear 2009-02-14, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/14/AR20090214007... Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo's first shackled deta inees off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elde rly detainee and ground his face into the cement -- the first of a range of humi liations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business. Neely has now come forward in this final year of the detention center' s existence, saying he wants to publicly air his feelings of guilt and shame abo ut how some soldiers behaved as the military scrambled to handle the first alleg ed al-Qaida and Taliban members arriving at the isolated U.S. Navy base. His acc ount, one of the first by a former guard describing abuses at Guantanamo, descri bes a chaotic time when soldiers lacked clear rules for dealing with detainees w ho were denied many basic comforts. He says the circumstances changed quickly on ce monitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived. As Neely put it in an interview with The Associated Press this week, "The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong." Neely, a ... Texan who served for a year in Ir aq after his six months at Guantanamo, received an honorable discharge last year ... and now works as a law enforcement officer in the Houston area. He is also president of the local chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. An urge to tell his story led him to the University of California at Davis' Guantanamo Testimon ials Project, an effort to document accounts of prisoner abuse. Note: For lots more on the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool 2009-02-01, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-rendition1-2009feb... The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept na val base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these pr ograms, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism t ool. Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authorit y to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off th e street. The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, an d a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over t o countries where they were tortured. The European Parliament condemned renditio ns as "an illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in t he program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of worki ng with the agency on dozens of rendition flights. But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the B ush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard. The d ecision underscores the fact that the [War on Terror] is far from over.

Note: For key reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of the War o n Terror, click here.

Urban Tool in Recruiting by the Army: An Arcade 2009-01-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/us/05army.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewant... At the Franklin Mills mall [in Philadelphia], past the Gap Outlet and the China Buddha Express, is a $13 million video arcade that the Army hopes will become a model for recruitment in urban areas, where the armed services typically have a hard time attracting recruits. The Army Experience Center is a fitting counterpa rt to the retail experience: 14,500 square feet of mostly shoot- em-up video games and three full-scale simulators, including an AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter, an armed Humvee and a Black Hawk copter with M4 carbine assault rifles. For thos e who want to take the experience deeper, the center has 22 recruiters. Or for m ore immediate full-contact mayhem, there are the outlet stores. The facility, wh ich opened in August, is the first of its kind. Philadelphia has been a particul arly difficult area for recruitment. In recent years the Army has tried a number of ways to increase enlistment, including home video games, direct marketing pr omotions, a stronger online presence and recruitment-themed music videos. In 200 7 it added bonuses of up to $2,000 for Army reservists who signed up new recruit s. Civil liberties groups have criticized the Pentagon for its efforts to reach high school students. [At the arcade] conversations with recruiters [took] place in an adjacent room or the central lounge area, where there were comfortable le ather chairs and a soundtrack of Jane s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Note: For lots more on modern war, click here.

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq 2008-11-30, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR20081128022... I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U. S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today. I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, beg an my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bos nia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still condu cting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were n ominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interroga tors' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- an d often break them.These interrogations were based on fear and control; they oft en resulted in torture and abuse. I refused to participate in such practices, an d a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I sup ervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified ... but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we l earned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work. Note: For revealing reports from reliable and verifiable sources on the realitie s of the Iraq and Afghan wars, click here.

Army Orders Pain Ray Trucks; New Report Shows 'Potential for Death' 2008-10-11, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=6007823&page=1 After years of testing, the Active Denial System -- the pain ray which drives of f rioters with a microwave-like beam -- could finally have its day. The Army is buying five of the truck-mounted systems for $25 million. But the energy weapon may face new hurdles, before it's shipped off to the battlefield; a new report d etails how the supposedly non-lethal blaster could be turned into a flesh-frying killer. The announcement arrives on the same day as a new report from less-leth al weapons expert Dr. Jrgen Altmann that analyzes the physics of several directed energy weapons, including Active Denial, the Advanced Tactical Laser (used as a non-lethal weapon), the Pulsed Energy Projectile (a.k.a. "Maximum Pain" laser) and the Long Range Acoustic Device (a.k.a. "Acoustic Blaster"). Dr. Altmann desc ribes the Active Denial beam in some detail, noting that it will not be complete ly uniform; anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the center will experience mor e heating than someone at the edge. And perhaps more significant is his thorough analysis of the heating it produces -- and the cumulative effect if the target does not have the chance to cool down between exposures. In U.S. military tests, a fifteen-second delay between exposures was strictly observed; this may not ha ppen when the ADS is used for real. "As a consequence, the ADS provides the tech nical possibility to produce burns of second and third degree. Because the beam of diameter 2 m and above is wider than human size, such burns would occur over considerable parts of the body, up to 50% of its surface." Note: To download the technical report by Dr. Altmann referrred to in the articl e, click here. For lots more on "non-lethal" weapons from reliable, verifiable s ources, click here.

'Myth' Behind American Troop Presence 2008-07-08, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=5331769 Myths die hard, and one of the most corrosive ones today is the mistaken idea th at Iraqis want us in Iraq. They do not. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has shocked official Washington by publicly saying he wants to negotiate a withdraw al date for U.S. forces and if not an exact date, a timetable for their withdraw al. Who does he think he is, Barack Obama? Yes, yes, Maliki may be a politician with his finger in the wind as he is trying to fend off his young firebrand Shii te rival, Muqtada al-Sadr, who wants the U.S. out yesterday, but clearly the Ira qi "wind" is blowing Sadr's way. Depending on how the question is asked, it appe ars that at least 70 percent of Iraqis want Americans to leave either immediatel y or expeditiously. Here at home, about 60 percent of Americans want U.S. forces to be withdrawn within the next year. Note: If the Iraqi people and leadership want the U.S. out, why are we still the re? For a good answer, click here.

Iraqis see red as U.S. opens world's biggest embassy 2008-04-24, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0424/p01s04-wome.html For the average American who will never see it, the new US Embassy in Baghdad ma

y be little more than the Big Dig of the Tigris. Like the infamous Boston highwa y project, the embassy is a mammoth development that is overbudget, overdue, and casts a whiff of corruption. For many Iraqis, though, the sand-and-ochre-colore d compound peering out across the city from a reedy stretch of riverfront within the fortified Green Zone is an unsettling symbol. "It is a symbol of occupation for the Iraqi people, that is all," says Anouar, a Baghdad graduate student who thought it was risk enough to give her first name. "We see the size of this emb assy and we think we will be part of the American plan for our country and our r egion for many, many years." The 104-acre, 21-building enclave the largest US Em bassy in the world, similar in size to Vatican City in Rome is often described a s a "castle" by Iraqis. "We all know this big yellow castle, but its main purpos e, it seems, is the security of the Americans who will live there," says Sarah, a university sophomore who also declined to give her last name for reasons of pe rsonal safety. The US government cleared the new Baghdad Embassy for occupancy l ast week, with the embassy's 700 employees and up to 250 military personnel expe cted to move in over the month of May, according to Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Emb assy personnel have been anxious for the complex, with more than 600 blast-resis tant apartments, to open and give them some refuge from the mortar fire that has increasingly targeted the Green Zone this year. Last month, a mortar slammed in to one of the unfortified trailers where personnel now sleep, killing an America n civilian contractor. Note: For many reports of the reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

VA stalling on care, judge told at S.F. trial 2008-04-21, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/MNQK109AA7.DTL More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a fed eral judge. The rights of hundreds of thousands of veterans are being violated b y the Department of Veterans Affairs, "an agency that is in denial," and by a go vernment health care system and appeals process for patients that is "broken dow n," Gordon Erspamer, lawyer for two advocacy groups, said in an opening statemen t at the trial of a nationwide lawsuit. He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 email - and the agency's backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an inc rease of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003. U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti ... ruled in January that the case could go to trial. In doing so, he reje cted the government's argument that civil courts have no authority over the VA's medical decisions or how it handles grievances. If the advocates can prove thei r claims, Conti said in his ruling, they would show that "thousands of veterans, if not more, are suffering grievous injuries as the result of their inability t o procure desperately needed and obviously deserved health care." He also ruled that veterans are legally entitled to five years of government-provided health c are after leaving the service, despite federal officials' argument that they are required to provide only as much care as the VA's budget allows in a given year . The trial follows publication of a Rand study last week that estimated 300,000 U.S. troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, or 18.5 percent of the total, suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress. Note: For many reports from reliable, verifiable sources detailing the devastati ng impacts of modern war, click here. For a revealing commentary by a top U.S. g eneral on how soldiers lives are ruined by needless wars, click here.

Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks 2008-04-11, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4635175 President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and app roved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interroga ted by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News. "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the America n people," Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes , I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved." As fi rst reported by ABC News, the most senior Bush administration officials repeated ly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda su spects would be interrogated by the CIA. The president had earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the CIA in a speech in 2006. But before [ABC's original] report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the mo st senior advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans -- down to the number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda prisoner -- had never been disclosed. Critics at home and abroad have harshly c riticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international la w and, they say, condoned torture. In the interview with ABC News, Bush defended the waterboarding technique used against KSM. "We had legal opinions that enabl ed us to do it," Bush said. "And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew." The president said, "I think it's ve ry important for the American people to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wa s. He was the person who ordered the suicide attack -- I mean, the 9/11 attacks. " Note: For a transcript of the interview with President Bush on the Washington Po st website, click here. For a powerful two-page summary of many unanswered quest ions about who really ordered the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Cheney, Rice Approved Use of Waterboarding, Other Tactics 2008-04-11, FOX News/Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,349948,00.html Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against [captives] after asking the Jus tice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned. The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings w here CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, ... were discussed and ultimately approved. A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with th e meetings ... spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue. Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interro gation tactics, including ones that critics call torture. "If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a correlation," the former intell igence official said. The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room i n the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions w ere Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State C olin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to investigate. "Wi th each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was m anaged and directed out of the White House," ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said. "This is what we suspected all along." The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply imm ersed in developing the CIA's interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when."

Military Contractors Are Hard to Fire 2008-02-02, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/02/02/national/w003206S... Contract personnel working for the Defense Department now outnumber U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; there are 196,000 private-sector workers in both countr ies compared to 182,000 troops. Contractors are responsible for a slew of duties , including repairing warfighting equipment, supplying food and water, building barracks, providing armed security and gathering intelligence. The dependence ha s come with serious consequences. A shortage of experienced federal employees to oversee this growing industrial army is blamed for much of the waste, fraud and abuse on contracts collectively worth billions of dollars. "We do not have the contracting personnel that we need to guarantee that the taxpayer dollar is bein g protected," said William Moser, the State Department's deputy assistant secret ary for logistics management. "We are very, very concerned about the integrity [ of] the contracting process. We don't feel like ... we can continue in the same situation." The office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has 52 open cases related to bribery, false billing, contract fraud, kickbacks a nd theft; 36 of those cases have been referred to the Justice Department for pro secution, according to the inspector general's office. The Army Criminal Investi gation Command is busy, too. The command has 90 criminal investigations under wa y related to alleged contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. Two dozen U .S. citizens have been charged or indicted so far 19 of those are Army military and civilian employees and more than $15 million in bribes has changed hands. Note: For many more revelations of war profiteering, click here.

O Brother, Who Art Thou? 2007-11-15, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/14/AR20071114021... "I am not my brother's keeper," Howard "Cookie" Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Commi ttee yesterday. As Cookie surely must know, that excuse hasn't worked since Gene sis. In this case, the players weren't Cain and Abel, but Cookie and his brother Buzzy. Cookie, under fire for allegedly quashing probes of the infamous Blackwa ter security contractor, began his testimony by angrily denying the "ugly rumors " that his brother, former CIA official Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard, is on Blackwater 's advisory board. But during a recess, Cookie called Buzzy and learned that -gulp -- the ugly rumors are true: His brother is on the board. When the lawmaker s returned, Cookie revised and extended his testimony. "I had not been aware of that," Cookie told the congressmen. "I hereby recuse myself from any matters hav ing to do with Blackwater." The lawmakers reacted with Old Testament fury. The s waggering Cookie -- he alternately addressed the lawmakers with his thumb in his waistband, slouching in his chair, rolling his eyes and making baffled glances -- had spent the morning aggressively denying the allegations lodged against him : that he had impeded investigations into contracting fraud, including weapons s muggling by Blackwater, and that he had abused his underlings. But then came Buz zy's bombshell -- and Cookie's credibility crumbled. Either he had lied to Congr ess, or his own brother had lied to him. It was only the latest bit of strangene ss for the powerful but eccentric Brothers Krongard. Buzzy [is] known for his ci gar chomping, martial arts and recreational workouts with SWAT teams. "Krongard once punched a great white shark in the jaw," his hometown Baltimore Sun reporte d when he took the No. 3 job at the CIA a decade ago. More recently, Buzzy joine d the advisory board of Blackwater, the firm known for its ready trigger fingers

in Iraq. Note: Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard was the Executive Director (the third-highest posit ion) at the CIA on 9/11, and had until 1998 been the head of the firm used to bu y many of the "put" options on United Airlines stock made just prior to 9/11 tha t were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.

War Protests: Why No Coverage? 2007-10-30, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1030/p09s02-coop.html Coordinated antiwar protests in at least 11 American cities this weekend raised anew an interesting question about the nature of news coverage: Are the media ig noring rallies against the Iraq war because of their low turnout or is the turno ut dampened by the lack of news coverage? I find it unsettling that I even have to consider the question. That most Americans oppose the war in Iraq is well est ablished. Poll after poll has found substantial discontent with a war that ranks as the preeminent issue in the presidential campaign. Given that context, it se ems remarkable to me that in some of the 11 cities in which protests were held B oston and New York, for example major news outlets treated this "National Day of Action" as though it did not exist. As far as I can tell, neither The New York Times nor The Boston Globe had so much as a news brief about the march in the da ys leading up to it. The day after, The Times, at least in its national edition, totally ignored the thousands who marched in New York and the tens of thousands who marched nationwide. The Globe relegated the news of 10,000 spirited citizen s (including me) marching through Boston's rain-dampened streets to a short piec e deep inside its metro section. A single sentence noted the event's national co ntext. As a former newspaper editor, I was most taken aback by the silence befor ehand. Surely any march of widespread interest warrants a brief news item to let people know that the event is taking place and that they can participate. It's called "advancing the news," and it has a time-honored place in American newsroo ms. Note: For hard-hitting critiques by famous journalists of major-media censorship of important news, click here.

The Democrats Who Enable Bush 2007-10-04, Salt Lake Tribune/Hearst Newspapers http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_7074632 President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party's leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy. Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American p eople want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a cr edible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war. Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang fro m the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illi nois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetica l presidencies. Can you believe it? When the question was put to Clinton, she re verted to her usual cautious equivocation, saying: "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting." Obama dodged, too: "I think it would be irr esponsible" to say what he would do as president. Edwards, on whom hopes were ri ding to show some independence, replied to the question: "I cannot make that com mitment." Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., ... wants to break up Iraq into three province s along religious and ethnic lines. In other words, Balkanize Iraq. To have majo

r Democratic backing to stay the course in Iraq added up to good news for Bush. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is another Democratic leader who has empowered Bush's war. Pelosi removed a provision from the most recent war-funding bill that woul d have required Bush to seek the permission of Congress before launching any att ack on Iran. Is it any wonder the Democrats are faring lower than the president in a Washington Post ABC approval poll? Bush came in at 33 percent and Congress at 29 percent. So what are the leading Democratic White House hopefuls offering? It seems nothing but more war. So where do the voters go who are sick of the Ir aqi debacle? Note: This article by veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas shows the power of the war machine controlling Washington DC today. For a highly revealing histo rical context on the "War Racket", click here.

White House To Push Mideast Arms Sales 2007-07-28, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/28/national/main3107184.shtml The Bush administration will ask Congress to expand multibillion-dollar aid and weapons sales packages to friendly nations in the Middle East. Secretary of Stat e Condoleezza Rice will announce proposed extensions and enlargements of foreign aid to Israel and Egypt, and a proposed arms sales package to Persian Gulf nati ons including Saudi Arabia. The Israeli and Egyptian proposals would lock in U.S . commitments for the next 10 years. The total for Israel would rise from $2.4 b illion to about $3 billion a year, and Egypt would continue to receive $1.3 bill ion a year. The Bush administration also wants Congress to give their stamp of a pproval to an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia. Overall, the aid and arms pack ages would total $20 billion ... which is double what officials first estimated when details first became public this past spring. Terrorism expert Sajjan Gohel says the Saudi arms sale might not be a good idea. "It shows that the Bush admi nistration isn't looking really at the long-term, but seems to be ... concerned about trying to secure oil reserves and deposits in Saudi Arabia," Gohel said. Note: For decades Israel, with a population now of just over 7 million, has been receiving U.S. tax dollars to the tune of over $300 per year for every man, wom an, and child? The new proposal will increase that to over $400. This is more th an 10 times what any other nation receives per capita. And what results has all of this aid brought? Click here for a 2002 Christian Science Monitor article whi ch starts off "Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion . If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person."

Former Marine Claims Illness From Mystery Vaccine 2007-05-07, WLWT-TV (Cincinnati, Ohio's NBC affiliate) http://www.wlwt.com/news/13271378/detail.html An alarming number of U.S. troops are having severe reactions to some of the vac cines they receive in preparation for going overseas. "This is the worst cover-u p in the history of the military," said an unidentified military health officer who fears for his job. A shot from a syringe is leaving some U.S. servicemen and women on the brink of death. Lance Corporal David Fey, 20, has dialysis three d ays a week. His kidneys are failing, his military career is over, and he feels l ike his country abandoned him. Fey said he loved every minute of boot camp and c ombat training at 29 Palms in California. But on Nov. 28, 2005, his life would c hange forever. Fey was one of a group of Marines who lined up for an undisclosed shot. "They asked us our name. We stood on these yellow footprints, and they ga ve us this shot, and we got the rest of the day off," he recalled. "After that s

hot, I started swelling up. I gained 30 pounds of water. My eyes swelled up wher e I couldn't see. I started snoring. I developed a rash on my hand." Three weeks later, Fey was back in Clermont County on his death bed at Clinton Memorial Hos pital. His kidneys were failing, and his body was so swollen that it left stretc h marks. Fey is one of a growing number of U.S. servicemen and women who are get ting sick after receiving vaccines. And the ... Department of Defense medical of ficer who spoke with [WLWT] said that the number is up in the thousands. The sym ptoms range from joint aches and pains and arthritic symptoms to death. The offi cer said those who have claimed to have had adverse reactions to shots are treat ed like it is all in their heads. Asked whether servicemen and women are receivi ng experimental vaccines, the officer said, "I would hope to God not. But from w hat I've seen, I would have to say yes."

Durbin kept silent on prewar knowledge 2007-04-27, Washington Times http://washingtontimes.com/national/20070427-124842-1706r.htm The Senate's No. 2 Democrat says he knew that the American public was being misl ed into the Iraq war but remained silent because he was sworn to secrecy as a me mber of the intelligence committee. "The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I cou ldn't believe it," Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Wedn esday when talking on the Senate floor about the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002. "I was angry about it. [But] frankly, I couldn't do much about it because, in t he intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy. We can't walk outside the do or and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradi ction to classified information that is being given to this Congress." Mr. Durbi n yesterday said there was no "ethical" way to notify the public of specific mis leading information being touted by the Bush administration because it would hav e required revealing top-secret information being provided to the intelligence c ommittee. Mr. Durbin, whose floor comments were part of the debate before yester day's passage of an emergency war-funding bill, said he and half the Democrats o n the intelligence committee voted against the war over concerns of the White Ho use's "very flimsy case, but it was given to the American people as a proven fac t." Congress authorized the 2003 use of armed force against Iraq by votes of 296 -133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate. Five of nine Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted for the measure as did all eight Republic ans. Note: Why wasn't this key information reported in other major media? And if it i s clear that the public is being blatantly lied to by politicians with hidden ag endas, doesn't that justify the breaking of secrecy oaths?

Navy Won't Detail Sonar Use for Whale Endangerment Case 2007-03-21, Fox News/Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,260127,00.html The Navy is refusing to detail its sonar use for a federal court in a case invol ving potential harm to whales, saying the information could jeopardize national security. The Natural Resources Defense Council is suing the Navy to ensure sail ors use sonar in a way that doesn't harm whales and other marine mammals. Critic s say active sonar, which sailors use by pumping sound through water and listeni ng for objects the sound bounces off of, can strand and even kill marine mammals . A U.S. Congressional Research Service report last year found Navy sonar exerci ses had been responsible for at least six mass deaths and unusual behavior among whales. Many of the beached or dead animals had damaged hearing organs. In cons

idering the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper issued an order f or the Navy to submit data for the case on when and where sailors have used sona r since 2003. The Navy said in its new release that it refused to comply citing state secrets privilege. Joel Reynolds, a Natural Resources Defense Council atto rney, said he would challenge the Navy's position. "This latest invocation of st ate secret privilege is one more attempt to deprive the public of the informatio n it needs to determine whether the Navy is illegally and needlessly endangering the marine environment," Reynolds said. Note: What this and almost all other media articles on this subject fail to ment ion is that traditional radar used used since before WWII does not harm whales a nd dolphins. It is only sophisticated new systems that are causing mass deaths o f these intelligent mammals around the world.

Journalists: U.S. military deleted photos of attack 2007-03-05, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/03/04/afghan.photos.ap Afghan journalists covering the aftermath of a suicide bomb attack ... said U.S. troops deleted their photos and video and warned them not to publish or air any images of U.S. troops or a car where three Afghans were shot to death. A freela nce photographer working for The Associated Press and a cameraman working for AP Television News said a U.S. soldier deleted their photos and video showing a fo ur-wheel drive vehicle in which three people were shot to death. The photographe r, Rahmat Gul, said witnesses at the scene told him the three had been shot to d eath by U.S. forces fleeing the attack. "When I went near the four-wheel drive, I saw the Americans taking pictures of the same car, so I started taking picture s," Gul said. "Two soldiers with a translator came and said, 'Why are you taking pictures?."' It wasn't clear why the accredited journalists would need permissi on to take photos of a civilian car on a public highway. The American ... warned him that he did not want to see any AP photos published anywhere. The American also raised his fist in anger as if he were going to hit him, but he did not str ike, Gul said. Taqiullah Taqi, a reporter for Afghanistan's largest television s tation, Tolo TV, said Americans were using abusive language. "They said, 'Delete them, or we will delete you,"' Taqi said. A freelance cameraman for AP Televisi on News said ... a U.S. officer told him that he could not go any closer to the scene but that he could shoot footage. The cameraman asked not to be named for h is own safety. As he was filming, he said, a U.S. soldier and translator "ordere d us not to move." The cameraman said they were very angry and deleted any foota ge that included the Americans. Note: Why is this kind of media censorship not being more widely reported? For m ore, click here.

Afghan opium 'hits record output' 2007-03-01, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6410263.stm Opium production in Afghanistan reached record levels last year, the United Stat es has said. The US State Department's annual report on narcotics also said the flourishing drugs trade was undermining the fight against the Taleban. Poppy pro duction rose 25% in 2006, a figure US Assistant Secretary of State Ann Patterson described as alarming. Four years after the US and its British allies began com bating poppy production, Afghanistan still accounts for 90% of the world's opium trade.

Note: Isn't it interesting that though the Taliban had eradicated over 90% of th e opium crop in 2001, it has not only come back to previous level, but far surpa ssed them after Afghanistan was "liberated." Could it be that the military force s are turning a blind eye or even involved? For information from a DEA insider o n this, click here.

Italy indicts 31 in alleged CIA kidnapping 2007-02-16, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17184663 A judge Friday indicted 26 Americans and five Italians in the abduction of an Eg yptian terror suspect on a Milan street in what would be the first criminal tria l stemming from the CIA s extraordinary rendition program. Prosecutors allege that five Italian intelligence officials worked with the Americans to seize Muslim c leric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr on Feb. 17, 2003. Nasr was allegedly transferre d by vehicle to the Aviano Air Force base near Venice, then by air to the Ramste in Air Base in Germany, and on to Egypt, where his lawyer says he was tortured. Nasr was freed earlier this week by an Egyptian court that found his four years of detention in Egypt unfounded. All but one of the Americans have been identified as CIA agents, including the former Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady and former Rome station chief Jeffrey Castelli. Among the Italians indicted by Judge Caterina Interlandi was the former chief of military intelligence, Nicolo Polla ri, and his former deputy, Marco Mancini. The CIA has refused to comment on the case, which has put an uncomfortable spotlight on its operations. Prosecutors ar e pressing the Italian government to seek the extradition of the Americans. In I taly, defendants can be tried in absentia. Prosecutors elsewhere in Europe are m oving ahead with cases aimed at the CIA program. A Munich prosecutor recently is sued arrest warrants for 13 people in another alleged CIA-orchestrated kidnappin g, that of a German citizen who says he was seized in December 2003 at the Serbi an-Macedonia border and flown to Afghanistan. Note: At long last, the CIA is beginning to be held accountable for flagrantly b reaking laws resulting in torture.

Pentagon boosts 'media war' unit 2006-10-31, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6100906.stm The US defence department has set up a new unit to better promote its message ac ross 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet. The Pentago n said the move would boost its ability to counter "inaccurate" news stories and exploit new media. The newly-established unit would use "new media" channels to push its message and "set the record straight", Pentagon press secretary Eric R uff said. A Pentagon memo seen by the Associated Press news agency said the new unit would "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and aim to "correct the record". The unit would reportedly monitor media such as weblogs and would also employ "surrogates", or top politicians or lobbyists who could be interviewed o n TV and radio shows.

Don't Turn Us Into Poodles 2006-07-04, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/opinion/04kristof.html Journalists regularly hold back information for national security reasons; I rec

ently withheld information at the request of the intelligence community. The one thing worse than a press that is "out of control" is one that is under control. Anybody who has lived in a Communist country knows that. Just consider what wou ld happen if the news media as a whole were as docile to the administration as F ox News or The Wall Street Journal editorial page. When I was covering the war i n Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as i t purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage...misled conse rvatives about Iraq from the beginning. The real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it. Historically, we in the press have done more damage to our nation by withholding secret information than by publishing it. One example was this newspaper's withholding details of the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. President Kennedy himself suggested that the U.S. would have been better served if The Times had published the full stor y and derailed the invasion. Then there were the C.I.A. abuses that journalists kept mum about until they spilled over and prompted the Church Committee investi gation in the 1970's. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the press...was too credulo us about claims that Iraq possessed large amounts of W.M.D. In each of these cas es...we failed in our watchdog role, and we failed our country. So be very wary of Mr. Bush's effort to tame the press. Watchdogs can be mean, dumb and obnoxiou s, but it would be even more dangerous to trade them in for lap dogs.

The Dark Side 2006-06-20, PBS Frontline http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/#press Amid daily revelations about prewar intelligence and a growing scandal surroundi ng the indictment of the vice president's chief of staff and presidential advise r, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and Richard Bruc e Cheney, the most powerful vice president in the nation's history. "A lot of wh at needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, u sing sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies," Chene y told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government would have to operate on the "dark side." In The Dark Side, airing June 20, 2006, at 9 P.M. on PBS...FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the ch ief architect of the war on terror and his battle with Director of Central Intel ligence George Tenet for control of the "dark side." Drawing on more than 40 int erviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war. After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies, and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal mee tings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and m arginalize the agency and Tenet.

Kicked out of Gitmo 2006-06-18, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-williams18jun18,0,339329... Covering Guantanamo means wrangling with...logistics so nonsensical that they tu rn two hours of reporting into an 18-hour day...with hostile escorts who seem to think you're in league with Al Qaeda...a Pentagon power play that muzzles alrea dy reluctant sources and an unceremonious expulsion to Miami on a military plane , safety-belted onto whatever seat is available. In this case, that seat was the

toilet. I ended up on that plane, on that seat, because...the only three newspa per reporters who managed to surmount Pentagon obstacles to covering the first d eaths at Guantanamo were ordered off the base. When unexpected news breaks, like the suicides, the Pentagon's knee-jerk reflex to thwart coverage reminds me of how Communist officials used to organize Cold War-era propaganda trips for Mosco w correspondents but then pull the plug when embarrassing realities intruded. Wh at little we learn often comes to light by accident. During my first visit in Ja nuary 2005...I asked...if the facility had ever been at or near capacity. "Only during the mass-hanging incident," the Navy doctor replied, provoking audible ga sps and horrified expressions among the public affairs minders...none of whom we re particularly pleased with the disclosure that 23 prisoners had attempted simu ltaneously to hang themselves with torn bed sheets in late 2003. Under ground ru les we must agree to if we want access to the base, journalists may not have any contact with detainees, who are removed from sight at all but one camp during m edia tours.

Iraq's Pentagon Papers (by Daniel Ellsberg) 2006-06-12, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-ellsberg11jun11,0,977634... A January poll [found] that 64% of Iraqis believe that crime and violent attacks will decrease if the U.S. leaves Iraq within six months. If that's true, then w hat are we doing there? It was questions very much like [this]...that led, event ually, to the publication of the first of the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, 35 years ago this week. Nearly two years earlier...I first started copying the 7 ,000 pages of top-secret documents from my office safe at Rand...an act that I f ully expected would send me to prison for life. It became increasingly clear tha t the whole chain of command, civilian and military, was participating in a cove rup. It's a system that lies reflexively, at every level from sergeant to comman der in chief, about murder. And I had...7,000 pages of documentary evidence to p rove it. The papers documented in stunning detail a pattern of lies and deceptio ns by four presidents and their administrations over 23 years to conceal their w ar plans. It became clear to me that the justifications that had been given for our involvement were false. I thought to myself: I don't want to be part of this lying machine anymore. Today, there must be, at the very least, hundreds of civ ilian and military officials...who have in their safes and computers comparable documentation of intense internal debates -- the Pentagon Papers of Iraq, Iran o r the ongoing war on U.S. liberties. Some of those officials, I hope, will choos e to accept the personal risks of revealing the truth -- earlier than I did -- b efore more lives are lost or a new war is launched. Note: If you have time to read only one full article on war deception, I can't r ecommend this one highly enough. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine, Pentagon offi cial, and State Department officer in Vietnam, more than any single person expos ed the huge deception involved in the Vietnam War. The story of his experience i s astonishingly similar to what is happening today.

New U.S. Embassy in Iraq cloaked in mystery 2006-04-14, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12319798 The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River here will be the large st of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, [and] self-contained power and water. The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the ministate in Rome. We can t t alk about it. Security reasons, Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at the current embas

sy, said. The embassy complex 21 buildings on 104 acres is taking shape on river side parkland in the fortified Green Zone, just east of al-Samoud, a former palace of Saddam Hussein s. The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy, almos t half listed as security, are far more numerous than at any other U.S. mission worldwide. They rarely venture out into the Red Zone, that is, violence-torn Iraq. Large numbers of non-diplomats work at the mission hundreds of military personn el and dozens of FBI agents, for example. U.S. embassies elsewhere ... typically cover 10 acres. Original cost estimates ranged over $1 billion, but Congress ap propriated only $592 million in the emergency Iraq budget adopted last year. Mos t has gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, with the re st awarded to six contractors working on the project s classified portion the actual embassy offices. Higgins declined to identify those builders, citing security r easons, but said five were American companies. The designs aren t publicly availab le. Security, overseen by U.S. Marines, will be extraordinary: setbacks and peri meter no-go areas that will be especially deep, structures reinforced to 2.5-tim es the standard, and five high-security entrances, plus an emergency entrance-ex it. Note: For more perplexing facts on this secretive fortress in a Times of London article, click here.

CIA Gave Iran Bomb Plans, Book Says 2006-01-04, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-intel4jan04,0,6972451.story In a clumsy effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, the CIA in 2004 intention ally handed Tehran some top-secret bomb designs laced with a hidden flaw that U. S. officials hoped would doom any weapon made from them. But the Iranians were t ipped to the scheme by the Russian defector hired by the CIA to deliver the plan s and may have gleaned scientific information useful for designing a bomb, write s New York Times reporter James Risen in "State of War." Two nuclear weapons exp erts...added that a deliberate flaw in the plans could have been easily found by the Iranians. The New York Times delayed for a year publication of its article on the NSA's domestic spying, in part because of personal requests from the pres ident. Critics have questioned whether the paper could have published the inform ation before last year's presidential election if it had decided against a delay . Newspaper officials have refused to comment on reasons for the delay or on the exact timing. Top New York Times officials also refused to publish a news artic le about the reported CIA plot to give intentionally flawed nuclear plans to Ira n, according to a person briefed on the newspaper's conversations by one of the participants. That person said the New York Times withheld publication at the re quest of the White House and former CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Pentagon rolls out stealth PR 2005-12-14, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-12-14-pentagon-pr_x.htm A $300 million Pentagon psychological warfare operation includes plans for placi ng pro-American messages in foreign media outlets without disclosing the U.S. go vernment as the source, one of the military officials in charge of the program s ays. Run by psychological warfare experts at the U.S. Special Operations Command , the media campaign is being designed to counter terrorist ideology and sway fo reign audiences to support American policies. The program will operate throughou t the world, including in allied nations and in countries where the United State s is not involved in armed conflict. The three companies handling the campaign i nclude the Lincoln Group, the company being investigated by the Pentagon for pay

ing Iraqi newspapers to run pro-U.S. stories. (Related story: Contracts for proU.S. propaganda) It's legal for the government to plant propaganda in other coun tries but not in the USA.

Ex-CIA boss: Cheney is 'vice president for torture' 2005-11-18, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/11/18/torture.vp Former CIA chief Stansfield Turner lashed out at Dick Cheney on Thursday, callin g him a "vice president for torture" that is out of touch with the American peop le. Turner's condemnation...comes amid an effort by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, to pass legislation forbidding any U.S. authority from torturing a prisoner. Mc Cain was tortured as a Vietnam prisoner of war. Cheney has lobbied against the l egislation, prompting Turner to say he's "embarrassed that the United State[s] h as a vice president for torture. I think it is just reprehensible." Turner...sco ffed at assertions that challenging the administration's strategy aided the terr orists' propaganda efforts. "It's the vice president who is out there advocating torture. He's the one who has made himself the vice president in favor of tortu re," said Turner, who from 1972 to 1974 was president of the Naval War College, a think tank for strategic and national security policy. "We military people don 't want future military people who are taken prisoner by other countries to be s ubjected to torture in the name of doing just what the United States does," he s aid.

Vietnam Study, Casting Doubts, Remains Secret 2005-10-31, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/politics/31war.html?ex=1288414800&en=e2f5e3... The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency h istorian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietn am War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes. The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and codebreaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam ha d attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to a uthorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack. The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. H anyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered in tercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that mid level agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence. Mr. Hanyok's finding s were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and sta rting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made p ublic. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, accord ing to an intelligence official. The intelligence official said the evidence for deliberate falsification is "about as certain as it can be." Note: For lots more on war fabrication see the excellent information in our War Information Center and the released FOIA documents from the early 1960s showing that top Pentagon officials planned to kill innocent Americans in order to provo ke a war against Cuba at http://www.WantToKnow.info/010501operationnorthwoods

Dick Cheney's Song of America 2005-10-26, Harpers Magazine

http://www.harpers.org/DickCheneysSongOfAmerica.html Drafting a plan for global dominance. Few writers are more ambitious than the wr iters of government policy papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney's masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and i s in fact the product of several ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the do cuments that bear his name, and he has maintained a close association with the i deologues behind them. Let us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this serie s of documents the Plan. The Plan was published in unclassified form most recent ly under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990s, as Cheney ended his term a s secretary of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993. The Plan is fo r the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to c hallenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies a like. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful , but that it must be absolutely powerful. The Plan is disturbing in many ways, and ultimately unworkable. Yet it is being sold now as an answer to the 'new rea lities' of the post-September 11 world, even as it was sold previously as the an swer to the new realities of the post-Cold War world. For Cheney, the Plan has a lways been the right answer, no matter how different the questions.

Energy-beam weapons still missing from action 2005-08-12, MSNBC/Associated Press http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8516353 For years, the U.S. military has explored a new kind of firepower that is instan taneous, precise and virtually inexhaustible: beams of electromagnetic energy. " Directed-energy" pulses can be throttled up or down depending on the situation, much like the phasers on "Star Trek" could be set to kill or merely stun. Such w eapons are now nearing fruition. The hallmark of all directed-energy weapons is that the target -- whether a human or a mechanical object -- has no chance to av oid the shot because it moves at the speed of light. At some frequencies, it can penetrate walls. "When you're dealing with people whose full intent is to die, you can't give people a choice of whether to comply," said George Gibbs, a syste ms engineer for the Marine Expeditionary Rifle Squad Program who oversees direct ed-energy projects. "What I'm looking for is a way to shoot everybody, and they' re all OK." Among the simplest forms are inexpensive, handheld lasers that fill people's field of vision, inducing a temporary blindness to ensure they stop at a checkpoint, for example. Some of these already are used in Iraq. A separate br anch of directed-energy research involves bigger, badder beams: lasers that coul d obliterate targets tens of miles away from ships or planes. Such a strike woul d be so surgical that, as some designers put it at a recent conference here, the military could plausibly deny responsibility. The directed-energy component in the project is the Active Denial System, developed by Air Force researchers and built by Raytheon Co. It produces a millimeter-wavelength burst of energy that p enetrates 1/64 of an inch into a person's skin, agitating water molecules to pro duce heat. The sensation is certain to get people to halt whatever they are doin g.

More British memos on prewar concerns 2005-06-14, MSNBC News http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8207731 It started during British Prime Minister Tony Blair's re-election campaign last

month, when details leaked about a top-secret memo, written in July 2002 -- eigh t months before the Iraq war. In the memo, British officials just back from Wash ington reported that prewar "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" to invade Iraq. Just last week, both President George W. Bush and Blair vigorously denied that war was inevitable. No, the facts were not being fixed, in any shape or form at all, said Blair at a White House news conference with the p resident on June 7. But now, war critics have come up with seven more memos, ver ified by NBC News. Current and former diplomats tell NBC News they understood fr om the beginning the Bush policy to be that Saddam had to be removed -- one way or the other. The only question was when and how.

Last survivor of 'Christmas truce' tells of his sorrow 2004-12-19, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/dec/19/christmas.lornamartin The words drifted across the frozen battlefield: 'Stille Nacht. Heilige Nacht'. To the ears of the British troops peering over their trench, the lyrics may have been unfamiliar but the haunting tune was unmistakable. After the last note a l one German infantryman appeared holding a small tree glowing with light. 'Merry Christmas. We not shoot, you not shoot.' It was just after dawn on a bitingly co ld Christmas Day in 1914, ... and one of the most extraordinary incidents of the Great War was about to unfold. Weary men climbed hesitantly at first out of tre nches and stumbled into no man's land. They shook hands, sang carols, lit each o ther's cigarettes, swapped tunic buttons and addresses and, most famously, playe d football. The unauthorised Christmas truce spread across much of the 500-mile Western Front where more than a million men were encamped. There is only one man in the world still alive who spent 25 December 1914 serving in a conflict that left 31 million people dead, wounded or missing. Alfred Anderson was 18 at the t ime. 'I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,' he said. 'Only the gu ards were on duty. We all went outside the farm buildings and just stood listeni ng. But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as y ou could see. We shouted "Merry Christmas", even though nobody felt merry.' In s ome parts of the front, the ceasefire lasted several weeks. 'I'll give Christmas Day 1914 a brief thought, as I do every year. And I'll think about all my frien ds who never made it home. But it's too sad to think too much about it. Far too sad,' he said, his head bowed and his eyes filled with tears. Note: For more on this amazing moment in history, including a powerfully moving song, click here.

Silver Bullet: Depleted Uranium 2000-02-07, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - Canada's PBS) http://web.archive.org/web/20000903222100/http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgmin... Jerry Wheat and the other Gulf vets were never told of the risks of being expose d to a DU campaign. Awarded a Purple Heart after being wounded in combat, Wheat came home with pieces of shrapnel embedded in his body and with mysterious body pains. A year after war's end, Wheat got startling evidence from his father -- a technician at the famous Los Alamos Nuclear Research Centre, who just out of cu riosity tested the shrapnel that came from his son's body and gear. The shrapnel was radioactive. Today, eight years after the Gulf War, that shrapnel still lig hts up a Geiger counter. Jerry's great fear is that whatever he brought back wit h him from the Gulf is now afflicting his family. His older son Joe was hospital ized with breathing problems the day after Wheat dragged his contaminated gear i nto the house. Derrick, his youngest son, who was born after the war, suffers st range blisters on his hands. His wife suffered a miscarriage. Jerry himself rece

ntly had a tumour removed from his shoulder. He now worries continually about ca ncer. Jerry says the military has never shown any interest in his shrapnel. The military said Jerry's health problems are due to post traumatic stress. If the l essons from past eras are anything to go by, there is often great ignorance abou t the path being charted when new weapons come along. For example when atomic te sting was all the rage in the '50s, or when Agent Orange was used in Vietnam. Wh en revolutionary new technology is introduced on the battlefield, no one at the time has any real idea of the consequences. Note: BBC has a webpage listing 10 of their articles both pro and con regarding depleted uranium at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/europe/2001/depleted_ura nium/default.stm

Afghans Detail Detention in Black Jail at U.S. Base 2009-11-29, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/world/asia/29bagram.html An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates ... without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells , each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. Former detaine es said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the [ CIA] in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Speci al Operations forces. Military officials said as recently as this summer that th e Afghanistan jail and another like it at the Balad Air Base in Iraq were being used to interrogate high-value detainees. And officials said recently that there were no plans to close the jails. All three former detainees interviewed by The New York Times complained of being held for months after the intensive interrog ations were over without being told why. Human rights researchers say they worry that the jail remains in the shadows and largely inaccessible both to the Red C ross and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. Note: For many revealing reports from major media sources on the worsening threa ts to civil liberties, click here.

Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A. 2009-10-28, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to cur rent and former American officials. The C.I.A. s practices ... suggest that the Un ited States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afgh an drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban. The relationship betwe en Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging. He helps the C.I.A. operate a para military group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspec ted insurgents. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of m ounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government. Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city. He s our landlord, a senior Americ an official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. A former C.I.A. office r with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on Ahmed Wali Ka rzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he owned.

Note: To read an analysis of these revelations, which argues that there is a muc h bigger story of "heavy dependence by U.S. and NATO counterinsurgency forces on Afghan warlords for security", click here.

US Air Force prepares drones to end era of fighter pilots 2009-08-23, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/22/us-air-force-drones-pilots-afghan... As part of an expanding programme of battlefield automation, the US Air Force ha s said it is now training more drone operators than fighter and bomber pilots an d signalled the end of the era of the fighter pilot is in sight. Just three year s ago, the service was able to fly just 12 drones at a time; now it can fly more than 50. At a trade conference outside Washington last week, military contracto rs presented a future vision in which pilotless drones serve as fighters, bomber s and transports, even automatic mini-drones programmed to attack in swarms. Con tractors made presentations for "nano-size" drones the size of moths that can fl it into buildings to gather intelligence; drone helicopters; large aircraft that could be used as strategic bombers and new mid-sized drones could act as jet fi ghters. This Terminator-like vision in which future generations of fighter aces become cubicle-bound drone operators thousands of miles from conflict is already here: the deployment that began during the Bush administration has accelerated during the first seven months of Obama's term. Some 5,000 robotic vehicles and d rones are now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2015, the Pentagon's $230bn a rms procurement programme Future Combat Systems expects to robotise around 15% o f America's armed forces. As US domestic approval for the "Af-Pak" conflict slip s (a new Washington Post poll found less than a quarter of the US public support sending more troops to Afghanistan), the reliance of drones is likely to grow, analysts say. The air force study suggests areas of warfare too critical for aut omation, including dogfighting and nuclear-bombing, could eventually be handled by drones. Note: For revealing reports on Pentagon war planning from major media sources, c lick here.

Report Reveals CIA Conducted Mock Executions 2009-08-21, Newsweek magazine http://www.newsweek.com/id/213188 A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions a s part of the agency's post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned. The report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill dur ing the course of CIA interrogation. Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also tu rned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into g iving [information] up," said one [source]. A federal law banning the use of tor ture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death." The report also says ... that a mock execution was staged in a room next to a detainee, dur ing which a gunshot was fired in an effort to make the suspect believe that anot her prisoner had been killed. The inspector general's report alludes to more tha n one mock execution. Before leaving office, Bush administration officials confi rmed that Nashiri was one of three CIA detainees subjected to waterboarding. The y also acknowledged that Nashiri was one of two Al Qaeda detainees whose detenti ons and interrogations were documented at length in CIA videotapes. But senior o fficials of the agency's undercover operations branch, the National Clandestine

Service, ordered that the tapes be destroyed, an action that has been under inve stigation for more than a year by a federal prosecutor. The new revelations are contained in a lengthy report on the CIA interrogation program completed by the agency's inspector general in May 2004. Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the illegal methods used by the CIA and US military in its wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

C.I.A. Sought Blackwater s Help to Kill Jihadists 2009-08-20, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/us/20intel.html The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the priva te security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former governme nt officials. Executives from Blackwater ... helped the spy agency with planning , training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the pro gram, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects. It is u nclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly cont roversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officia ls said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations. Officials said the C.I.A. d id not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had i ndividual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune. Over the years, Blackwater has hired several former top C.I.A. officials, including Cofer Black, who ran the C.I.A. counterterrorism center im mediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. C.I.A. operatives also regularly use the c ompany s training complex in North Carolina. The complex includes a shooting range used for sniper training. Note: For many revealing reports from major media sources on the frequent use of assassinations to advance state objectives, click here.

2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11's Wake 2009-08-12, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/us/12psychs.html Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the l ookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Centr al Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most imp ortant interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism. They h ad never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military tr aining they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. disserta tions were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skill s and no expertise on Al Qaeda. But they had psychology credentials. Seven month s after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fal lout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. H older Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigatio n, in which the psychologists' role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justic e Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who p ronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency's inspector general. The psychologists' ... fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. With a po

ssible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a wel l-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article. Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the torture employed by the CIA and US military in "the war on terror," click here.

Assassinations anyone? CIA claims of cancelled campaign are hogwash 2009-07-19, Toronto Sun http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/eric_margolis/2009/07/19/1018410... CIA director Leon Panetta just told Congress he cancelled a secret operation to assassinate al-Qaida leaders. The CIA campaign, authorized in 2001, had not yet become operational, claimed Panetta. His claim is humbug. The U.S. has been tryi ng to kill al-Qaida personnel (real and imagined) since the Clinton administrati on. These efforts continue under President Barack Obama. Claims by Congress it w as never informed are hogwash. The CIA and Pentagon have been in the assassinati on business since the early 1950s, using American hit teams or third parties. As sassination was outlawed in the U.S. in 1976, but that did not stop attempts by its last three administrations to emulate Israel's Mossad in the "targeted killi ng" of enemies. The George W. Bush administration, and now the Obama White House , sidestepped American law by saying the U.S. was at war, and thus legally killi ng "enemy combatants." But Congress never declared war. Washington is buzzing ab out a secret death squad run by Dick Cheney when he was vice-president and his p rotege, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This gun g-ho general led the Pentagon's super secret Special Operations Command, which h as become a major rival to the CIA in the business of "wet affairs" (as the KGB used to call assassinations) and covert raids. America is hardly alone in trying to rub out enemies or those who thwart its designs. Britain's MI-6 and France's SDECE were notorious for sending out assassins. U.S. assassins are still at wor k. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. drones are killing tribesmen almost daily. Over 90% are civilians. Americans have a curious notion that killing people from the air is not murder or even a crime, but somehow clean. Note: For more revealing information on this, click here. For more on assassinat ion as a tool of state, click here.

White House Weighs Order on Detention 2009-06-27, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/26/AR20090626033... Obama administration officials ... are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects ind efinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of Whit e House deliberations. Such an order would embrace claims by former president Ge orge W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. In a May speech, President Obama broached the need for a system of long-term detention and suggested that it would include congressional and judicial oversight. "We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decid e alone," he said. A senior Republican [Congressional] staff member said that se nators have yet to see "a comprehensive, detailed policy" on long-term detention from the administration. "They can do it without congressional backing, but I t hink there would be very strong concerns," the staff member said, adding that "C ongress could cut off funding" for any detention system established in the Unite d States. Concerns are growing among Obama's advisers that Congress may try to a

ssert too much control over the process. "Legislation could kill Obama's plans," said one government official involved. The official said an executive order cou ld be the best option for the president at this juncture. Under one White House draft that was being discussed this month, according to administration officials , detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. soil, but their o ngoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review. Note: Again the Obama administration is following in the footsteps of the Bush a dministration, despite prior promises not to do so. For more on threats to civil liberties from reliable sources, click here.

Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture 2009-05-22, NBC Chicago http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Mancow-Takes-on-Waterboarding-and-Loses.... Shock jocks shock. And so it went Friday morning when WLS radio host Erich "Manc ow" Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboar ding live on his show. Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on -- ac tually it was head down, while restrained and reclining. "I want to find out if it's torture," Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped hi s on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute t orture. At about 8:40 a.m., he entered a small storage room next to his studio. "The average person can take this for 14 seconds," Marine Sergeant Clay South an swered, adding, "He's going to wiggle, he's going to scream, he's going to wish he never did this." With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand, Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied u p. Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the ta ble, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool t o signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds. "It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke," Mancow said, l ikening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeli ng to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneou s...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture." Note: Click on the link above to watch a video of Mancow being waterboarded.

Report Gives New Detail on Approval of Brutal Techniques 2009-04-22, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22report.html?partner=rss&emc=r... A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most det ailed evidence yet that the military s use of harsh interrogation methods on terro rism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration. The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conduct ed by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejecte d claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities. The 232-page report, the product of an 18-mo nth inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times. The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghani stan and at the naval base in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq stripping d etainees, placing them in stress positions or depriving them of sleep originated i n a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE. A ccording to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a coll

eague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantnamo in October 20 02, as pressure was rising to get tougher with detainee interrogations. Officers the re sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques. Note: For many revealing reports on the horrific realities of the US wars on Ira q and Afghanistan, click here.

Reporter's notebook: TED 2009 2009-02-07, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/07/BULG15OVGP.DTL Some ... favorite gee-whiz moments from this year's TED conference: -- UC Berkel ey biologist Robert Full blew everyone's mind by outlining his efforts to create the perfect robotic "distributed foot." He studies the feet and legs of geckos and cockroaches and transfers their design to robots, enabling them to scale wal ls. One such machine, the Spinybot, can climb glass walls. -- P.W. Singer, an ac ademic who studies war, terrified the crowd with a detailed look at modern, robo tic warfare. Something I didn't know: You can sit in a room in New Mexico and pi lot armed drone airplanes in Iraq and kill people. Then you go home and have din ner with your kids. Somewhere, Aldous Huxley weeps. -- Stanford's Catherine Mohr displayed the robotic surgical arm she's working on that could change medicine. Among the amazing possibilities are surgeons in the United States performing ad vanced surgeries in remote parts of the world. These are just a handful of the a mazing innovations and disclosures made at TED this year. In the coming weeks an d months, videos of all of these talks will be made available to the public at w ww.ted.com. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is a 25-yea r-old annual conference attended by many of the world's leading scientists, acad emics and business leaders. The agenda consists of a series of talks, during whi ch big thinkers discuss big ideas. Note: For powerful information on bizarre "non-lethal" weapons developed by the military, click here. For an enlightening NPR interview on artificial war, click here. And for one of the most powerful TED presentations ever, see neuroanatomi st Jill Bolte Taylor's description of her experience having a stroke, available here.

Science closing in on cloak of invisibility 2009-01-15, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR20090115022... They can't match Harry Potter yet, but scientists are moving closer to creating a real cloak of invisibility. Researchers at Duke University, who developed a ma terial that can "cloak" an item from detection by microwaves, report that they h ave expanded the number of wavelengths they can block. Last August the team repo rted they had developed so-called metamaterials that could deflect microwaves ar ound a three-dimensional object, essentially making it invisible to the waves. T he system works like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and c loaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky. The researchers report in ... t he journal Science that they have developed a series of mathematical commands to guide the development of more types of metamaterials to cloak objects from an i ncreasing range of electromagnetic waves. "The new device can cloak a much wider spectrum of waves -- nearly limitless -- and will scale far more easily to infr ared and visible light," senior researcher David R. Smith said. The new cloak is made up of more than 10,000 individual pieces of fiberglass arranged in paralle l rows. The mathematical formulas are used to determine the shape and placement of each piece to deflect the electromagnetic waves. The research was supported b

y Raytheon Missile Systems, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Innovat eHan Technology, the National Science Foundation of China, the National Basic Re search Program of China and National Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, Chi na. Note: Isn't it interesting that the US Air Force and a major US defense corporat ion are joining in a research venture with Chinese corporations and government a gencies? Also, remember that secret military projects are usually at least 10 ye ars in advance of anything announced to the public.

How Technology May Soon "Read" Your Mind 2009-01-04, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/31/60minutes/main4694713.shtml The content of our thoughts is our own - private, secret, and unknowable by anyo ne else. [But] neuroscience research into how we think and what we're thinking i s advancing at a stunning rate, making it possible for the first time in human h istory to peer directly into the brain to read out the physical make-up of our t houghts, some would say to read our minds. The technology that is transforming w hat once was science fiction into just plain science is a specialized use of MRI scanning called "functional MRI," fMRI for short. "I always tell my students th at there is no science fiction anymore," [said] Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta. What [researchers] ... have d one is combine fMRI's ability to look at the brain in action with computer scien ce's new power to sort through massive amounts of data. "There are some other te chnologies that are being developed that may be able to be used covertly and eve n remotely. They're trying to develop now a beam of light that would be projecte d onto your forehead. It would go a couple of millimeters into your frontal cort ex, and then receptors would get the reflection of that light. And [there are] s ome studies that suggest that we could use that as a lie detection device. If yo u were sitting there in the airport and being questioned, they could beam that o n your forehead without your knowledge. We can't do that yet, but they're workin g on it," [Wolpe said]. Note: Remember that classified military technology is usually at least 10 years ahead of anything in the public realm. For more mind-altering information on thi s key topic, click here and here.

CIA Helped Shoot Down 15 Civilian Planes 2008-12-11, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/11/world/main4664791.shtml With the help of CIA spotters, the Peruvian air force shot down 15 small civilia n aircraft suspected of carrying drugs, in many cases without warning and within two to three minutes of being sighted, a U.S. lawmaker said Thursday. It was th e first public disclosure of the number of planes shot down between 1995 and 200 1 as part of the Airbridge Denial Program, a CIA counternarcotics effort that ki lled an innocent American missionary, Veronica Bowers, and her infant daughter i n 2001. Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, senior Republican on the Intelligence Commi ttee of the House of Representatives, told The Associated Press most of the 15 p lanes shot down with the help of the CIA crashed in the jungle. The wreckage has not been or could not be examined to ascertain whether narcotics were aboard th e aircraft. "The Bowers could have gone in the same category if they had crashed in the jungle," Hoekstra said, speaking of the missionary family from Hoekstra' s state, Michigan. The Bowers' plane made an emergency river landing after it wa s hit. Excerpts from a CIA inspector general's report released in November raise

d questions about whether the missionaries' plane was the only craft mistakenly suspected of drug smuggling. The CIA report said that in most of the shootdowns, pilots fired on aircraft "without being properly identified, without being give n the required warnings to land, and without being given time to respond to such warnings as were given to land." Note: For many key reports from major media sources on government corruption, cl ick here.

Army combat unit to deploy within U.S. 2008-10-03, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/10/03/army.unit/index.html The United States military's Northern Command [NORTHCOM], formed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, is dedicating a combat infantry team to deal with catastrophes in the U.S., including terrorist attacks and natural disaster s. The 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry, which was first into Baghdad , Iraq, in 2003, started its controversial assignment [on October 1]. The First Raiders will spend 2009 as the first active-duty military unit attached to the U .S. Northern Command since it was created. They will be based in Fort Stewart, G eorgia, and focus primarily on logistics and support for local police and rescue personnel, the Army says. The plan is drawing skepticism from some observers wh o are concerned that the unit has been training with equipment generally used in law enforcement, including beanbag bullets, Tasers, spike strips and roadblocks . That kind of training seems a bit out of line for the unit's designated role a s Northern Command's CCMRF (Sea Smurf), or CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force. CBRNE stands for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yi eld explosive incidents. Use of active-duty military as a domestic police force has been severely limited since passage of the Posse Comitatus Act following the Civil War. Bloggers are criticizing the new force, saying that because it has b een training in law enforcement tactics it could be be used for domestic law enf orcement. Note: Naomi Wolf, author of Give Me Liberty and The End of America, considers th is domestic deployment of combat troops to be a coup d'etat with frightening imp lications.

Cheney Misled GOP Leaders, New Book Says 2008-09-16, Washington Post http://voices.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/09/cheney_... A GOP congressional leader who was wavering on giving President Bush authority t o wage war in late 2002 said Vice President Cheney misled him by saying that Ira qi President Saddam Hussein had direct personal ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and was making rapid progress toward a suitcase nuclear weapon. That's one of the re velations in the new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by The Post's Bar ton Gellman. Angler is based on hundreds of previously unpublished interviews wi th present and former Cheney advisers, senior officials in federal agencies, dip lomats, judges, military officers, senators and members of Congress. Cheney's ac cusations about Saddam Hussein, described by former House Majority Leader Richar d Armey, ... went far beyond public statements that have been criticized for rel ying on "cherry-picked" intelligence of unknown reliability. There was no intell igence to support the vice president's private assertions, Gellman reports, and they "crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply wit hout foundation." Some of the book's most significant news describes a three-mon th conflict between the Justice Department and the vice president's office over

warrantless domestic surveillance. The top White House national security lawyer begins hearing rumors of "the vice president's special program." John B. Belling er III, who had not been informed of the operation, confronted Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington. "I'm not going to tell you whether there is or isn't such a program," Addington replied, glowering. "But if there were such a program, you' d better go tell your little friends at the FBI and the CIA to keep their mouths shut." Note: For many powerful exposures of government corruption, click here.

The Army's Totally Serious Mind-Control Project 2008-09-14, Time magazine http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1841108,00.html Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That's why the U.S. Ar my has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing "thought helmets" that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ult imately, the Army hopes the project will "lead to direct mental control of milit ary systems by thought alone." Improvements in computing power and a better unde rstanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctiv e neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to him self. The Army's initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly so phisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. It's not as far-fetched as you might think: video gamers are eagerly awaiting a crude commercial version of brain wave technology a $299 headset from San Francisco-based Emotiv Systems in summer 2009. The mili tary's vastly more sophisticated system may be a decade or two away from reality , let alone implementation. The five-year contract it awarded last month to a co alition of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mell on University, and the University of Maryland, seeks to "decode the activity in brain networks" so that a soldier could radio commands to one or many comrades b y thinking of the message he wanted to relay and who should get it. Note: The US military and intelligence agencies have been conducting and funding research in mind control for decades. Click here for a summary of this research .

Bush Seeks to Affirm a Continuing War on Terror 2008-08-28, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/washington/30terror.htm Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision t hat has received almost no public attention: an affirmation that the United Stat es is still at war with Al Qaeda. The language, part of a proposal for hearing l egal appeals from detainees at the United States naval base at Guantnamo Bay, Cub a, goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatu r of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and su rveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say. Some lawmakers are concerned that the administration s effort to declare anew a war footing is an 11th-hour maneuver to re-establish its broad interpretation of the president s wa rtime powers, even in the face of challenges from the Supreme Court and Congress . The proposal is also the latest step that the administration, in its waning mo nths, has taken to make permanent important aspects of its long war against terror ism. From a new wiretapping law approved by Congress to a rewriting of intellige

nce procedures and F.B.I. investigative techniques, the administration is moving to institutionalize by law, regulation or order a wide variety of antiterrorism tactics. This seems like a final push by the administration before they go out t he door, said Suzanne Spaulding, a former lawyer for the Central Intelligence Age ncy and an expert on national security law. Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources of the realities behind t he "war on terror," click here.

CIA Denies Deception About Iraq 2008-08-23, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR20080822026... The controversy over a best-selling author's account of forgery and deception in the White House deepened yesterday with a new CIA denial that it helped the Bus h administration produce phony documents suggesting past links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Author Ron Suskind's book The Way of the World, released ear lier this month, contends that the White House learned in early 2003 that the Ir aqi president no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction but went to war re gardless. Suskind wrote that the information was passed to British and U.S. inte lligence officials in secret meetings with Tahir Habbush, Iraq's spy chief at th e time. Moreover, in an allegation that implies potentially criminal acts by adm inistration officials, the author wrote that White House officials ordered a for gery to influence public opinion about the war. The book contends that the CIA p aid Habbush $5 million and resettled him in Jordan after the war. Then, it says, in late 2003, the White House ordered the CIA to enlist Habbush's help in conco cting a fake letter that purported to show that Iraq helped train Mohamed Atta, the [alleged hijacker] in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Such a letter surfaced in Iraq in December 2003, but its authenticity quickly came into question. Suskind ... yesterday continued to stand by his book and accused the CIA and White Hous e of orchestrating a smear campaign. "It's the same old stuff," said Suskind, wh o said his findings are supported by hours of interviews, some of them taped. "T here's not a shred of doubt about any of it."

White House 'puzzled' by ex-spokesman's book bashing Bush 2008-05-28, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/27/mcclellan.book/index.html The White House ... said it was "puzzled" by a former spokesman's memoir in whic h he accuses the Bush administration of being mired in propaganda and political spin and at times playing loose with the truth. In excerpts from [his recently r eleased book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Cultur e of Deception], Scott McClellan writes on the war in Iraq that Bush "and his ad visers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honest y so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war." McClellan's former White House colleagues had harsh reactions to McCle llan's book. Fox News contributor and former White House adviser Karl Rove said on that network Tuesday that the excerpts from the book he's read sound more lik e they were written by a "left-wing blogger" than his former colleague. Another former Bush aide-turned-critic says the reaction to McClellan's book by his form er colleagues has a familiar ring to it. "They're saying some of the exact same things about McClellan they said about me," Richard Clarke, the former White Hou se counterterrorism chief, told CNN. Clarke left government in 2003. The followi ng year, he accused President Bush of ignoring warnings about the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and of using the attacks to push for wa r with Iraq. Early in the book ... McClellan wrote that he believes he told untr

uths on Bush's behalf in the case of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked to the media. "I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly pass ing along a falsehood," he wrote.

Tillman wants accountability in son's death 2008-05-16, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/15/DDRO10MM87.DTL During the rush of post-9/11 patriotism, few stories were more compelling than t he life and death of Pat Tillman, the ... professional football player turned so ldier. And, according to those closest to Tillman, few have been as illustrative of how the government has tried to manipulate public opinion about the war. Fou r years - and seven investigations - after her son's death in Afghanistan in a f riendly fire incident, Mary Tillman remains frustrated that the people responsib le for covering up the circumstances of his demise have not been held accountabl e. No one has been severely disciplined. [Mary Tillman is] touring the country t o promote her book, Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman, with the goal of telling the story of her son's life and of her journey through the military bureaucracy in the aftermath of his death. Since he enlisted, Pat Tillm an's story has been clutched by opposing sides of the war's political divide. He left a $3.6 million contract offer from the Arizona Cardinals on the table to e nlist in the military and fight al Qaeda in June 2002. On April 22, 2004, Tillma n was killed in Afghanistan. Two weeks later, just before his nationally televis ed memorial service, the Pentagon awarded him the Silver Star. He died, the mili tary said, while charging up a hill toward the enemy. But that wasn't the real s tory; Tillman was killed by his own men. The military knew that within hours but waited five weeks before revealing it. Years later, Mary Tillman is still looki ng for answers. Note: For a former Marine general's account of what war is really all about, cli ck here.

Ex-Officials: Bush Admin. Ignored Iraq Corruption 2008-05-13, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4842691 The Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels with in the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad, according to two former State Department employees. Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department's Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and James Mattil, who worked as the chief of staff, told Senate Democrats ... that their o ffice was understaffed and its warnings and recommendations ignored. Brennan als o alleges the State Department prevented a congressional aide visiting Baghdad f rom talking with staffers by insisting they were too busy. In reality, Brennan s aid, office members were watching movies at the embassy and on their computers. The staffers' workload had been cut dramatically because of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's "evisceration" of Iraq's top anti-corruption office, he said. The State Department's policies "not only contradicted the anti-corruption miss ion but indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption to fester at the hi ghest levels of the Iraqi government," Brennan told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. The U.S. embassy "effort against corruption including its new center piece, the now-defunct Office of Accountability and Transparency was little more than 'window dressing,'" he added. Mattil, who worked with Brennan, made simila r allegations. Specifically, he said the U.S. "remained silent in the face of an unrelenting campaign" by senior Iraqi officials to subvert Baghdad's Commission

on Public Integrity. Note: For many powerful exposures of government corruption from reliable, verifi able sources, click here.

Torture Memo Gave White House Broad Powers 2008-04-02, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/DOJ/story?id=4569746&page=1 The Justice Department's newly declassified torture memo outlined the broad lega l authority its lawyers gave to the Bush White House on matters of torture and p residential authority during times of war. The March 14, 2003 memorandum ... pro vided legal "guidance" for military interrogations of "alien unlawful combatants ," and concluded that the president's authority during wartime took precedence o ver the individual rights of enemies captured in the field. The memo ... determi ned that amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which in part protect rights of in dividuals charged with crimes, do not apply equally to enemy combatants. "The Fi fth Amendment due process clause does not apply to the president's conduct of a war," the memo noted. It also asserted, "The detention of enemy combatants can i n no sense be deemed 'punishment' for purposes of the Eighth Amendment," which p rohibits "cruel and unusual" forms of punishment. The memo was drafted by John Y oo, who was at the time the deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice De partment's Office of Legal Counsel. Former aides to John Ashcroft say the then-a ttorney general privately dubbed Yoo "Dr. Yes" for being so closely aligned with lawyers at the White House. The memo also provided an argument in defense of go vernment interrogators who used harsh tactics in their line of work. The memo al so laid out a defense against the authority of the U.N. Convention Against Tortu re, or CAT. Jack Goldsmith who headed OLC from October 2003 to July 2004, and wo rked at the Pentagon before coming to the department ... described the problems he had reviewing and standing by Yoo's work. "My first [reaction] was disbelief that programs of this importance could be supported by legal opinions that were this flawed." Note: For further disturbing reports on threats to civil liberties, click here.

Justice Official Defends Rough CIA Interrogations 2008-02-17, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/16/AR20080216026... The Bush administration allowed CIA interrogators to use tactics that were "quit e distressing, uncomfortable, even frightening," as long as they did not cause e nough severe and lasting pain to constitute illegal torture, a senior Justice De partment official said last week. In testimony before a House subcommittee, Stev en G. Bradbury, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Cou nsel, spelled out how the administration regulated the CIA's use of rough tactic s and offered new details of how [waterboarding] was used to compel disclosures by prisoners. Bradbury indicated that no water entered the lungs of the three pr isoners who were subjected to the practice, lending credence to previous account s that the noses and mouths of CIA captives were covered in cloth or cellophane. Cellophane could pose a serious asphyxiation risk, torture experts said. Bradbu ry's unusually frank testimony ... stunned many civil liberties advocates and ou tside legal scholars who have long criticized the Bush administration's secretiv e and aggressive interrogation policies. Martin S. Lederman, a former Office of Legal Counsel official who teaches law at Georgetown University, called Bradbury 's testimony "chilling." Lederman said that "to say that this is not severe phys ical suffering -- is not torture -- is absurd. And to invoke the defense that wh

at the Spanish Inquisition did was worse and that we use a more benign, non-tort ure form of waterboarding . . . is obscene." Bradbury wrote two secret memos in 2005 that authorized waterboarding, head-slapping and other harsh tactics by the CIA. As a result of that and other issues, Senate Democrats have repeatedly blo cked Bradbury's nomination to head the legal counsel's office permanently.

The President s Coming-Out Party 2007-12-15, Harper's magazine http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001917 This has been an important week in the torture debate in America. It has been th e week of the President s coming-out party. This week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC s Matt Lauer, and e xplained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is t orture he said; no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Compa ny. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blesse d, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be r eviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose pe rsonal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. A nd, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush s answer is never no. He has never found a case where he didn t find torture was appropriate. Here s a key piece of th e Kiriakou statement: LAUER: "Was the White House involved in that decision?" KI RIAKOU: "Absolutely, this isn t something done willy nilly. It s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department." He then goes into the process in considerable detail. Watch the video here. So now the process can be fully diagrammed, and the cast of characters is stunning. Th e torture system involves the operations division of the CIA on the implementati on side. The Justice Department is right in the thick of it. And finally the Whi te House. David Addington, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley these are all names we can now link directly to the torture system. They decided who w ould be tortured and how.

An American Embassy with All the Amenities 2007-10-04, Talk of the Nation (NPR) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14993509 The new U.S. embassy in Baghdad is shaping up to be the largest and most lavish embassy in the world. Tucked inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, the $600-m illion compound will include grocery stores, a movie theater, tennis courts and a club for social gatherings. In "The Mega Bunker of Baghdad," Vanity Fair repor ter William Langewiesche describes the compound and argues that it's not being b uilt for diplomacy. Note: Click on the link above to listen to this revealing radio report.

Robot wars are a reality 2007-08-18, Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,2151357,00.html

The deployment of the first armed battlefield robots in Iraq is the latest step on a dangerous path - we are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots de cide who, where and when to kill. Robots are integral to [the U.S.'s] $230bn fut ure combat systems project, a massive plan to develop unmanned vehicles that can strike from the air, under the sea and on land. Congress has set a goal of havi ng one-third of ground combat vehicles unmanned by 2015. Over 4,000 robots are s erving in Iraq at present, others in Afghanistan. And now they are armed. Predat ors and the more deadly Reaper robot attack planes have flown many missions ... with inevitable civilian deaths, yet working with remote-controlled or semi-auto nomous machines carries only the same ethical responsibilities as a traditional air strike. But fully autonomous robots that make their own decisions about leth ality are high on the US military agenda. They are cheap to manufacture, require less personnel and, according to the navy, perform better in complex missions. This is dangerous new territory for warfare, yet there are no new ethical codes or guidelines in place. Policymakers seem to have an understanding of [Artificia l Intelligence] that lies in the realms of science fiction and myth. Their answe r to the ethical problems is simply, "Let men target men" and "Let machines targ et other machines". In reality, a robot could not pinpoint a weapon without pinp ointing the person using it or even discriminate between weapons and non-weapons . Autonomous robots are not like other weapons. We are going to give decisions o n human fatality to machines that are not bright enough to be called stupid.

Fighting War Protesters 2007-06-27, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR20070626017... In the early 1970s, as Vietnam War-era protests swirled around the Washington ar ea, local police borrowed riot equipment and received intelligence training from an unusual source: the CIA. The agency, which is barred from domestic law enfor cement, provided gas masks, stun guns, searchlights and protective vests. CIA sp ecialists trained more than 20 officers ... in surveillance photography, counter sabotage and surreptitious entry. The CIA-local nexus was included in hundreds o f pages of documents released yesterday by the agency that detailed a quarter-ce ntury of CIA history. The records said the agency recruited officers primarily t o protect CIA facilities from attack by protesters. "A conscious decision was ma de . . . to utilize the services of local police to repel invaders in case of ri ot or dissension," a top CIA official wrote in May 1973. But the documents make it clear that the intelligence agency also wanted to keep tabs on the mammoth an tiwar demonstrations in Washington from 1969 through 1971. The D.C. police depar tment, for example, was given a communications system "to monitor major anti-Vie tnam war demonstrations," the records said. The CIA aid also extended to basic l aw enforcement. Police officials in Montgomery County told The Post in 1973 that they received CIA surveillance training to combat street crime. The agency also gave Arlington and Alexandria a substance it had developed to detect whether so meone had recently handled metallic objects, such as firearms. Note: The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have been posted on line by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking here.

Bush Changes Continuity Plan 2007-05-10, The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR20070509027... President Bush issued a formal national security directive yesterday ordering ag encies to prepare contingency plans for a surprise, "decapitating" attack on the federal government, and assigned responsibility for coordinating such plans to

the White House. The prospect of a nuclear bomb being detonated in Washington wi thout warning ... has been cited by many security analysts as a rising concern s ince the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The order makes explicit that the focus of fed eral worst-case planning involves a covert nuclear attack against the nation's c apital. "Adequate warning of potential emergencies that could pose a significant risk to the homeland might not be available, and therefore all continuity plann ing shall be based on the assumption that no such warning will be received," sta tes the 72-paragraph order. The statement added, "Emphasis will be placed upon g eographic dispersion of leadership, staff, and infrastructure in order to increa se survivability and maintain uninterrupted Government Functions." After the 200 1 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly t o locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time [forming] a shad ow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plan s." Since then, other agencies including the Pentagon, the Office of the Directo r of National Intelligence and the CIA have taken steps to relocate facilities o r key functions outside of Washington for their own reasons, citing factors such as economics or the importance of avoiding Beltway "group-think." Note: Why isn't Congress making these absolutely vital decisions? What gives the se organizations authority to determine what will happen in the case of a major attack?

Ex-C.I.A. Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq 2007-04-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/washington/27intel.html?ex=1335326400&en=e6... George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out aga inst Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a se rious debate about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat. [His book] is the first detailed account by a member of the president s inner circle of the Sep t. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to f ind the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war. There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the i mminence of the Iraqi threat, Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment. Nor, he adds, was there ever a significant discussion about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion. Mr. Tenet ... makes clear his bitter view that the ad ministration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war. As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, rather than acknowledge responsibility , the administration s message was: Don t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess. Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligenc e Estimate about Iraq s weapons programs, calling the episode one of the lowest mom ents of my seven-year tenure. Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administrati on critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D . Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda. Mr. T enet has spoken rarely in public, and never so caustically, since stepping down in July 2004. Note: Was the Iraq war based largely on lies and deception? Now that Hussein is gone and there are no weapons of mass destruction, who is the enemy in Iraq? For the comments of a top U.S. general, click here.

Jessica Lynch Sets Record Straight 2007-04-25, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/25/earlyshow/main2725423.shtml

On Tuesday, former Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch testified in Washington, D.C., about the real story of her capture and rescue while serving in Iraq in 2003. She spok e before the House Government Reform Committee along with the family of fallen A rmy Ranger Pat Tillman. Lynch was badly injured when her convoy was ambushed in Iraq in 2003. She was later rescued by American troops from an Iraqi hospital, b ut the tale of her ambush was changed into a story of heroism on her part. At th e hearing, the chairman of the House panel, Henry Waxman, accused the government of inventing "sensational details and stories" about Tillman's death and Lynch rescue. After she arrived home, Lynch set the record straight in a book called " I Am a Soldier, Too." "At first I didn't even realize the stories that were bein g told," she said. "It was quite a while afterwards, and then I found out. I kne w that I had to get the truth out there because, one, I wouldn't be able to live with myself ... knowing that these stories were portraying me to do something t hat I didn't." Although Lynch was injured severely, she didn't suffer any gunsho ts wounds. Note: Thank you to Jessica for being a hero with the courage to expose the lies and fabrications of those who will do almost anything to support the war machine . For more, click here.

US generals will quit if Bush orders Iran attack 2007-02-25, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1434540.ece Some of America s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the Wh ite House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defe nce and intelligence sources. Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that a n attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely. Up to five generals and admira ls are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckl ess attack. A generals revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented. Robert Gate s, the defence secretary, has repeatedly warned against striking Iran and is bel ieved to represent the view of his senior commanders. The threat of a wave of re signations coincided with a warning by Vice-President Dick Cheney that all optio ns, including military action, remained on the table. He was responding to a com ment by Tony Blair that it would not be right to take military action against Ira n . A second US navy aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS John C Stennis a rrived in the Gulf last week. Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, the commander of the U S Fifth Fleet, warned: The US will take military action if ships are attacked or if countries in the region are targeted or US troops come under direct attack. Bu t General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said recently there was zero chance of a war with Iran. He played down claims by US intelligence that the Iranian government was responsible for supplying insurgents in Iraq, forcin g Bush on the defensive. Pace s view was backed up by British intelligence officia ls who said the extent of the Iranian government s involvement in activities insid e Iraq by a small number of Revolutionary Guards was far from clear . Note: When internal fighting in the military and government is reported in the m ajor media, it is a sign of very deep internal schisms. Yet the ships are in pla ce for another "Gulf of Tonkin" incident.

US is top purveyor on weapons sales list 2006-11-13, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2006/11/13/us_is_top_purveyor_on_we... The United States last year provided nearly half of the weapons sold to militari

es in the developing world, as major arms sales to the most unstable regions -many already engaged in conflict -- grew to the highest level in eight years, ne w US government figures show. The United States supplied $8.1 billion worth of w eapons to developing countries in 2005 -- 45.8 percent of the total. The figures underscore how the largely unchecked arms trade to the developing world has bec ome a major staple of the American weapons industry, even though introducing man y of the weapons risks fueling conflicts rather than aiding long-term US interes ts. [The U.S.] also signed an estimated $6.2 billion worth of new deals last yea r to sell attack helicopters, missiles, and other armaments to developing nation s such as the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. There is growing evidence that the sales are increasingly more abo ut dollars and cents for the US military-industrial complex. A UN panel [recentl y] voted to study whether a new treaty might be possible to regulate the sale of conventional arms. The United States was the only country out of 166 to vote no . A study last year by the progressive World Policy Institute found that the Uni ted States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in an ongoing war. More than half of the countries buying US arms...were defined as undemocra tic by the State Department's annual Human Rights Report, including top recipien ts Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.

'Iraq was awash in cash. We played football with bricks of $100 bills' 2006-03-20, The Guardian (one of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1734939,00.html At the start of the Iraq war, around $23bn-worth of Iraqi money was placed in th e trusteeship of the US-led coalition by the UN. The money...was to be used in a "transparent manner"...for "purposes benefiting the people of Iraq". For the pa st few months we have been working on a Guardian Films investigation into what h appened to that money. A great deal of it has been wasted, stolen or frittered a way. Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills we re shipped in - $12bn, in cash. "Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money," says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the gover ning Coalition Provisional Authority. "We played football with some of the brick s of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere". The envir onment created by the coalition positively encouraged corruption. "American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud z one," says Alan Grayson, a Florida-based attorney who represents whistleblowers now trying to expose the corruption. One CPA official was given nearly $7m and t old to spend it in seven days. Note: I highly recommend this entire article to understand some of what happens in war. For lots more on war-related corruption written by a highly decorated US general, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/warisaracket

UK radiation jump blamed on Iraq shells 2006-02-19, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2047373,00.html Radiation detectors in Britain recorded a fourfold increase in uranium levels in the atmosphere after the shock and awe bombing campaign against Iraq. Environment al scientists who uncovered the figures through freedom of information laws say it is evidence that depleted uranium from the shells was carried by wind current s to Britain. Government officials, however, say the sharp rise in uranium detec ted by radiation monitors in Berkshire was a coincidence and probably came from local sources. Each detector recorded a significant rise in uranium levels durin g the Gulf war bombing campaign in March 2003. The reading from a park in Readin

g was high enough for the Environment Agency to be alerted. This research shows t hat rather than remaining near the target as claimed by the military, depleted u ranium weapons contaminate both locals and whole populations hundreds to thousan ds of miles away, [Liverpool University's Chris Busby] said. Busby s report shows t hat within nine days of the start of the Iraq war on March 19, 2003, higher leve ls of uranium were picked up on five sites in Berkshire. On two occasions, level s exceeded the threshold at which the Environment Agency must be informed, thoug h within safety limits. The report says weather conditions over the war period s howed a consistent flow of air from Iraq northwards. Note: For more on the depleted uranium cover-up: http://www.WantToKnow.info/0504 05depleteduranium

A remote control that controls humans 2005-10-26, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9816703/wid/11915829 Prepare to be remotely controlled. I was. Just imagine being rendered the rough equivalent of a radio-controlled toy car. Japan's top telephone company says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. But mor e sinister applications also come to mind. I can envision it being added to mili taries' arsenals of so-called "non-lethal" weapons. A special headset was placed on my cranium by my hosts during a recent demonstration. It sent a very low vol tage electric current from the back of my ears through my head -- either from le ft to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-co ntrol was moved. I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to st ep straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating curren ts literally threw me off. The technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulat ion -- essentially, electricity messes with the delicate nerves inside the ear t hat help maintain balance. I felt a mysterious, irresistible urge to start walki ng to the right whenever the researcher turned the switch to the right. I was co nvinced -- mistakenly -- that this was the only way to maintain my balance.

Ike Was Right About War Machine 2005-10-02, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/30/60minutes/main892398.shtml The United States...is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq. Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China. Another way...is by cutting sp ending for things like Medicare prescriptions, highway construction, farm paymen ts, AMTRAK, National Public Radio and loans to graduate students. We ought to st art saving on our bloated military establishment. We have more than 10,000 nucle ar weapons -- enough to destroy all of mankind. We're spending $200 million a ye ar on bullets alone. We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He bec ame President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, b y the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misp laced power exists and will persist." Well, Ike was right. That's just what s happ ened. Note: See the text of Eisenhower's farewell speech on the Yale University websit e. To view a video of the original speech, click here.

The Secret Downing Street Memo 2005-05-01, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html "This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by mas sive military action. C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction o f terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publish ing material on the Iraqi regime's record."

Apocalypse Soon (By Former US Sect. of Defense Robert MacNamara) 2005-05-00, Foreign Policy Magazine May/June 2005 Issue http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2829 It is time...for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nucle ar weapons as a foreign-policy tool. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nu clear launch is unacceptably high. Much of the current US nuclear policy has bee n in place since before I was secretary of defense, and it has only grown more d angerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years. On any given d ay...the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could l aunch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes' delib eration by the president and his advisors. After leaving the Defense Department, I became president of the World Bank. During my 13-year tenure, from 1968 to 19 81, I was prohibited...from commenting publicly on issues of US national securit y. [Afterwards] I decided to go public with some information that I knew would b e controversial, but that I felt was needed to inject reality into these increas ingly unreal discussions about ... nuclear weapons. To launch weapons against a nuclear-equipped opponent would be suicidal. To do so against a nonnuclear enemy would be militarily unnecessary, morally repugnant, and politically indefensibl e. The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a very high risk of nuclear catastrophe. There is no way to reduce the risk to ac ceptable levels, other than to first eliminate the hair-trigger alert policy and later to eliminate or nearly eliminate nuclear weapons.

The Coming Wars (by Seymour M. Hersch) 2005-01-24, The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/050124fa_fact This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administ ration is looking at this as a huge war zone, the former high-level intelligence official told me. Next, we re going to have the Iranian campaign." The President ha s signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando g roups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspec ted terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asi a. The Pentagon doesn t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress, the former high-level intelligence official said. They don t even call it covert ops -- it s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it s black reconnaissance. They re not even going to tell the cincs -- the regional American military commanders-in-chief.

Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month 2005-01-12, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2129-2005Jan11.html The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Huss ein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley. Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be publishe d this spring. The CIA declined to authorize any official involved in the weapon s search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offere d an authoritative account of the status of the hunt on the condition of anonymi ty. The ISG [Iraq Study Group] has interviewed every person it could find connec ted to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and every suspected site with in Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves, acc ording to several people involved in the weapons hunt. Congress allotted hundred s of millions of dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public acco unting of the money. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified. Note: To understand how such major secrecy and deception happens, click here.

Navy's use of sonar suspected in near-stranding of whales 2004-12-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/13/MNGOEAB3HJ1.DTL The United States is facing increasing international pressure to place limitatio ns on the use of military sonar ... that has been linked to mass strandings of w hales. The European Union Parliament -- the most prominent of four international bodies that have taken up the matter in recent months -- called in October for its member states to develop a moratorium on all types of military sonars, which use powerful sound to locate objects such as submarines. According to studies c ited by the EU and the other world bodies, noise can interfere with the survival of the ocean creatures that depend on sound to navigate, find food, locate mate s, avoid predators and communicate with one another. At high decibel levels, noi se can kill. The U.S. Navy is the biggest user of midfrequency active sonar in t he world -- and government officials have been loath to require permits to regul ate its use. In more than a dozen instances dating back to the 1960s, however, w hales have stranded themselves on the beaches and sometimes died at the time of naval training exercises miles away using midfrequency active sonar. An unpreced ented stranding of 16 beaked and minke whales in the Bahamas in 2000 brought wor ldwide attention to military sonar. A NOAA investigation concluded that a Navy t esting maneuver using midfrequency sonar -- by far the most commonly used type o f sonar -- was the likely cause. Necropsies found signs of brain hemorrhaging, w hich is consistent with injury from sound. Note: To contact your political and media representatives encouraging a ban dang erous sonar use, click here. For more on this important matter, click here.

Uncovering an Israeli jail that specializes in nightmares 2004-06-16, Newsweek http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5251751

What [Israeli historian Gad] Kroizer had discovered and later footnoted in an ac ademic paper ... was the location of an ultrasecret jail where Israel has held A rabs in total seclusion for years, barred visits by the Red Cross and allegedly tortured inmates. Known as 1391, the facility is used as an interrogation center by a storied unit of Israel's military intelligence, whose members-all Arabic s peakers-are trained to wring confessions from the toughest militants. Some of th e methods are reminiscent of Abu Ghraib: nudity as a humiliation tactic, comprom ising photographs, sleep deprivation. In a few cases, at least, interrogators at 1391 appear to have gone beyond Israel's own hair-splitting distinction between torture and what a state commission referred to in 1987 as "moderate physical p ressure." But the nightmare for those in 1391 is the isolation and the fear that no one knows where you are. The location of the compound is so hush-hush that a court this year banned a visit by an Israeli legislator. Prisoners describe bei ng hooded everywhere at the facility except in their cells. Hassan Rawajbeh ... a member of the nearly disbanded Palestinian Preventive Security force ... was p icked up by soldiers in Nablus 18 months ago. He was hooded, handcuffed and thro wn on the floor of a van. When the hood was removed, he was in a tiny, windowles s cell. The chamber contained no toilet, only a bucket in the corner, which ... his jailers would empty once every few weeks. A low buzzing droned constantly. F or nearly four months, Rawajbeh saw no one but his interrogators, who kept him n aked for days at a time and prevented him from going to the bathroom.

Who killed Nick Berg? 2004-05-29, Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/28/1085641717320.html Iraq in flames, Washington an object of disgust. What to do? At this pivotal mom ent, CNN and Fox News are tipped off to a clip of an American citizen being behe aded. The victim is ... Nick Berg.The vile deed is deemed the work of al-Qaeda. The timing of the video was brilliant for the West. Media pundits judged the cri me a deeper evil than the systemic torture of innocent Iraqis. But some people s ensed a rat. But if it was not al-Qaeda, who? While this video shows a human bod y having its head chopped off, it does not necessarily portray an act of murder. A month before the discovery of [his] corpse, Berg had been released from custo dy. But whose custody? Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt ... claimed he was in the custody of Iraqi police. However, the Iraqi police chief [stated] "the Iraqi pol ice never arrested the slain American". Berg's family are certain his jailers we re the US military. His father, Michael, had been told so by the FBI. He has pro duced an email from a US consular official ... confirming that his son was in th e hands of the US. In his final moments on screen Berg is wearing an orange jump suit of the kind familiar from Guantanamo Bay. His white chair is identical to t hose in the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures. During the decapitati on, starting at the front of the throat, there is little sign of blood. The scre am is wildly out of sync, sounds female, and is obviously dubbed. Dr John Simpso n, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons ... agrees with other experts who find it highly probable that Berg had died before his decapitation. There's something fishy about this video. In the end, the question is: who killed Nick Berg, and why? Note: If the above link fails, click here. For a CNN article raising other serio us questions on Berg, click here. For more reliable information on how governmen t can control and manipulate public perception, click here.

The Armageddon Plan 2004-03-01, The Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200403/mann

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was ... a [Republican] congressman. Rumsfeld [was] the head of G. D. Sear le & Co.. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress kne w where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld and Che ney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the R eagan Administration. [It] called for setting aside the legal rules for presiden tial succession ... in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "P resident" and his staff. The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration [si nce] September 11, 2001. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "cont inuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the Ho use, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would pla y a greatly diminished role. "One of the awkward questions we faced ... was whet her to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." [Cheney's and Rumsfeld's] participatio n in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises ... also demons trates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades ... even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far a way. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, wh o regularly called upon them. They were ... a part of the permanent hidden natio nal-security apparatus of the United States. Note: If above link fails, click here. The author, James Mann, is a former Washi ngton correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C. Apparen tly, Cheney and Rumsfeld don't find Congress to be very important.

U.S. finds lost nuclear bomb 1966-03-18, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/17/BAVV16AMLN.DTL A hydrogen bomb that went missing for three months in the Mediterranean Sea is b ack in the hands of the U.S. military after being found the previous day. The bo mb had been lost in January when two U.S. military planes, a KC-135 tanker and a B-52 carrying four thermonuclear weapons, collided during midair refueling. Thr ee of the four bombs fell to the ground near Palomares, Spain. While none of the m detonated with a nuclear explosion, the high-explosive triggers in two of the bombs went off upon impact and contaminated the area with radioactive material. A fourth bomb plunged into the water off Spain's southeastern coastline. Followi ng the incident, the Spanish government announced it would no longer allow U.S. planes carrying nuclear weapons to fly over its territory. On March 17, the U.S. Navy, using a midget submarine called the Alvin [found] the bomb 2,500 feet und erwater, intact and with its parachute still attached. Note: You can access a Jan. 27, 1966 NY Times article on this incident for a sma ll fee at this link.

No ducking land mine treaty, Mr. President 2009-12-06, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/05/ED451AT7MU.DTL This country hasn't used land mines in nearly 20 years. It no longer makes the i ndiscriminate killers nor provides them to allies. Why then is President Obama off to Oslo this week to collect a Nobel Peace Prize - refusing to sign an inte rnational treaty to ban the shrapnel-spewing buried bombs? His refusal is ... sh

ameful. The devices, which maim and kill for years after a conflict ends, caused more than 5,000 casualties last year in the world's poorest places such as Camb odia, Angola and Central America. Obama's stance puts him in line with President s George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who both ducked a chance to put this country in line with more than 150 nations that have signed the treaty. Other notable no n-signers: China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Cuba. Is this the company we want to keep? Sticking with land mines is a puzzler. The United States has a reported stockpile of 10 million devices, though it hasn't deployed any since the 1991 G ulf War. By signing the agreement, the Pentagon would hardly be giving up a main stay weapon. It's time for Obama to go in a new direction. He should sign, not e quivocate, on a treaty that Washington has avoided for over a decade. Here's a t hought while typing up your Peace Prize acceptance speech, Mr. President: It's t ime to ban land mines. Note: The refusal to sign the worldwide landmine ban treaty seems to be a puzzle r, until you realize the US government is protecting the rights to profit of US arms corporations. For a retired Marine general's analysis of the profiteering t hat is the principal purpose for war, "War is a Racket,"click here.

Rise in soldier suicides leaves Pentagon looking for answers 2009-11-19, Times of London http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6922396.ece American soldiers are committing suicide in the greatest numbers since official records began in 1980, with the US Army at a loss to explain the phenomenon sinc e a third of the dead have never been deployed in combat. Suicides in the army a 141 in 2009 so far. The upward trend ha lone have passed last year s record of 140 s defied efforts to improve access to appropriate counselling for veterans retur ning from combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The figure for the first ten mon ths of the year excludes 71 suicides among troops taken off active duty in 2009, and 42 in the US Marine Corps. Roughly a third of this year s suicides have been by soldiers taking their own lives in war zones, a third by returning soldiers a nd a third by those based permanently in the US or awaiting deployment overseas. Many military suicides can be traced in part to an inability to process the gui lt of having killed in battle. Note: For lots more from major media sources on the horrific effects of modern w ar on both combatants and civilians, click here. And for the writings of a top g eneral on why this is happening, click here.

C.I.A. Abuse Cases Detailed in Report on Detainees 2009-08-25, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/politics/25detain.html Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. named a veteran federal prosecutor on Monday to examine abuse of prisoners held by the Central Intelligence Agency, after th e Justice Department released a long-secret report showing interrogators choked a prisoner repeatedly and threatened to kill another detainee s children. Mr. Hold er chose John H. Durham, a prosecutor from Connecticut who has been investigatin g the C.I.A. s destruction of interrogation videotapes, to determine whether a ful l criminal investigation of the conduct of agency employees or contractors was w arranted. The attorney general said his decision to order an inquiry was based i n part on the recommendation of the Justice Department s ethics office, which call ed for a new review of several interrogation cases. He said he was also influenc ed by a 2004 report by the C.I.A. inspector general at the time, John L. Helgers on, on the agency s interrogations. The report was released Monday under a court o

rder in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Although large portions of the 109 -page report are blacked out, it gives new details about a variety of abuses ins ide the C.I.A. s overseas prisons, including suggestions about sexually assaulting members of a detainee s family, staging mock executions, intimidation with a hand gun and power drill, and blowing cigar and cigarette smoke into prisoners faces t o make them vomit. The inspector general s review raised broad questions about the legality, political acceptability and effectiveness of the harshest of the C.I. A. s methods, including some not authorized by the Justice Department and others t hat were approved, like the near-drowning technique of waterboarding. Note: And what do you think might have been in the blacked out portions of the r eport? For lots more on the use of illegal methods by the CIA and US military in their prosecution of the "war on terror," click here.

Americans tiring of war in Afghanistan 2009-08-21, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/20/MNFU19BG53.DTL The violence-scarred elections in Afghanistan provided a stage for the Taliban t o show war-weary Americans and Afghans that it has rebounded and can strike - ev en after eight years of war. For President Obama's policies, the timing couldn't be worse. With memories of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks dimming, Americans ar e tiring of the conflict. New polling shows a majority - 51 percent - of those s urveyed now believe the war is not worth the fight, an increase of 6 percentage points in a month. Obama's answer to the mounting skepticism is to say that, in a way, the war has just begun. The final push to wipe out [the] Taliban ... is n ot 8 years old but really got started when he took office and ordered 17,000 mor e troops into Afghanistan. In short order, he also installed a new commander and persuaded Pakistan to join the United States in what on Thursday he called a pi ncer movement to squeeze the enemy astride the common border. Note: As shown over and over again, presidents and politicians of both major pol itical parties in the U.S. support the war machine in order to get the war chest they need to be elected or re-elected. Obama is no exception. For lots more on this, click here.

U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases 2009-05-24, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to cap ture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and form er American government officials. Pakistan's intelligence and security services captured a Saudi suspect and a Yemeni suspect this year with the help of America n intelligence and logistical support, Pakistani officials said. They are still being held by Pakistan, which has shared information from their interrogations w ith the United States, the official said. The current approach, which began in t he last two years of the Bush administration and has gained momentum under Mr. O bama, is driven in part by court rulings and policy changes that have closed the secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and all but ended the tr ansfer of prisoners from outside Iraq and Afghanistan to American military priso ns. Human rights advocates say that relying on foreign governments to hold and q uestion [captives] could increase the potential for abuse at the hands of foreig n interrogators. The fate of many ... whom the Bush administration sent to forei gn countries remains uncertain. One suspect, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was capt

ured by the C.I.A. in late 2001 and sent to Libya, was recently reported to have died there in Libyan custody. In the last years of the Bush administration and now on Mr. Obama's watch, the balance has shifted toward leaving all but the mos t high-level terrorist suspects in foreign rather than American custody. Note: It appears that the US government is simply avoiding bringing any of its c aptives under official US control. After the fanfare surrounding the closure of some of its "secret" prisons abroad, the government is moving detainees into pri sons run by the governments of foreign countries. Could this be for the purpose of continuing the same torture and indefinite detention that it can no longer ca rry out in US-controlled prisons? For lots more on the "war on terror" from reli able sources, click here.

Military tribunals not the same as U.S. courts 2009-05-23, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/23/MN9Q17OTTB.DTL President Obama says his proposed reforms to the military commissions his predec essor established to try suspected terrorists will bring the tribunals "in line with the rule of law." But it isn't the same law that applies in U.S. courts. Pe ntagon officials appoint the judges and can remove them. Military commanders cho ose the jurors, who can convict defendants by non-unanimous votes, except in dea th penalty cases. The military can monitor defense lawyers' conversations with t heir clients. Prosecutors can also present evidence that would never pass muster in civilian courts. Confessions made under physical or mental pressure could be admissible, despite Obama's disavowal of torture and coercion. There's no ban o n evidence from illegal searches. And defendants may be convicted on the basis o f hearsay - a second hand report of an out-of-court accusation by another person , perhaps a fellow suspect, whom the defense never gets to see or question. Civi l-liberties advocates and legal organizations defending prisoners who may be tri ed before the commissions say the system is an invitation to abuse and differs l ittle from the tribunals established by President George W. Bush. "The system is designed to ensure the outcome they want ... convictions in every case," said B en Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who has attended proceedin gs for prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "This suggests that the much-heralded improvements to the Bush military commission system are l argely cosmetic." Note: For lots more on the "war on terror" from reliable sources, click here.

'Global War On Terror' Is Given New Name 2009-03-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR20090324028... The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase "global war on terror," a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor. In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of securit y review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long W ar' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation .' " Senior administration officials had been publicly using the phrase "oversea s contingency operations" in a war context for roughly a month before the e-mail was sent. The Bush administration adopted the phrase ["Global War on Terror"] s oon after the Sept. 11, 2001. But critics abroad and at home, including some wit hin the U.S. military, said the terminology mischaracterized the nature of the e nemy and its abilities. Some military officers said, for example, that classifyi ng al-Qaeda and other anti-American militant groups as part of a single movement

overstated their strength. Last month, the International Commission of Jurists urged the Obama administration to drop the phrase "war on terror." The commissio n said the term had given the Bush administration "spurious justification to a r ange of human rights and humanitarian law violations," including detention pract ices and interrogation methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as torture.

Army manual raises emphasis on electronic warfare 2009-02-25, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/25/AR20090225022... For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the Army is updating its plans for electronic warfare, calling for more use of high-powered microwaves, lasers and infrared beams to attack enemy targets and control angry crowds. The 112-pa ge manual, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press ... doesn't offe r specifics on new equipment or gadgetry but lays out in broad terms the Army's fear that without new equipment and training, U.S. forces may be at a deadly dis advantage. Army patrols currently rely on specially trained Air Force and Navy m embers whose electronic expertise helps sniff out improvised explosive devices, which have killed more than 1,700 U.S. troops since the war began. The Army sees the need for a new system more finely tuned to its purposes. The new doctrine d irects the Army, which has put a premium on fighting insurgents in Iraq's most p opulous cities, to use technology that can distinguish enemy threats from common technologies such as radios or cell phones used by civilians or friendly forces . It also calls on the Army to develop and deploy directed-energy weapons, which would produce a concentrated beam of electromagnetic energy or atomic or subato mic particles to blind, disrupt or destroy targets. Such technology could be use d in a variety of attack modes against enemy equipment, facilities or personnel. Note: How can anyone claim that our troops, with all of their already sophistica ted weapons, may be "at a deadly disadvantage"? For many key reports on the real ities of modern warfare, click here.

KBR, Partner in Iraq Contract Sued in Human Trafficking Case 2008-08-28, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/27/AR20080827032... A Washington law firm filed a lawsuit yesterday against KBR, one of the largest U.S. contractors in Iraq, alleging that the company and its Jordanian subcontrac tor engaged in the human trafficking of Nepali workers. Agnieszka Fryszman, a pa rtner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said 13 Nepali men, between the ages of 18 and 27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and res taurants in Amman, Jordan. But once the men arrived in Jordan, their passports w ere seized and they were told they were being sent to a military facility in Ira q, Fryszman said. As the men were driven in cars to Iraq, they were stopped by i nsurgents. Twelve were kidnapped and later executed, Fryszman said. The thirteen th man survived and worked in a warehouse in Iraq for 15 months before returning to Nepal. The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California on behalf of the workers' families and the survivor, claims that the trafficking scheme was engin eered by KBR and its Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners, according to Fry szman. This spring, an administrative law judge at the Department of Labor, whic h has jurisdiction over cases that involve on the job injuries at overseas milit ary bases, ordered Daoud to pay $1 million to the families of 11 of the victims. Note: For many more reports on corporate corruption from major media sources, cl ick here.

US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability' 2008-08-12, New Scientist magazine http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14520-us-boasts-of-laser-weapons... An airborne laser weapon dubbed the "long-range blowtorch" has the added benefit that the US could convincingly deny any involvement with the destruction it cau ses, say senior officials of the US Air Force (USAF). The Advanced Tactical Lase r (ATL) is to be mounted on a Hercules military transport plane. Boeing announce d the first test firing of the laser, from a plane on the ground, earlier this s ummer. Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase "plausible deniability" to describe the weapon's benefits in a briefing ... on laser weapons to the New Mexico Opti cs Industry Association in June. As the term suggests, "plausible deniability" i s used to describe situations where those responsible for an event could plausib ly claim to have had no involvement in it. John Pike, analyst with defence think -tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear. "The target would never know what hit them," says Pike. "Further, there would be no m unition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike." A la ser beam is silent and invisible. An ATL can deliver the heat of a blowtorch wit h a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night. With no pr evious examples for comparison, it may be difficult to discern whether damage to a vehicle or person was the result of a laser strike. Note: For lots more on war and weaponry, click here.

ACLU: U.S. Treasury stymies war court defense attorneys 2008-07-08, Miami Herald http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/597624.html The American Civil Liberties Union, which has pledged to cover costs of civilian lawyers defending alleged terrorists, is in a struggle with the U.S. Treasury D epartment over a permit to pay $250-an-hour fees and other expenses to attorneys who have been shuttling to [the] U.S. Navy base [at Guantanamo]. The Treasury d ivision, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, is the same unit that polices Ame rican citizens' travel to Cuba. Its authority to license defense costs at the wa r courts here, called military commissions, comes from anti-terror legislation. ACLU director Anthony Romero accused the Bush administration of foot-dragging, n oting civilian defense lawyers were slow to receive security clearances to meet accused terrorists held for years without access to attorneys. "Now the governme nt is stonewalling again by not allowing Americans' private dollars to be paid t o American lawyers to defend civil liberties," he said. He called the slow licen sing an "obstruction of justice" at a time when "the Bush administration insists on moving ahead with the prosecutions." The program is called the John Adams Pr oject, sponsored by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense La wyers. Under it, attorneys will be paid for travel, expenses, research and copyi ng as well as $250 an hour to defend men ... now facing death penalty prosecutio ns at the war court. Top criminal defense lawyers typically charge at least $550 an hour. Note: For important reports on threats to civil liberties from major media sourc es, click here.

U.S. Advised Iraqi Ministry on Oil Deals 2008-06-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/world/middleeast/30contract.html?partner=rs... A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an inte gral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major We stern oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American offi cials say. The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts announcement, is th e first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals t o open Iraq s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism. In t heir role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said . At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with som e of the world s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rar e prize to the industry. The contracts are expected to be awarded Monday to Exxo n Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, as well as to several smaller oil compani es. The deals have been criticized by opponents of the Iraq war, who accuse the Bush administration of working behind the scenes to ensure Western access to Ira qi oil fields even as most other oil-exporting countries have been sharply limit ing the roles of international oil companies in development. Though enriched by high prices, the companies are starved for new oil fields. American military off icials say the pipelines [in Iraq] now have excess capacity, waiting for output to increase at the fields. Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the real reasons behin d the war in Iraq, click here.

'Curveball' speaks, and a reputation as a disinformation agent remains intact 2008-06-18, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-curveball18-2008jun18,0,... Rafid Ahmed Alwan hoped for an easier life when he came [to Nuremberg, Germany] from Iraq nine years ago. He also hoped for a reward for his cooperation with Ge rman intelligence officers. "For what I've done, I should be treated like a king ," he said outside a cramped, low-rent apartment he shares with his family. Inst ead, the Iraqi informant code-named Curveball has flipped burgers at McDonald's and Burger King, washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant and baked pretzels in an all-night bakery. He also has faced withering international scorn for peddling d iscredited intelligence that helped spur an invasion of his native country. It w as intelligence attributed to Alwan -- as Curveball -- that the White House used in making its case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. H e described what turned out to be fictional mobile germ factories. The CIA belat edly branded him a liar. After Curveball's role in the pre-invasion intelligence fiasco was disclosed by the Los Angeles Times four years ago, the con man behin d the code name remained in the shadows. His security was protected and his iden tity concealed by the BND, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service. Along with co nfirmation of Curveball's identity, however, have come fresh disclosures raising doubts about his honesty -- much of that new detail coming from friends, associ ates and past employers. And records reveal that when Alwan fled to Germany, one step ahead of the Iraq Justice Ministry, an arrest warrant had been issued alle ging that he sold filched camera equipment on the Baghdad black market. Note: For much more information on the CIA's "disinformant" Curveball, click her e. The lies he told were peddled by US media, including the major television net works and The New York Times and Washington Post, in the run-up to the US invasi on of Iraq. For a powerful summary of major media cover-ups, click here.

Lawmakers Urge Special Counsel Probe of Harsh Interrogation Tactics 2008-06-08, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/07/AR20080607011... Nearly 60 House Democrats yesterday urged the Justice Department to appoint a sp ecial counsel to examine whether top Bush administration officials may have comm itted crimes in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspe cted terrorists. In a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, the lawmake rs cited what they said is "mounting evidence" that senior officials personally sanctioned the use of waterboarding and other aggressive tactics against detaine es in U.S.-run prisons overseas. An independent investigation is needed to deter mine whether such actions violated U.S or international law, the letter stated. "This information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law," it said. The letter was signed by 56 Hou se Democrats, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-M ich.) and House Intelligence Committee members Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Jerro ld Nadler (D-N.Y). The request was prompted in part by new disclosures of high-l evel discussions within the Bush administration that reportedly focused on speci fic interrogation practices. Some of the new detail was contained in a report la st month by the Justice Department's inspector general, which described a series of White House meetings in which the controversial tactics were vigorously deba ted. Conyers, whose committee already is looking into the role played by adminis tration lawyers in authorizing aggressive measures, said a broader probe is now needed.

4 colonels relieved of command over nuclear-armed flight 2007-10-20, Boston Globe/Washington Post http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/10/20/4_colonels_r... Four Air Force colonels have been relieved of their commands and more than 65 lo wer-ranking officers and airmen have been disciplined over a series of errors th at led to a B-52 flight from North Dakota to Louisiana with six nuclear-armed cr uise missiles that no one realized were under the wing. The Fifth Bomb Wing comm ander at Minot, Colonel Bruce Emig, was removed from command, along with his chi ef munitions officer and the operations officer of the B-52 unit at Barksdale. T he munitions squadron commander at Minot was relieved of command shortly after t he incident. The problems began with a breakdown in the formal scheduling proces s used to prepare the AGM-129 cruise missiles in question for decommissioning. I n March, the Pentagon decided to retire it in favor of an older AGM-86. Part of the preparation involved removing the W-80 nuclear warhead and replacing it with a steel dummy on missiles to be flown aboard B-52s to Barksdale for destruction . On the morning of Aug. 29, the loading crew at Minot used a paper schedule tha t was out of date when members picked up 12 missiles from a guarded weapons-stor age hangar, six with dummy warheads and six they did not realize had nuclear war heads. The trailer that would carry the pylons to the B-52 arrived early, and it s crew did not inspect the missiles as it should have before loading them on the trailer. The driver called the munitions control center to verify the numbers, but the staff there failed to check them. At the aircraft, the crew that loaded the pylons, one under each wing, failed again to check the missiles, which have a small glass porthole to view whether a dummy or nuclear warhead is installed. The next morning, Aug. 30, the plane's navigator failed to do a complete check o f the missiles, as required, looking under only one wing and not the one where t he nuclear-armed missiles were. Note: How is it possible that 65 military people were involved in this? Could it

be that they were part of a rogue operation that was uncovered? There's more he re than meets the eye.

State Department Use of Contractors Leaps in 4 Years 2007-10-19, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24contractor.html?ex=1350878400&... Over the past four years, the amount of money the State Department pays to priva te security and law enforcement contractors has soared to nearly $4 billion a ye ar from $1 billion, ... but ... the department had added few new officials to ov ersee the contracts. Auditors and outside exerts say the results have been vast cost overruns, poor contract performance and, in some cases, violence that has s o far gone unpunished. A vast majority of the money goes to companies like DynCo rp International and Blackwater [Worldwide] to protect diplomats overseas, train foreign police forces and assist in drug eradication programs. There are only 1 7 contract compliance officers at the State Department s management bureau oversee ing spending of the billions of dollars on these programs, officials said. Two n ew reports have delivered harsh judgments about the State Department s handling of the contracts, including the protective services contract that employs Blackwat er guards whose involvement in a Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad has raised questio ns about their role in guarding American diplomats in Iraq. The ballooning budge t for outside contracts at the State Department is emblematic of a broader trend , contracting experts say. The Bush administration has doubled the amount of gov ernment money going to all types of contractors to $400 billion, creating a new and thriving class of post-9/11 corporations carrying out delicate work for the government. But the number of government employees issuing, managing and auditin g contracts has barely grown. That s a criticism that s true of not just State but of almost every agency, said Jody Freeman, an expert on administrative law at Harva rd Law School.

Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs 2007-10-09, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR20071008014... Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square l ast month. "I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senio r from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are no t insects." Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too. "I'd never seen anyth ing like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragon flies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' " Some suspect the ins ectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Departm ent of Homeland Security. No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy dr ones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. So what was seen by Crane, Alarcon and a handful of others at the D.C. m arch -- and as far back as 2004, during the Republican National Convention in Ne w York, when one observant ... peace-march participant described on the Web "a j et-black dragonfly hovering about 10 feet off the ground, precisely in the middl e of 7th Avenue . . . watching us?" Three people at the D.C. event independently described a row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails of the big dragonflies -- an accoutrement that [Jerry Louton, an entomologist a t the National Museum of Natural History,] could not explain. And all reported s eeing at least three maneuvering in unison. "Dragonflies never fly in a pack," h e said. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice said her gr oup is investigating witness reports and has filed Freedom of Information Act re quests with several federal agencies. If such devices are being used to spy on p

olitical activists, she said, "it would be a significant violation of people's c ivil rights." Note: To read further reliable reports of threats to our civil liberties, click here.

In Bush we trust - or else 2007-08-05, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/08/05/EDJFRB8AF1.DTL President Bush's latest affront to the U.S. Constitution [is] in plain view on t he White House Web site: "Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq." This far-reaching order ... is a fr ontal assault on the Fifth Amendment, which decrees that the government cannot s eize an individual's property without due process. [The order asserts] the autho rity to freeze the American assets of anyone who directly or indirectly assists someone who poses "a significant risk" [to] the "peace and stability" of [Iraq] or the reconstruction effort. "On its face, this is the greatest encroachment on civil liberties since the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II," sa id Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer who was a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration. Fein said the sanctions against suspected violators would amount to "a financial death penalty. King George III really would have been je alous of this power." The executive order not only calls for the freezing of ass ets of anyone who directly or indirectly [opposes US policy in Iraq,] it prohibi ts anyone else from providing "funds, goods or services" to a blacklisted indivi dual. In other words, a friend or relative could have his or her assets seized f or trying to help someone whose bank account is suddenly frozen. An attorney who offered legal help could risk losing everything he or she owned. Then again, th ere's not much need for lawyers in the world of this executive order. The blackl ist would be drawn up by the "secretary of treasury, in consultation with the se cretary of state and the secretary of defense." The Fifth Amendment was written for good reason: It's dangerous to give the government unchecked authority to se ize private property without judicial review.

It's time to check the balance of power 2007-07-29, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/29/ING0UR6C1D1.DTL Since 9/11, President Bush's repeated assaults on the Constitution and celebrati on of international lawlessness ... have needlessly made Americans less safe. Th e president, for example, has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in intercepting the conversations and e-mails of American citizens on American s oil on his say-so alone. He has claimed authority to break into and enter our ho mes, open our mail and commit torture. He has insisted that the entire United St ates is a battlefield -- even pizza parlors -- where lethal military force may b e employed to kill ... suspects with bombs or missiles. He has detained citizens and noncitizens alike as enemy combatants based on secret evidence. And he has insisted that he is constitutionally empowered to keep U.S. troops in Iraq indef initely. Congress should restore the Constitution's checks and balances and prot ections against government abuses. The most frightening of Bush's abuses travels under the banner of "extraordinary rendition." In its name, Bush has kidnapped, secretly imprisoned, and tortured. The practice is what would be expected of di ctators such as the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin or Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The d etainees are held incommunicado without accusation or trial. No judge reviews th e allegedly incriminating evidence. No law restricts interrogation methods or th e conditions of confinement. And the innocent are left without recourse as "coll

ateral damage" in Bush's ... global [war on terrorism]. Note: The author, Bruce Fein, served as Associate Attorney General under Preside nt Reagan.

In Iraq's four-year looting frenzy, the allies have become the vandals 2007-06-08, The Guardian (one of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/heritage/story/0,,2098275,00.html Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and th e flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on e arth. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with war time shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological si te. When the head of Iraq's supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and herita ge, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today's Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don't. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York c ity, sacked the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan was at their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically not to protec t the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the Nazis protected t he Louvre. America [has converted] Nebuchadnezzar's great city of Babylon into t he hanging gardens of Halliburton. In the process the 2,500-year-old brick pavem ent to the Ishtar Gate was smashed by tanks and the gate itself damaged. Babylon is being rendered archaeologically barren. Outside the capital some 10,000 site s of incomparable importance to the history of western civilisation, barely 20% yet excavated, are being looted as systematically as was the museum in 2003. Whe n [archeologists] tried to remove vulnerable carvings from the ancient city of U mma to Baghdad, [they] found gangs of looters already in place with bulldozers, dump trucks and AK47s.

Officers: Ex-CIA chief Tenet a 'failed' leader 2007-04-27, CNN News http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/29/tenet.letter/index.html In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligen ce community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership." The lett er, signed by Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael, said Tenet should have resigned in protest ra ther than take part in the administration's buildup to the war. (Read the full l etter) Johnson is a former CIA intelligence official and registered Republican w ho voted for Bush in 2000. Cannistraro is former head of the CIA's counterterror ism division. The writers said ... "your lament that you are a victim in a proce ss you helped direct is self-serving. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war. CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly th ere was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored a nd later misused." The letter said CIA officers learned later that month Iraq ha d no contact with Osama bin Laden and that then-President Saddam Hussein conside red the al Qaeda leader to be an enemy. Still, Tenet "went before Congress in Fe bruary 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to al Qaeda. "You help ed set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positio ns, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence t hat did not support the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collecte

d the intelligence. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obl igations to the people of the United States."

Trust Busters 2007-04-15, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-neil15apr15,1,434... [ABC's talk show] "The View," by accident or design, has an almost eerie calibra tion to the public at large. For example, only one of the four co-hosts ... is a supporter of President Bush. In other words, 25% of the cast has a favorable op inion of Bush, pretty much in line with Bush's approval ratings nationally. Like wise, last year a Scripps Howard poll found that 36% of the U.S. public believes the government was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks. I estimate Rosie [O'D onnell] constitutes 36% of the cast. Why does pop culture matter? Because it rev eals ... what is really on our minds. And what's on our minds lately is reasonab le doubt. Actor Charlie Sheen [is] onboard to narrate a new version of the onlin e 9/11 conspiracy documentary "Loose Change," with distribution by billionaire M ark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures. We're not talking about a couple of flaky moonbat s in an Oakland basement. Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks. And just about everyw here you look, official narratives are coming unglued: Pat Tillman, for example, or the firing of eight federal prosecutors. The abduction of British sailors in what Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed was indisputably Iraqi territorial water s has proved to be quite disputable. [An] ex-British ambassador claims the map u sed by the Ministry of Defence to support its case is a fake. I am not a 9/11 co nspiracy theorist. At the same time, I'm certain we don't know all there is to k now about those events. The data stream has been so thoroughly corrupted. Weapon s of mass destruction. Abu Ghraib. The silencing of climate scientists. It's har d for the ministries of Washington to make an appeal to authority when they have been proven so unreliable. Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cov er-up, click here.

Bush's legacy: The president who cried wolf 2007-01-11, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16583889 Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offe ring an entrance strategy for Iran. Only this president could look out over a vi sta of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, Where mistakes hav e been made, the responsibility rests with me only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran. Without any authorization from the pu blic, which spoke so loudly and clearly to you in November s elections without any consultation with a Congress ... you seem to be ready to make an open-ended com mitment (on America s behalf) to do whatever you want, in Iran. Our military, Mr. Bush, is already stretched so thin by this bogus adventure in Iraq that even a m ajority of serving personnel are willing to tell pollsters that they are dissati sfied with your prosecution of the war. You, sir, have become the president who cried wolf. Many of us are as inclined to believe you just shuffled the director of national intelligence over to the State Department because he thought you we re wrong about Iran. Many of us are as inclined to believe you just put a pilot in charge of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because he would be truly usefu l in an air war next door in Iran. Your assurances ... that we trust you have lo st all shape and texture. You have lost the military. You have lost the Congress to the Democrats. You have lost many of the Republicans. You are losing the cre

dibility, not just of your presidency, but more importantly of the office itself . And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones. Note: For powerful information from a highly decorated U.S. General on the real reasons behind war, click here.

MI5 rebels expose Tube bomb cover-up 2006-02-26, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2059046,00.html MI5 is facing an internal revolt by officers alarmed about intelligence failures and the lack of resources to fight Islamic terrorism. To illustrate their conce rn, agents have leaked more topsecret documents to The Sunday Times because they want a public inquiry into the missed intelligence leading up to the July attacks in London. They believe ministers have withheld information from the public abo ut what the security services knew about the suspects before the bombing of July 7 and the abortive attacks of July 21. The documents include an admission by Jo hn Scarlett, head of SIS, the secret intelligence service (also known as MI6), t hat one of the July 21 suspects was tracked on a trip to Pakistan just months be fore the attempted bombings. MI5, which is responsible for national security, al lowed the July 21 suspect to travel to Pakistan after he was detained and interv iewed at a British airport. It stopped monitoring him because it said the Pakista ni authorities assessed that he was doing nothing of significance . They are criti cal of Blair, who has ruled out an inquiry saying it would distract the security services from fighting terrorism. The assessment echoes a decision by MI5 to ha lt surveillance on two of the July 7 bombers 16 months before the attacks. Both were filmed and taped by MI5 agents as they met two men allegedly plotting to ca rry out a terrorist attack in England.

Lawmaker Challenges U.S. Case for War 2005-05-18, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2005/05/17/VI2005051700710... A British lawmaker forcefully denied allegations in a Senate hearing yesterday t hat he received rights to purchase millions of barrels of Iraqi oil at a discoun t from Saddam Hussein's government, and he delivered a fiery attack on three dec ades of U.S. policy toward Iraq. George Galloway, a formidable debater recently ousted from the British Labor Party after attacking Prime Minister Tony Blair fo r supporting the war in Iraq, used his appearance before the Senate Permanent Su bcommittee on Investigations as a forum to challenge the veracity of the Bush ad ministration's case for going to war. He also unleashed a personal attack agains t panel Chairman Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), calling his investigation the "mother o f all smoke screens" designed to "divert attention from the crimes that you supp orted" by endorsing President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Important Note: Mr. Galloway's statement was not posted on the website of the Se nate Committee tasked with posting these matters. Whereas testimony of all other panel members is provided, for Mr. Galloway, the website states "Mr. Galloway d id not submit a written statement." Mr. Galloway did submit a statement, and it has been posted many places on the Internet, and published widely in articles li ke that above. See the relevant Senate Committee webpage at: http://hsgac.senate.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=232

Iraqi Refugee's Tale of Abuse Dissolves Upon Later Scrutiny 2005-01-21, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20C11FC3A5C0C728EDDA80894DD40... Testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2003 about the rebuilding of Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the story of Jumana Michael Hanna, an Iraqi woman...with a tale of her horrific torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime. Hanna's tale - more than two years of imp risonment that included being subjected to electric shocks, repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted - was unusual in that she was willing to name the Iraqi poli ce officials who participated in her torture, "information that is helping us to root out Baathist policemen who routinely tortured and killed prisoners," Wolfo witz said. But Hanna's story, which 10 days before Wolfowitz's testimony had bee n the subject of a front-page article in the Washington Post, appears to have un raveled. Esquire magazine, in this month's issue, published a lengthy article, b y a writer who was hired to help Hanna produce a memoir, saying that her account had all but fallen apart.

A National Disgrace 2009-11-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11wed1.html Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bus h administration s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation and torture. The I talian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong. In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 ot her Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured. Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Ara r, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by feder al agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommu nicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was torture d. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians le t him go. It has long been established that Mr. Arar was not guilty of anything. Canada admitted that it had supplied false information to American authorities, and in 2007, it apologized and offered Mr. Arar $10 million in damages. Written by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, the 59-page majority opinion held that no civil d amages remedy exists for the horrors visited on Mr. Arar. The ruling distorts pr ecedent and the Constitutional separation of powers to deny justice to Mr. Arar and give officials a pass for egregious misconduct. The overt disregard for the central role of judges in policing executive branch excesses has frightening imp lications for safeguarding civil liberties, as four judges suggested in dissenti ng opinions. Note: For many reports from major media sources of growing government threats to civil liberties, click here.

CIA doctors face human experimentation claims 2009-09-02, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/02/cia-usa Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its "enhanced interrogatio n" of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged. Physicians for Human Ri ghts (PHR), a not-for-profit group that has investigated the role of medical per

sonnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantnamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto un derstood. PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the devel opment, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA's secret "torture programme". The most incendiary accusation of PHR's latest report, Aid ing Torture, is that doctors actively monitored the CIA's interrogation techniqu es with a view to determining their effectiveness, using detainees as human subj ects without their consent. The report concludes that such data gathering was "a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation". Human experimentation witho ut consent has been prohibited in any setting since 1947 [with] the Nuremberg Co de, which resulted from the prosecution of Nazi doctors. In April, a leaked repo rt from the International Committee of the Red Cross found that medical staff em ployed by the CIA had been present during waterboarding, and had even used what appeared to be a pulse oxymeter, placed on the prisoner's finger to monitor his oxygen saturation during the procedure. PHR is calling for an official investiga tion into the role of doctors in the CIA's now widely discredited programme. It wants to know exactly how many doctors participated, what they did, what records they kept and the science that they applied. Note: To watch a video of a Democracy Now! segment on the PHR report, click here . For astounding information on how MDs participated in the CIA's mind control e xperiments in the past, click here.

Judge: CIA interrogations not relevant to 9/11 accused's sanity 2009-08-10, Miami Herald http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/story/1179756.html U.S. military defense lawyers for accused 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al Shibh ca nnot learn what interrogation techniques CIA agents used on the Yemeni before he was moved to Guantnamo to be tried as a terrorist, an Army judge has ruled. Bin a l Shibh, 37, is one of five men charged in a complex death penalty prosecution b y military commission currently under review by the Obama administration. But hi s lawyers say he suffers a "delusional disorder," and hallucinations in his cell at Guantnamo may leave him neither sane enough to act as his own attorney nor to stand trial. Prison camp doctors treat him with psychotropic drugs. Army Col. St ephen Henley, the military judge on the case, has scheduled a competency hearing for mid-September. Meantime, the judge ruled on Aug. 6 that "evidence of specif ic techniques employed by various governmental agencies to interrogate the accus ed is . . . not essential to a fair resolution of the incompetence determination hearing in this case." Prosecutors had invoked a national security privilege in seeking to shield the details from defense lawyers. Many of the techniques used on the men have already been made public. They included waterboarding, sleep de privation and sexual humiliation methods meant to break a captive's will. But Na vy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, the Yemeni's Pentagon appointed defense attorney, sa id court-approved mental health experts -- as well as the judge -- need to know the specifics to assess her client's mental illness. If he suffers post-traumati c stress disorder as a result of his CIA interrogations, there may be PTSD treat ments that could make him competent. Note: For many reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of "the war on terror," click here.

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Look at Past Use 2009-04-22, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22detain.html?partner=rss&emc=r...

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an all uring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking leg al trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military traini ng. How could that be torture? In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, witho ut a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had alway s condemned. This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The Ne w York Times shows, largely because no one involved not the top two C.I.A. offic ials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. B ush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees investigate d the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate. According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven yea rs ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for S urvival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to giv e American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communist s in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans. Ev en George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroug hly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine t he history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as wat erboarding. Note: For powerful revelations of the realities behind the fake "war on terror", click here.

Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official 2009-01-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR20090113033... The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guan tanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Sa udi national ... interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isola tion, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition." "We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J . Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of mili tary commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His tre atment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the c ase" for prosecution. Military prosecutors said in November that they would seek to refile charges against Qahtani, 30, based on subsequent interrogations that did not employ harsh techniques. But Crawford, who dismissed war crimes charges against him in May 2008, said in the interview that she would not allow the pros ecution to go forward. The interrogation ... was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the h eart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to h eart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats pe r minute, the record shows. Note: For many revealing reports on torture and other war crimes committed in th e War on Terrorism and in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

U.S. Air Force investigates Gitmo war court director 2008-10-25, Miami Herald http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/breaking-news/story/741796.html The Air Force is investigating a top official in the Guantnamo war crimes trials following complaints that he inappropriately sought to influence the prosecution of cases. Defense lawyers and human rights groups have accused Air Force Brig.

Gen. Thomas Hartmann, who supervised the prosecution of enemy combatants at Guan tnamo Bay until he was reassigned last month, of lacking neutrality and pushing f or premature prosecutions to rally public support for the tribunals. Air Force M aj. David Frakt, a military defense lawyer who has represented several Guantnamo detainees, said the probe was launched after he and others alerted authorities a bout possible ethical violations by Hartmann. Frakt said that he informed his su periors in July of concerns regarding Hartmann's "unprofessional conduct" and "l ack of candor," and that the investigation could result in professional sanction s and might give some detainees grounds to challenge actions that Hartmann took in cases against them. Hartmann was removed as legal adviser for the Guantnamo tr ials in September. He continues to oversee the tribunals in his new post, but is not directly involved with prosecutors. Military judges have already barred him from participating in three Guantnamo trials, saying he lacked impartiality and aligned himself too closely with prosecutors. The investigation is proof that se rious questions remain about the tribunals' fairness, said Jennifer Daskal, a la wyer for Human Rights Watch, which has lobbied on behalf of the detainees. "The Department of Defense has absolutely refused to clean house." Note: For many disturbing reports on threats to civil liberties from major media sources, click here.

Book Cites Secret Red Cross Report of C.I.A. Torture of Qaeda Captives 2008-07-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/washington/11detain.html?partner=rssuserlan... Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constit uted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001. The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared i n the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubayd ah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were "categorically " torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. The book says Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box "so small ... he had to double up his li mbs in the fetal position" and was one of several prisoners to be "slammed again st the walls," according to the Red Cross report. The C.I.A. has admitted that A bu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured in the nose and mouth to [cause near] suffocation and drowning. The b ook, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, by Jane Mayer ... offers new details of the agency s secret de tention program, as well as the bitter debates in the administration over interr ogation methods. Citing unnamed "sources familiar with the report," Ms. Mayer wr ote that the Red Cross document "warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, p lacing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecu ted." Note: For lots more on war and war crimes, click here.

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts 2008-06-13, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/washington/13scotus.html?partner=rssuserlan... The Supreme Court ... delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush adminis tration s handling of the detainees at Guantnamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prison ers there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention. The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Mili

tary Commissions Act of 2006 that ... stripped the federal courts of jurisdictio n to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Ke nnedy said the truncated review procedure provided by a previous law, the Detain ee Treatment Act of 2005, falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substi tute because it failed to offer the fundamental procedural protections of habeas c orpus. Justice Kennedy declared: The laws and Constitution are designed to survive , and remain in force, in extraordinary times. The decision, which was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer, was categorical in its rejection of the administration s basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration s strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House tha t domestic law would never reach. Note: For many disturbing reports on threats to civil liberties from major media sources, click here.

Detainees Now Have Access to Federal Court 2008-06-13, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR20080612042... Defense attorneys for the 270 detainees at Guantanamo Bay said the Supreme Court decision yesterday that granted detainees habeas corpus rights was a watershed moment that will allow the men, some held for as long as 6 1/2 years, to challen ge their detentions before a civilian judge. The court's ruling immediately give s the detainees access to a federal court in Washington, where lawyers will seek to have judges order the men released from indefinite detention. Legal experts said it is unclear how the hearings will proceed, but the government could be co mpelled to present highly classified evidence, and detainees could for the first time be able to publicly call witnesses, present evidence of abuse and rebut te rrorism allegations. The decision could force the U.S. government to show why in dividual detainees must be held, something U.S. officials have fought for years. As many as 130 detainees have been deemed dangerous but are unlikely to ever fa ce criminal charges, according to prosecutors, and now government officials coul d have to argue for indefinite detention even if the evidence is flimsy or nonex istent. "We're going to see a high number of people the government is going to h ave to release," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented Guantanamo Bay detainees since 2002. It is unclea r how the Boumediene v. Bush decision will affect military commissions trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 20 detainees, including ... Khalid Sheik Mohammed, have been charged with war crimes.

Artist Trevor Paglen has his eye on satellites 2008-05-31, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/30/DD6R10US53.DTL For four decades, the United States has been filling the outer reaches of our at mosphere with 189 reconnaissance satellites. And for several years, artist-geogr apher Trevor Paglen has been keeping his eye on them. "The Other Night Sky," ... at the Berkeley Art Museum, is a result of Paglen's nocturnal efforts. "When yo u look at the number of satellites, what they're doing and what they represent, it is really a vision of trying to have the world in your clutches," says Paglen in his disheveled office in UC Berkeley's geography department. "[T]his project is trying to think about what ... looking at the night sky in search of truth m

eans today." "The Other Night Sky" is not Paglen's first foray into extended stu dies of secret military projects. Six years ago - while working on a project abo ut the California penal system that involved examining satellite photos of priso ns - he stumbled on some classified military sites. At the time, the war on terr or was in full bloom and a number of rumors about secret sites had begun to circ ulate. "We knew the CIA had to be running secret prisons around the world," Pagl en says. "It was not in the news, but you could tell - people were being rounded up but were not being put in our jails. These hidden military sites I stumbled upon seemed really relevant to the idea that the state was disappearing people." Through numerous information requests at the national and state levels, he gene rated reams of knowledge about the United States' secret rendition program that was not then making news. That he had time to pursue it gave Paglen a sense of m oral responsibility. Note: Trevor Paglen's new book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be D estroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World presents peculiar should er patches created for the weird and top secret programs funded by the Pentagon' s black budget. His 2006 book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights, was the first to focus on extraordinary rendition -- when the CIA take s captives to countries where they can be tortured or jailed without due process .

Army Blocks Public's Access to Documents in Web-Based Library 2008-02-21, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/20/AR20080220028... The Army has shut down public access to the largest online collection of its doc trinal publications, a move criticized by open-government advocates as unnecessa ry secrecy by a runaway bureaucracy. Army officials moved the Reimer Digital Lib rary behind a password-protected firewall on Feb. 6, restricting access to an el ectronic trove that is popular with researchers for its wealth of field and tech nical manuals and documents on military operations, education, training and tech nology. All are unclassified, and most already are approved for public release. "Almost everything connected to the Army is reflected in some way in the Reimer collection," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrec y at the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists. "It provides the public wi th an unparalleled window into Army policy. It provides unclassified resources o n military planning and doctrine." Aftergood ... said the collection offers spec ialized military manuscripts that do not appear on the shelves of local librarie s. These include documents on the Army's use of unmanned aircraft [and] tactics and techniques for the use of nonlethal weapons. "All of this stuff had been spe cifically approved for public release," Aftergood said. "I think it's a case of bureaucracy run amok. And it's a familiar impulse to secrecy that needs to be ch allenged at every turn." In 2006, the National Archives acknowledged that the CI A and other agencies had withdrawn thousands of records from the public shelves ... and inappropriately reclassified many of them. Early in 2002, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft issued a memo urging federal agencies to use whatever l egal means necessary to reject Freedom of Information Act requests for public do cuments. Note: For reliable reports on escalating government secrecy from reliable, verif iable sources, click here.

Time Runs Out for an Afghan Held by the U.S. 2008-02-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/world/asia/05gitmo.html?ex=1359867600&en=19...

Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here as a war hero, famous for ... a daring pr ison break he organized for three opponents of the Taliban government in 1999. B ut in 2003, Mr. Hekmati was arrested by American forces in southern Afghanistan when, senior Afghan officials ... contend, he was falsely accused by his enemies of being a Taliban commander himself. For the next five years he was held at th e American military base in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, where he died of cancer on Dec. 30. The fate of Mr. Hekmati, the first detainee to die of natural causes at Guan tnamo ... demonstrates the enduring problems of the tribunals at Guantnamo. Afghan officials, and some Americans, complain that detainees are effectively thwarted from calling witnesses in their defense, and that the Afghan government is neve r consulted on the detention cases, even when it may be able to help. Mr. Hekmat i s case, officials who knew him said, shows that sometimes the Americans do not s eem to know whom they are holding. In a report in February 2006 ... researchers at Seton Hall University School of Law ... concluded that no outside witnesses h ad ever been called to appear at Guantnamo. Lt. Col. Stephen E. Abraham ... stepp ed forward last June to criticize the tribunals. In a submission to the Supreme Court, he condemned them for relying on generalized evidence that would have bee n dismissed by any competent court, and as being devised to rubber-stamp the adm inistration s assertion that the detainees had been correctly designated enemy comb atants when they were captured and that they could be held indefinitely.

Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe 2008-01-27, Sunday Times (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3257725.ece An investigation into the illicit sale of American nuclear secrets was compromis ed by a senior official in the State Department, a former FBI employee has claim ed. The official is said to have tipped off a foreign contact about a bogus CIA company used to investigate the sale of nuclear secrets. The firm, Brewster Jenn ings & Associates, was a front for Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent. Her publ ic outing two years later in 2003 by White House officials became a cause clbre. T he claims that a State Department official blew the investigation into a nuclear smuggling ring have been made by Sibel Edmonds, 38, a former Turkish language t ranslator in the FBI s Washington field office. Plame, then 38, was the ... wife o f a former US ambassador, Joe Wilson. She travelled widely for her work, often c laiming to be an oil consultant. In fact she was a career CIA agent who was part of a small team investigating the same procurement network that the State Depar tment official is alleged to have aided. Brewster Jennings was one of a number o f covert enterprises set up to infiltrate the nuclear ring. [Edmonds said the St ate Department official] "found out about the arrangement . . . and he contacted one of the foreign targets and said . . . you need to stay away from Brewster J ennings because they are a cover for the government. Phillip Giraldi, a former CI A officer, said: It s pretty clear Plame was targeting the Turks. If indeed that [S tate Department] official was working with the Turks to violate US law on nuclea r exports, it would have been in his interest to alert them to the fact that thi s woman s company was affiliated to the CIA. I don t know if that s treason legally bu t many people would consider it to be. Note: To read former CIA agent Philip which he identifies the unnamed State k here. And to read an interview with r revelations appearing in the Sunday k here. Giraldi's analysis of Edmonds' claims, in Department official as Marc Grossman, clic Edmonds on the series of articles about he Times and media censorship elsewhere, clic

Back In Iraq: The 'Whores Of War'

2007-09-29, Sunday Herald (Scotland's leading newspaper, Sunday edition) http://www.sundayherald.com/search/display.var.1724225.0.back_in_iraq_the_who... Despite being implicated in several controversial killings, [Blackwater] is the Pentagon's most favoured contractor and has effective diplomatic immunity in Ira q. Referred to as "the most powerful mercenary army in the world", both the US a mbassador to Iraq and the army's top generals hold it in regard. The company, ba sed near the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, was co-founded by Erik Prince , a billionaire right-wing fundamentalist. At its HQ, Blackwater has trained mor e than 20,000 mercenaries to operate as freelancers in wars around the world. Pr ince is a big bankroller of the Republican Party - giving a total of around $275 ,550 - and was a young intern in the White House of George Bush Sr. Under George Bush Jr, Blackwater received lucrative no-bid contracts for work in Iraq, Afgha nistan and New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. His firm has pulled down contrac ts worth at least $320 million in Iraq alone. Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the book Blackwater: The Rise Of The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, says when Bus h was re-elected in 2004, one company boss sent this email to staff: "Bush Wins, Four More Years!! Hooyah!!" One Blackwater employment policy is to hire ex-admi nistration big-hitters into key positions. It hired Cofer Black, a former State Department co-ordinator for counter-terrorism and former head of the CIA's count er-terrorism centre, as vice-chairman. Robert Richer, a former CIA divisional he ad, joined Blackwater as vice-president of intelligence in 2005. Scahill says th e firm is "the front line in what the Bush administration views as the necessary revolution in military affairs" - privatisation of as many roles as possible. S cahill went on to call Prince a "neo-crusader, a Christian supremacist, who ... has been allowed to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world ."

Producer of 9/11 Conspiracy Film 'Loose Change' Arrested for Deserting the Army 2007-07-26, FOX News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290942,00.html One of the young filmmakers behind a controversial 9/11 conspiracy documentary w as arrested this week on charges that he deserted the Army, even though ... he r eceived an honorable discharge. Korey Rowe, 24, who served with the 101st Airbor ne in Afghanistan and Iraq, told FOXNews.com that he was honorably discharged fr om the military 18 months ago which he said he explained to sheriffs when they p ounded on his door late Monday night. When they came to my house, I showed them m y paperwork, Rowe said. The cops said, 'You re still in the system.' Rowe is one of t he producers of "Loose Change," a cult hit on the Internet espousing the theory that the U.S. government and specifically the Bush administration orchestrated t he Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The movie is set to be released in about 40 Briti sh theaters in late August, according to Rowe and fellow filmmakers Jason Bermas and Dylan Avery. Police arrested Rowe at his house in Oneonta, N.Y., about 10:4 5 p.m. on Monday and took him to the Otsego County jail, where he spent a day-an d-a-half before he was released, he said. Rowe was turned over to officials at F ort Drum the closest military base who then booked him on a flight to Fort Campb ell, Ky., where his unit is based, to try to straighten out why the military iss ued a warrant for his arrest. A warrant for my arrest came down and showed up on the sheriff s desk, Rowe said. Where it came from and why it showed up all of a sudd en is a mystery to me. There were at least five sheriffs on hand for his arrest, Rowe said. They pulled a whole operation. They cut my phone lines. They came from the woods. It was crazy it was ridiculous, he said.

Bush Approves New CIA Methods 2007-07-21, Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR20070720012... President Bush set broad legal boundaries for the CIA's harsh interrogation of t errorism suspects yesterday, allowing the intelligence agency to resume a progra m that was suspended last year after criticism that it violated U.S. and interna tional law. In an executive order lacking any details about actual interrogation techniques, Bush said the CIA program will now comply with a Geneva Conventions prohibition against "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Two administration officials said that suspects now in U.S. custody could be moved immediately into the "enhanced interrogation" progr am and subjected to techniques that go beyond those allowed by the U.S. military . Rights activists criticized Bush's order for failing to spell out which techni ques are now approved or prohibited. "All the order really does is to have the p resident say, 'Everything in that other document that I'm not showing you is leg al -- trust me,' " said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. The CIA interrogat ion guidelines are contained in a classified document. A senior intelligence off icial, asked whether this list includes such widely criticized methods as the si mulated drowning known as "waterboarding," declined to discuss specifics but sai d "it would be very wrong to assume that the program of the past would move into the future unchanged." CIA detainees have also alleged they were left naked in cells for prolonged periods, subjected to sensory and sleep deprivation and extr eme heat and cold, and sexually taunted. A senior administration official briefi ng reporters yesterday said that any future use of "extremes of heat and cold" w ould be subject to a "reasonable interpretation . . . we're not talking about fo rcibly induced hypothermia."

Study suggests cancer risk from depleted uranium 2007-05-08, The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2074419,00.html Depleted uranium, which is used in armour-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the meta l's effects on human lung cells. The study adds to growing evidence that DU caus es health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased. DU is a b yproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power. It is much less radioactive th an other uranium isotopes, and its high density - twice that of lead - makes it useful for armour and armour piercing shells. It has been used in conflicts incl uding Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defence was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and b irth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons. Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explo sion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers a nd people returning after the conflict. Once they are lodged in the lung even lo w levels of radioactivity would damage DNA in cells close by. "The real question is whether the level of exposure is sufficient to cause health effects. The ans wer to that question is still unclear," he said, adding that there has as yet be en little research on the effects of DU on civilians in combat zones. "Funding f or DU studies is very sparse and so defining the disadvantages is hard," he adde d. Note: We suspect a major cover-up of the dangers of DU, on which the media have reported little. How convenient that this pesky waste product from nuclear power plants which is radioactive for thousands of years could be sold to the militar y for weapons. For lots more on this vital topic, click here.

Tech Watch: Forecasting Pain 2006-12-00, Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4202262.html No longer a gleam in the Pentagon's eye, ray guns or radiofrequency (RF) weapons , to be exact officially have arrived. As troops are increasingly forced to serv e as an ad hoc police force, nonlethal weapons have become a priority for the mi litary. The Department of Defense is currently testing the Active Denial System (ADS), which fires pain-inducing beams of 95-GHz radio waves, for deployment on ground vehicles. This surface heating doesn't actually burn the target, but is p ainful enough to force a retreat. While the military continues to investigate th e safety of RF-based weapons, defense contractor Raytheon has released Silent Gu ardian, a stripped-down version of the ADS, marketed to law enforcement and secu rity providers as well as to the military. Using a joystick and a targeting scre en, operators can induce pain from over 250 yards away, as opposed to more than 500 yards with the ADS. Unlike its longer-ranged counterpart, Silent Guardian is available now. As futuristic and frightening as the ADS "pain ray" sounds, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding an even more ambitious use of RF energy. Researchers at the University of Nevada are investigating the feasib ility of a method that would immobilize targets without causing pain. Rather tha n heating the subject's skin, this approach would use microwaves at 0.75 to 6 GH z to affect skeletal muscle contractions. This project is still in the beginning stages. The ADS, on the other hand, is already a painful reality. Note: For lots more concerning information on non-lethal weapons, click here.

Nonlethal weapons touted for use on citizens 2006-09-12, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14806772/ Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on America n citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday. The object is basically public relations. Dom estic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible saf ety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne. "If we're not willing to use i t here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people i f they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices. Note: The government has been developing potentially lethal "non-lethal weapons" for decades, as evidenced by released FOIA government documents. Don't miss our excellent summary on this critical topic available at http://www.WantToKnow.inf o/mindcontrol10pg#nonlethal and the in-depth Washington Post article on psycholo gical manipulations available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/060123psyops.

In the chaos of Iraq, one project is on target: a giant US embassy 2006-05-03, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2162249,00.html The question puzzles and enrages a city: how is it that the Americans cannot kee p the electricity running in Baghdad for more than a couple of hours a day, yet still manage to build themselves the biggest embassy on Earth? Irritation grows as residents deprived of air-conditioning and running water three years after th e US-led invasion watch the massive US Embassy they call 'George W's palace' ris ing from the banks of the Tigris. In the pavement cafs, people moan that the stru

cture is bigger than anything Saddam Hussein built. Officially, the design of th e compound is supposed to be a secret, but you cannot hide the giant constructio n cranes and the concrete contours of the 21 buildings that are taking shape. Lo oming over the skyline, the embassy has the distinction of being the only big US building project in Iraq that is on time and within budget. In a week when Wash ington revealed a startling list of missed deadlines and overspending on buildin g projects, Congress was told that the bill for the embassy was $592 million (312 million). Note: For the deeper reasons behind this war, don't miss http://www.WantToKnow.i nfo/warcoverup

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi 2006-04-10, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR20060409008... [April 10, 2006] The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnif y the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military doc uments. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligen ce officials believe may have...helped the Bush administration tie the war to... Sept. 11. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted d eadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," [s aid] Col. Derek Harvey, who...was one of the top officers handling Iraq intellig ence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature...made him more important than he really is." One b riefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army G en. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home aud ience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war. There were d irect military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One sli de in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqaw i was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter. Filkins's resulting art icle...ran on the Times front page. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million. "Villainize Zarqawi" one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed..."PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work. One internal br iefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said..."The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

UK film: terror fears exaggerated 2005-05-14, CNN/Reuters http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/14/film.cannes.terrorfears.reut CANNES, France (Reuters) -- A British documentary arguing U.S. neo-conservatives have exaggerated the terror threat is set to rock the Cannes Film Festival on S aturday, the way "Fahrenheit 9/11" stirred emotions here a year ago. At a screen ing late on Friday ahead of its gala on Saturday, "The Power of Nightmares" by f ilmmaker and senior BBC producer Adam Curtis kept an audience of journalists and film buyers glued to their seats and taking notes for a full 2-1/2 hours. The f ilm, a non-competition entry, argues that the fear of terrorism has come to perv ade politics in the United States and Britain even though much of that angst is based on carefully nurtured illusions. Note: To view this excellent film online free, click here.

Brigadier shocks and awes: there is no war on terrorism

2005-04-27, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Brigadier-shocks-and-awes-there-is-no-war... The so-called global war on terrorism does not exist, a high-ranking army office r has declared in a speech that challenges the conventional political wisdom. In a frank speech, Brigadier Justin Kelly dismissed several of the central tenets of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, saying the "war" part is all about pol itics and terrorism is merely a tactic. Speaking at a conference on future warfi ghting, Brigadier Kelly, the director-general of future land warfare, also sugge sted that the "proposition you can bomb someone into thinking as we do has been found to be untrue".

Why We Fight 2005-03-23, BBC (Film Review) http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/why-we-fight.shtml This award-winning film provides an inside look at the anatomy of the American w ar machine. Why We Fight [was originally] the title of a series of propaganda fi lms that Frank Capra began making in 1942, with the aim of encouraging the Ameri can war effort against Nazism. Director Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kiss inger) has used the films as a commentary on the contemporary obsession of the A merican elite with military power. He also harks back to a speech by President E isenhower, who, just before he left office, referred to the "military-industrial complex". Eisenhower was worried that too much intelligence, and too much busin ess acumen in America, had become focussed on the production of unnecessary weap ons systems. Since Eisenhower's time, everything has become much worse, as Eugen e Jarecki describes it. The war in Iraq was made possible by a new range of weap ons systems: a bomb called the "bunker buster" was dropped by stealth bombers on the first night of the conflict. Is American foreign policy dominated by the id ea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life ? Jarecki's shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative ans wer to each of these questions. Note: To watch this great film (which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance F ilm Festival) free online, click here or here. For powerful information on cover -ups around war, click here.

Secret US plans for Iraq's oil 2005-03-17, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4354269.stm The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 at tacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil. Two years ago toda y - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would beg in to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered. In fact there were two conflicting plans, settin g off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side , versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmati sts". "Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan [was] drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants. Insiders told Newsnight that planning beg an "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the Septemb er 11th attack on the US. The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secre t plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives inten t on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel. Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Governmen

t a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in Ma y 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facili ties while I was involved." Formerly US Secretary of State, [James] Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi Arabian government.

Anti-war activist's works banned at prison camps 2009-10-11, Miami Herald http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/v-fullstory/story/1275646... Professor Noam Chomsky may be among America's most enduring anti-war activists. But the leftist intellectual's anthology of post-9/11 commentary is taboo at Gua ntnamo's prison camp library, which offers books and videos on Harry Potter, Worl d Cup soccer and Islam. U.S. military censors recently rejected a Pentagon lawye r's donation of an Arabic-language copy of the political activist and linguistic professor's 2007 anthology Interventions for the library. Chomsky, 80, who has been voicing disgust with U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War, reacted wit h irritation and derision. "This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes," he told The Miami Herald by e-mail after learning of the decision. "Of some inciden tal interest, perhaps, is the nature of the book they banned. It consists of opeds written for The New York Times syndicate and distributed by them. The subver sive rot must run very deep." Prison camp officials would not say specifically w hy the book was rejected. A rejection slip accompanying the Chomsky book did not explain the reason but listed categories of restricted literature to include th ose espousing "Anti-American, Anti-Semitic, Anti-Western" ideology, literature o n "military topics." Prison camp staff would not say how many donated books have been refused.

Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib ... Bagram? 2009-07-11, Sunday Herald (One of Scotland's leading newspapers) http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.2518245... Noor Habib's hands shake as he draws a picture of how he says he was abused. He claims that he was taken to a small, darkened cell where his arms were tied to t he ceiling and he was made to stand in waist-deep water for six hours at a time. He says he was beaten, threatened with dogs, and deprived of sleep. Habib was a n inmate at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, an American military detenti on centre outside Kabul. Over a period of more than two months, we tracked down 27 former detainees. There were others, but they were afraid to speak or had bee n warned not to. Many allegations of ill-treatment appear repeatedly in the inte rviews; physical abuse, the use of stress positions, excessive heat or cold, unb earably loud noise, being forced to remove clothes in front of female soldiers a nd in four cases, being threatened with death at gunpoint. All the men who spoke to us were interviewed in isolation and they were all asked the same questions. They were held at times between 2002 and 2008 and they were all accused of belo nging to or helping al-Qaeda or the Taliban. None of the inmates were charged wi th any offence or put on trial. The camp has held thousands of people over the l ast eight years. Most of the inmates are Afghans but some were captured abroad a nd brought here under a process known as "extraordinary rendition", including at least two Britons. The Obama administration says they are dangerous men and it classifies them as "terrorist suspects" and "enemy combatants" rather than "pris oners of war". It is a legal classification that critics say deliberately denies inmates access to lawyers or the right to appeal or even complain about their t reatment. Note: For more revelations from reliable, verifiable sources of the horrific abu

ses carried out under US direction at secret prisons worldwide, click here.

Israelis intercept Gaza aid ship 2009-06-30, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8127145.stm Israeli forces have boarded a ship trying to carry aid and pro-Palestinian activ ists to the Gaza Strip in defiance of Israel's blockade of the territory. The 20 passengers include former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Prize win ner Mairead Maguire. Ms McKinney described it as "an outrageous violation of int ernational law", as the boat was on a humanitarian mission and was not in Israel i waters. The US-based Free Gaza Movement has breached the blockade five times s ince August 2008. Two other attempts by the activist group were stopped by Israe li warships during Israel's three-week military offensive in Gaza in December an d January. The mission is the latest by the Free Gaza Movement, which has rename d the ferry Spirit of Humanity. "This is an outrageous violation of internationa l law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rig hts mission to the Gaza Strip," said Ms McKinney in a statement. "President [Bar ack] Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that's exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey." On Monday, a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross described the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza as people "trapped in despair", unable to rebuild their lives af ter Israel's offensive. Donors have pledged $4.5 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation in Gaza following the 22-day offensive which left more than 50,00 0 homes, 800 industrial properties and 200 schools damaged or destroyed, as well as 39 mosques and two churches. Note: A similar boat was rammed by the Israeli military about six months ago. To watch a 3-minute CNN interview on this, click here.

They May Not Want The Bomb 2009-05-23, Newsweek magazine http://www.newsweek.com/id/199147 Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you t hink. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be ha ppy with a peaceful civilian program. Over the last five years, senior Iranian o fficials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to buil d nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime's foundin g father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were "un-I slamic." The country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that "developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbid den under Islam." Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting w ith the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives i ts legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapon s are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini's statements and stop issuing new fatwas against n ukes. Following a civilian nuclear strategy has big benefits. The country would remain within international law, simply asserting its rights under the Nuclear N on-Proliferation Treaty, a position that has much support across the world. That would make comprehensive sanctions against Iran impossible. And if Tehran's aim is to expand its regional influence, it doesn't need a bomb to do so.

How 07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate 2009-04-28, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/media/28abc.html?partner=rss&emc=r... In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government s use of w aterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiria kou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspecte d terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that w hile he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yie lded results very quickly. Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterbo arded for probably 30, 35 seconds, Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. F rom that day on he answered every question. His claims unverified at the time, bu t repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers have been sharply contr adicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah at least 83 times. Some critics say that the now-dis credited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the pub lic perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique. I think it was sanitized by the way it was described in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch. On World News, ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself never carried out any of the waterboarding. Still, he t old ABC that the actions had disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attac ks. A video of the interview was no longer on ABC's website. Note: For the transcript of the original ABC interview of John Kiriakou, click h ere. To watch a video of the interview which ABC News removed from its website, click here.

Obama's NSC Will Get New Power 2009-02-08, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/07/AR20090207020... President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Coun cil, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy acros s a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues. The result will be a "dr amatically different" NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its pre decessors since the forum was established after World War II ... according to na tional security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an intervie w. Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process a nd be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama. The new structur e ... will expand the NSC's reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign po licy issues. New NSC directorates will deal with such department-spanning 21st-c entury issues as cybersecurity, energy, climate change, nation-building and infr astructure. Many of the functions of the Homeland Security Council, established as a separate White House entity by President Bush after the terrorist attacks o f Sept. 11, 2001, may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is still un determined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a separate body within the White House. Over the next 50 days, John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who serves a s presidential adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security and is Jones's deputy, will review options for the homeland council, including its responsibil ity for preparing for and responding to natural and terrorism-related domestic d isasters.

Judge Orders 17 Detainees at Guantnamo Freed 2008-10-07, New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/washington/08detain.html?partner=rssuserlan... A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detaine es at Guantnamo Bay by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration s detention policies. The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, where they hav e been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of t he restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area. I think the moment has ar rived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for d etention, Judge Urbina said. Saying the men had never fought the United States an d were not a security threat, he tersely rejected Bush administration claims tha t he lacked the power to order the men set free in the United States and governm ent requests that he stay his order to permit an immediate appeal. The ruling wa s a sharp setback for the administration, which has waged a long legal battle to defend its policies of detention at the naval base at Guantnamo Bay, arguing a b road executive power in waging war. Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have waded through detention questions and in several major cases the courts have rej ected administration contentions. The government recently conceded that it would no longer try to prove that the Uighurs were enemy combatants, the classificati on it uses to detain people at Guantnamo, where 255 men are now held. Note: For many disturbing reports from reliable, verifiable sources on threats t o civil liberties, click here.

Bush Doctrine enters American vocabulary 2008-09-26, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/26/EDGR135ERL.DTL Thanks to the Sept. 11 interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson of ABC News, t he Bush Doctrine has become part of the American vocabulary. Although it has bee n a fateful doctrine - it was used to justify the attack on Iraq - many American s reported that they were as clueless about it as Gov. Palin. So what is the Bus h Doctrine? According to international law as generally understood since the cre ation of the United Nations, a pre-emptive attack is legal only if a country has certain knowledge that an attack on it is imminent - too imminent for the matte r to be taken to the U.N. Security Council. Pre-emptive war is different from pr eventive war, in which a country, fearing that another country may become strong enough to threaten it at some time in the future, attacks it to prevent this po ssibility. Preventive wars are illegal under international law. This distinction , however, creates a terminological problem: Although preventive war is worse th an pre-emptive war, to most ears preemption sounds worse. Many people, therefore , speak of pre-emptive war when they mean preventive war. To avoid confusion, we can use the term pre-emptive-preventive war. Neoconservatives, the most powerfu l of whom is Vice President Dick Cheney, had long disliked the idea that America 's use of military power could be constrained by the prohibition against preempt ive-preventive war. In 1992, his last year as secretary of defense, Cheney produ ced a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance that said the United States should use force to "pre-empt" and "preclude threats." After the 9/11 terrorist attacks , the neocons were able to turn their wish into U.S. policy. Note: This article is by WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin. He analyzes t he significance of the 9/11 attacks for the acceptance of the Bush Doctrine in m ore detail in his recent book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, pointing out that the author of the document which first made the doctrine official policy was Phi lip Zelikow, who then later became executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom 2008-09-09, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/world/africa/09cairo.html Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom [in Cairo] that Osama bin Lade n and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 1 1, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in thei r planning, if not their execution, too. Look, I don t believe what your government s and press say. It just can t be true, said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. Why would they tell the truth? I th ink the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oi l. Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs like themselves could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington s post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks , especially with the invasion of Iraq. Maybe people who executed the operation w ere Arabs, but the brains? No way, said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store ow ner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. It was organized by other people, the Uni ted States or the Israelis. Zein al-Abdin, 42, an electrician, [said] What happene d in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda. They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that s why. Note: For a two-page summary of many reports from reliable, verifiable sources t hat highlight unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click her e.

Pentagon Debates Development of Offensive Cyberspace Capabilities 2008-09-08, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cyber8-2008sep08,0,10498... Igniting a provocative new debate, senior military officials are pushing the Pen tagon to go on the offensive in cyberspace by developing the ability to attack o ther nations' computer systems, rather than concentrating on defending America's electronic security. Under the most sweeping proposals, military experts would acquire the know-how to commandeer the unmanned aerial drones of adversaries, di sable enemy warplanes in mid-flight and cut off electricity at precise moments t o strategic locations, such as military installations, while sparing humanitaria n facilities, such as hospitals. An expansion of offensive capabilities in cyber space would represent an important change for the military. But a new National M ilitary Strategy for Cyberspace Operations, declassified earlier this year, fuel ed the Pentagon debate and gave the military a green light to push for expanded capabilities. "As we go forward in time, cyber is going to be a very important p art of our war-fighting tactics, techniques and procedures," said Michael W. Wyn ne, a former Air Force secretary. Under Wynne, the Air Force established a provi sional Cyber Command in 2007 and made operating in the cyber domain part of its mission statement, on par with air operations. Wynne clashed with superiors over the Air Force approach to cyberspace and other issues and was fired in June aft er breakdowns in U.S. nuclear weapons security procedures. New Air Force leaders now are reassessing plans for a permanent Cyber Command, which under Wynne's le adership would have included some offensive capabilities.

Use of Iraq Contractors Costs Billions, Report Says 2008-08-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/washington/12contractors.html?partner=rssus...

The United States this year will have spent [at least] $100 billion on contracto rs in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush admini stration s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released [on August 12]. The report, by the Congressional Budget Office ... will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies. The Pentagon s reliance on outside contractors in I raq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fuel ed charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and un safe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about wh ether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield. The budget office s report found that from 2003 to 2007, the government awarded contracts in Iraq worth about $85 billion, and that the administration was now awarding contracts at a rate of $15 billion to $20 billio n a year. At that pace, contracting costs will surge past the $100 billion mark before the end of the year. Through 2007, spending on outside contractors accoun ted for 20 percent of the total costs of the war, the budget office found. The d ependence on private companies to support the war effort has led to questions ab out whether political favoritism has played a role in the awarding of multibilli on-dollar contracts. Note: For many disturbing reports on the realities of the Afghan and Iraq wars f rom major media sources, click here.

A History of Abuse in the War on Terror 2008-07-22, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/books/22schuessler.html?partner=rssuserland... The Dark Side, Jane Mayer s gripping new account of the war on terror, is really t he story of two wars: the far-flung battle against Islamic radicalism, and the b itter, closed-doors domestic struggle over whether the president should have lim itless power to wage it. The war on terror, according to Ms. Mayer, ... was a "p olitical battle cloaked in legal strategy, an ideological trench war" waged by a small group of true believers whose expansive views of executive power she trac es from the Nixon administration through the Iran-contra scandal to the panicked days after 9/11. Ms. Mayer s prime movers and main villains are Vice President Di ck Cheney and his legal counsel (now chief of staff) David Addington, who after the terrorist attacks moved to establish "a policy of deliberate cruelty that wo uld ve been unthinkable on Sept. 10." As the leader of the self-styled "war counci l," a group of lawyers who took the lead in making the rules for the war on terr or, Mr. Addington startled many colleagues with the depth of his fervor and the reach of his power. The war council settled on a "pre-emptive criminal model," i n which suspects would be used more or less indefinitely to gather evidence of f uture crimes rather than held accountable for previous ones. There would be mini mal oversight from Congress. The C.I.A. would take the lead, developing aggressi ve new interrogation methods that would be described as enhanced, robust, special. t they were not, a series of secret memos issued by John Yoo and others at the O ffice of Legal Council would attempt to certify, was torture. Note: For lots more on the realities behind the "war on terror", click here.

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US weapons 'withdrawn' from base 2008-06-27, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/suffolk/7477718.stm

Peace campaigners have welcomed reports that the US military has withdrawn its l ast nuclear weapons from Britain. The Federation of American Scientists said in a report 110 nuclear bombs were removed from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. The US m ilitary said it was policy not to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapon s at Lakenheath. Kate Hudson, from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), s aid: "We would like official confirmation from the government that this has happ ened." She added: "We believe an open admission will be a confidence-boosting me asure for future disarmament initiatives." The report's author, Hans Kristensen, said the move had happened in the past few years. Mr Kristensen, an expert on t he US nuclear arsenal, said the withdrawal of the bombs [is] part of a general s trategic shift since the end of the Cold War. The Suffolk base has been the site of many protests over the years, mainly due to the claims that nuclear bombs we re stored at the base.

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back 2008-06-19, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html?partner=rssuse... Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil conces sions to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power. Exxon Mobil, Shell, To the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company along with Chevro tal and BP n and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq s largest fields. The deals, expected to be anno unced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentia lly lucrative country for their operations. The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, i ncluding companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts [would] give the co mpanies an advantage in bidding on future contracts. There was suspicion among m any in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United Sta tes had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts s eek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to c ombat terrorism. Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the w ar and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior official s of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be ident ified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry. Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the real reasons behin d the war in Iraq, click here.

Officer calls Sept. 11 cases tainted 2008-06-05, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-tribunal5-2008jun05,0,79... When Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged collaborators in the Sept. 11 terror ist attacks appear before the war crimes tribunal here today, ousted chief prose cutor Col. Morris D. Davis will not be celebrating. Davis, who has spent half of his life in the military justice system, still considers it "the most ethical p rocess in the world." But the Pentagon's push to prosecute the so-called 9/11 Fi ve is tainted, in his view, by political intrusions, illegal influence applied b y more-senior officers and reliance on evidence obtained through coercion or tor ture. Davis drew the wrath of many in the Pentagon hierarchy when he objected la st fall to pressures from Bush administration political appointees to prosecute Mohammed, known in intelligence circles as KSM, ahead of other war crimes suspec

ts whose cases were already researched and on whom vital evidence was declassifi ed. Unless the evidence prosecutors have against Mohammed and his codefendants i s declassified, much of their prosecution will be conducted behind closed doors, depriving the American media and public of a clear view of the proceedings, he says. Davis ran afoul of superiors ... when he advised his prosecutors against r elying on evidence obtained through waterboarding and other interrogation techni ques that have been deemed coercive or tantamount to torture. Davis resigned aft er political appointees at the Pentagon rejected his judgment on the choice of c ases to be tried in the months leading up to this November's election, as well a s his advice against building prosecutions on coerced and potentially unreliable confessions.

Hundreds of Iraq schemes 'failed' 2008-04-28, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7370355.stm An audit of US-funded reconstruction projects for Iraq has found millions of dol lars have been wasted because many schemes have never been completed. The Specia l Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction blamed delays, costs, poor performan ce and violence for failure to finish some 855 projects. Many other projects had been falsely described as complete, found the audit of 47,321 reconstruction pr ojects. Iraq reconstruction has cost US taxpayers more than $100bn so far. USAID , the body responsible for overseeing Iraqi reconstruction, has responded that t he database used for the review was incomplete. The audit by Senator Stuart Bowe n found US officials had terminated at least 855 projects before completion. Of this number, 112 were ended because of the contractors' poor performance. Daniel le Brian, executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversig ht, said: "The report paints a depressing picture of money being poured into fai led Iraq reconstruction projects. Contractors are killed, projects are blown up just before being completed, or the contractor just stops doing the work." Last year, congressional investigators said as much as $10bn (5bn) charged by US contr actors for Iraq reconstruction had been questionable. Note: Why is the U.S. spending over $100 billion to "reconstruct" Iraq? That's o ver $500 for each taxpayer in the U.S., with little to show for it. For more, se e what a highly decorated U.S. general has to say on all this by clicking here.

General Clears Army Officer of Crime in Abu Ghraib Case 2008-01-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/washington/11abuse.html?ex=1357707600&en=b9... The only United States Army officer to face a court-martial over the scandal at Iraq s Abu Ghraib prison has been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing in the case. A court-martial convicted Lt. Col. Steven Jordan in August of disobeying an orde r not to discuss the investigation of abuse at the jail and issued him a crimina l reprimand as penalty. But Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, commanding officer for the A rmy Military District of Washington, disapproved of both the conviction and the reprimand. The decision by General Rowe wipes Colonel Jordan s record clean of any criminal responsibility. Colonel Jordan had once faced a maximum punishment of five years in prison and dismissal from the Army over the Abu Ghraib scandal, wh ich unleashed a wave of global condemnation against the United States when image s of abused prisoners surfaced in 2004. The photos included scenes of naked deta inees stacked in a pyramid and other inmates cowering in front of snarling dogs. Colonel Jordan, who was in charge of an Abu Ghraib interrogation center, said h e had played no part in the abuse and complained that the military was trying to make him a scapegoat. His defense team also argued that he held no command auth

ority at the prison. The judicial panel of 10 officers that convicted him in Aug ust of disobeying the order also acquitted him of any responsibility for the cru el treatment of Abu Ghraib detainees. Eleven lower-ranking soldiers have been co nvicted in military courts in connection with the physical abuse and sexual humi liation of Abu Ghraib detainees. Two other officers have been disciplined by the Army, but neither faced criminal charges or dismissal.

Doubts grow over Iranian boat threats 2008-01-11, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2239119,00.html Doubts intensified last night over the nature of an alleged aggressive confronta tion by Iranian patrol boats and American warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday , after Pentagon officials admitted that they could not confirm that a threat to blow up the US ships had been made directly by the Iranian crews involved in th e incident. Several news sources reported that senior navy officials had concede d that the voice threatening to blow up the US warships in a matter of minutes c ould have come from another ship in the region, or even from shore. The concessi on came on the day that a formal American complaint was lodged with Iran over th e incident, and just 24 hours after President George Bush ... warned Tehran to d esist from such aggression and said any repetition would lead to "serious conseq uences". On Tuesday, the US administration released video footage that it said s howed the Iranian speedboats harassing the American vessels. A voice in English with a strong accent was heard to say: "I am coming at you - you will explode in a couple of minutes." Yesterday the Iranians put out their own four-minute vide o that showed an Iranian patrol officer in a small boat communicating with one o f the US ships. "Coalition warship number 73, this is an Iranian navy patrol boa t," the Iranian said. An American naval officer replied: "This is coalition wars hip number 73 operating in international waters." The voice of the Iranian sailo r in Tehran's footage was different [from] the deeper and more menacing voice th reatening to blow up the warships in the US version. Nor was there any sign of a ggressive behaviour by the Iranian patrol boats. The mystery remains of where th e voice that apparently threatened to bomb the US ships came from. The Pentagon has said that it recorded the film and the sound separately, and then stitched t hem together - a dubious piece of editing even before it became known that the s ource of the voice could not, with certainty, be linked to the Iranian patrol bo ats. Note: Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?

Immunity for Telecoms May Set Bad Precedent, Legal Scholars Say 2007-10-22, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR20071021010... When previous Republican administrations were accused of illegality in the FBI a nd CIA spying abuses of the 1970s or the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, Democr ats in Congress launched investigations or pushed for legislative reforms. But l ast week, faced with admissions by several telecommunication companies that they assisted the Bush administration in warrantless spying on Americans, leaders of the Senate intelligence committee took a much different tack -- proposing legis lation that would grant those companies retroactive immunity from prosecution or lawsuits. The proposal marks the second time in recent years that Congress has moved toward providing legal immunity for past actions that may have been illega l. The Military Commissions Act, passed by a GOP-led Congress in September 2006, provided retroactive immunity for CIA interrogators who could have been accused of war crimes for mistreating detainees. Legal experts say the granting of such

retroactive immunity by Congress is unusual, particularly in a case involving p rivate companies. "It's particularly unusual in the case of the telecoms because you don't really know what you're immunizing," said Louis Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law with the Law Library of the Library of Congress. Civil lib erties groups and many academics argue that Congress is allowing the government to cover up possible wrongdoing and is inappropriately interfering in disputes t hat the courts should decide. The American Civil Liberties Union [said] in a new s release Friday that "the administration is trying to cover its tracks."

Save the Gnostics 2007-10-06, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06deutsch.html?ex=1349409600&en=19a... The [US] didn t set out to eradicate the Mandeans, one of the oldest, smallest and least understood of the many minorities in Iraq. This extinction in the making has simply been another unfortunate ... consequence of our invasion of Iraq thou gh that will be of little comfort to the Mandeans, whose 2,000-year-old culture is in grave danger of disappearing from the face of the earth. The Mandeans are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity, cousins of the people who produced t he ... Gospel of Thomas, a work that sheds invaluable light on the many ways in which Jesus was perceived in the early Christian period. The Mandeans have their own language ... an impressive body of literature, and a treasury of cultural a nd religious traditions amassed over two millennia of living in the southern mar shes of present-day Iraq and Iran. Practitioners of a religion at least as old a s Christianity, the Mandeans have witnessed the rise of Islam; the Mongol invasi on; the arrival of Europeans, who mistakenly identified them as Christians of St. John, because of their veneration of John the Baptist; and, most recently, the o ppressive regime of Saddam Hussein. They have withstood everything until now. Li ke their ancestors, contemporary Mandeans were able to survive as a community be cause of the delicate balance achieved among Iraq s many peoples over centuries of cohabitation. But our reckless prosecution of the war destroyed this balance, a nd the Mandeans, whose pacifist religion prohibits them from carrying weapons ev en for self-defense, found themselves victims of kidnappings, extortion, rapes, beatings, murders and forced conversions carried out by radical Islamic groups a nd common criminals. When American forces invaded in 2003, there were probably 6 0,000 Mandeans in Iraq; today, fewer than 5,000 remain. Note: A fascinating introduction to the culture and history of this ancient peop le is Edmondo Lupieri's The Mandaeans: the Last Gnostics.

Outsourcing foreign policy 2007-09-21, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks21sep21,0,4584140.column For years, the [Bush] administration has been quietly auctioning off U.S. foreig n policy to the highest corporate bidder -- and it may be too late for us to buy it back. Look at Blackwater. Blackwater increasingly promises to do everything the U.S. government can do, but better. Blackwater's facility in North Carolina is the world's largest private military facility -- it's so good that the U.S. m ilitary uses it for training. Since its founding, it has trained 50,000 "consult ants" who can be deployed anywhere in the world. With no geographical limits, th e company is eager to prove its value. Blackwater has trained police in Afghanis tan and naval commandos in Azerbaijan, and it sent heavily armed employees to Ne w Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They started off offering their services as v olunteers -- or vigilantes, some critics said. FEMA, playing catch-up, followed with contracts, as did a number of other agencies. Increasingly, Blackwater look

s like a miniature government. It has people, infrastructure and hardware. For i nstance, it is buying Brazilian-made fighter bombers -- great in combat but not really necessary if you're merely providing civilian bodyguards. Blackwater is u nusual, but it's not entirely unique. Other corporations ... are also eagerly fi lling the vacuum as the U.S. government retreats worldwide from the business of governing. The White House's motives are obvious. Why fight another war, with al l the bother of convincing Congress, if you can quietly hire a private military company to fight it for you? Why interrogate suspected insurgents if you can out source the whole messy business? As for the corporations so eagerly lapping up t he contracting dollars, there's no conspiracy -- it's just the good old profit m otive.

Special military group looks ahead to fight America's future wars 2007-08-26, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/26/BU5ORKEUK.DTL For half a century, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - a low-profil e but vital division of the Defense Department - has ... been the force behind d ozens of weapons, from the M-16 rifle and night-vision goggles to smart bombs an d stealth aircraft. Now, DARPA is planning for a long war in which U.S. troops w ill be expected to face guerrilla adversaries. And just as during the Cold War, DARPA is counting on high-tech Silicon Valley to give U.S. forces the edge. More than 3,000 scientists, entrepreneurs and military leaders ... gathered in Anahe im ... for the agency's 50th anniversary conference. The agency is operating on a $3.1 billion budget, up 8 percent from fiscal 2006. Virtually every Silicon Va lley company, from the obvious candidates like Lockheed Martin Missiles and Spac e to ... Google, has been touched in some way by DARPA. "Almost every great digi tal oak has a DARPA acorn at the bottom," said futurist Paul Saffo. During three days in Anaheim, DARPA and Pentagon officials made 60 presentations, painting a picture of a future in which the United States will have to spend $1 million on countermeasures for every dollar shelled out by bomb-building guerrillas like t hose U.S. forces are encountering in Iraq. But DARPA's high-tech dreams have the ir critics, who view its "visions" as boondoggles the nation can't afford. "I th ink it (DARPA) is basically a jobs program," said Chalmers Johnson, a retired Un iversity of California political scientist. Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentag on's New Map, one of the treatises that lay out the scenario for these asymmetri cal wars that planners expect, [said] "The million-to-one (ratio) is unsustainab le."

Defense Agency Proposes Outsourcing More Spying 2007-08-19, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/18/AR20070818009... The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such fu nctions by the Pentagon's top spying agency. The proposed contracts ... reflect a continuing expansion of the Defense Department's intelligence-related work and fit a well-established pattern of Bush administration transfers of government w ork to private contractors. Since 2000, the value of federal contracts signed by all agencies each year has more than doubled to reach $412 billion, with the la rgest growth at the Defense Department. Outsourcing particularly accelerated amo ng intelligence agencies after the [Sept. 11] 2001 terrorist attacks. The DIA's action comes a few months after CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, acting under pre ssure from Congress, announced a program to cut the agency's hiring of outside c ontractors by at least 10 percent. The DIA is the country's major manager and pr

oducer of foreign military intelligence, with more than 11,000 military and civi lian employees worldwide and a budget of nearly $1 billion. It has its own analy sts from the various services as well as collectors of human intelligence in the Defense HUMINT Service. DIA also manages the Defense attaches stationed in emba ssies all over the world. Unlike the CIA, the DIA outsources the major analytica l products known as all-source intelligence reports, a senior intelligence offic ial said.

Abu Ghraib whistleblower's ordeal 2007-08-05, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6930197.stm When Joe Darby saw the horrific photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison he was stun ned. So stunned that he walked out into the hot Baghdad night and smoked half a dozen cigarettes and agonised over what he should do. Darby was a ... soldier wi th US forces at Abu Ghraib prison when he stumbled across those images which wou ld eventually shock the world in 2004. They were photographs of his colleagues, some of them men and women he had known since high school -- torturing and abusi ng Iraqi prisoners. His decision to hand them over rather than keep quiet change d his life forever. He fears for the safety of his family. Joe Darby knew what h e saw was wrong, but it took him three weeks to decide to hand those photographs in. When he finally did, he was promised anonymity and hoped he would hear no m ore about it. But he was scared of the repercussions. And then he was sitting in a crowded Iraqi canteen with hundreds of soldiers and Donald Rumsfeld came on t he television to thank Joe Darby by name for handing in the photographs. "I don' t think it was an accident because those things are pretty much scripted," Mr Da rby says. "I really find it hard to believe that the secretary of defence of the United States has no idea about the star witness for a criminal case being anon ymous." Rather than turn on him for betraying colleagues, most of the soldiers i n his unit shook his hand. It was at home where the real trouble started. His wi fe ...had to flee to her sister's house which was then vandalised with graffiti. Many in his home town called him a traitor. But he does not see himself as a he ro, or a traitor. Just "a soldier who did his job - no more, no less. I've never regretted for one second what I did when I was in Iraq, to turn those pictures in," he says.

Nations Use Fear to Distract From Rights Abuses, Group Says 2007-05-24, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/23/AR20070523014... Powerful governments and armed groups are spreading fear to divert attention fro m human rights abuses ... Amnesty International said yesterday in its annual ass essment of rights worldwide. "The politics of fear is fueling a downward spiral of human rights abuse in which no right is sacrosanct and no person is safe," sa id Irene Khan, secretary general of the human rights watchdog. Governments are u ndermining the rule of law and human rights with "short-sighted fear-mongering a nd divisive policies." The United States is "the leading country using fear to j ustify the unjustifiable," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty Interna tional USA. "The U.S. used to be in a position to speak out effectively against torture and military tribunals. We can't do that now because we are carrying out some of the same practices," he said. The organization urged the new U.S. Congr ess to take the lead in restoring respect for humane standards and practices at home and abroad. Citizens in many countries are being manipulated by fear, the g roup said. Amnesty applauded civil society for its "courage and commitment" in t he face of abuses. Marches, petitions, blogs and armbands "may not seem much by themselves," the report said, "but by bringing people together they unleash an e

nergy for change that should not be underestimated. People power will change the face of human rights in the 21st century."

Iran Gets Army Gear in Pentagon Sale 2007-01-16, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2797525 The U.S. military has sold forbidden equipment at least a half-dozen times to mi ddlemen for countries including Iran and China who exploited security flaws in t he Defense Department's surplus auctions. The sales include fighter jet parts an d missile components. In one case ... a Pakistani arms broker convicted of expor ting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that h ad bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a gents ... say those parts made it to Iran. In [another] case, convicted middleme n for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the Defense Department's surplus division. C ustoms agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold the m again -- customs evidence tags still attached -- to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran. That incident appalled even an expert on weaknesses in Pentago n surplus security controls. Sensitive military surplus items are supposed to be demilitarized or "de-milled" rendered useless for military purposes or, if auct ioned, sold only to buyers who promise to obey U.S. arms embargoes, export contr ols and other laws. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found it alarmin gly easy to acquire sensitive surplus. Last year, its agents bought $1.1 million worth including rocket launchers, body armor and surveillance antennas by drivi ng onto a base and posing as defense contractors. Investigators have found the P entagon's inventory and sales controls rife with errors.

Rwandan Genocide Survivor Recalls Horror 2006-11-30, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/30/60minutes/main2218371.shtml The genocide in Rwanda 12 years ago was the most efficient ever carried out. 800 ,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days. One incredible and inspiring survivor s tale has come to light only recently. It took Immaculee Ilibagiza, a college-edu cated young woman from a remote village, many years before she could confront th e horrors she lived through. She is speaking out now, she says, to prevent furth er atrocities. It was extremely low tech ... just machetes, spears and knives, w ielded by Hutus, the majority tribe as they tried to wipe out the minority Tutsi s. [They] were slaughtered in their tracks, wherever they were found. When it wa s over, three out of every four Tutsis in Rwanda had been killed. When it began, Immaculee's father told her to run to a minister s house three miles away, and to beg him to hide her. The minister was a Hutu. [He] put Immaculee and six other women in a tiny, rarely used bathroom in a remote corner of the house. Seven wom en were huddled in a bathroom measuring three feet by four feet, for 91 days. Th ey took turns standing and stretching. "They were searching. They were there all the time," Immaculee remembers. She lost 40 pounds one third of herself. What p rompted the genocide? The Hutus had long-standing resentments against the Tutsis , who formed the nation's elite. There are things you can point to, but ... what could possibly explain what happened? Immaculee knows Rwandans can never forget but believes they must forgive. Revenge ... only prolongs the pain. Now she's a woman on a mission to spread the story ... hoping it can prevent future atrocit ies. She has giving lectures; she has written a book; and she is determined to s top the inevitable revisionists who claim the genocide never happened. Note: An intense video clip of this story is available at the CBS link above. Th

is article fails to mention the key fact that top officials in developing nation s knew very well of the mass murder as it was happening, yet refused to send hel p. This is graphically portrayed in the powerful movie Hotel Rwanda. Immacullee' s amazing book, Left to Tell, has been an huge inspiration to many people around the world.

Cops Taser UCLA Student 2006-11-17, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2662158 There is [a] painful six-minute video that has suddenly spread all over the worl d. It shows part of what happened in front of students who had been studying in the UCLA library when an Iranian-American student reportedly did not show any ID to campus police. The excruciating video clip [shows] enraged students screamin g at police; police yelling back and using strong force trying to get students u nder control. "Here's your Patriot Act!" shouts a student, using profanity after screaming out in anguished pain from the electric jolts of a police Taser. "Sta nd up or you'll get Tasered again!" the police shout back. Appalled fellow stude nts crowd in, some demanding the badge numbers of the police. To watch the video , click here. Police Department Assistant Chief Jeff Young [said] "He had refuse d to identify himself; he had refused to leave the library, and...he went limp, which is a form of resistance." Some students saw it differently. "Tabatabaineja d was also stunned with the Taser when he was already handcuffed," complained th ird-year student Carlos Zaragoza. Tasers are increasingly controversial a powerf ul means of control for police that is apparently sometimes too powerful. While it is often referred to as a "non-lethal" weapon [a study] found that since 1999 , 84 people in the United States and Canada have died after being shocked by a T aser. Four of UCLA's nearly 60 full-time police officers recently won "Taser Awa rds," given by the manufacturers of the electronic shock device. Note: For lots more reliable information on "non-lethal weapons," click here.

Failures of Imagination 2006-09-01, September/October 2006 Issue Columbia Journalism Review http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Umansky.asp It was early December 2002. [Carlotta] Gall, the Afghanistan correspondent for T he New York Times, had just seen a press release from the U.S. military announci ng the death of a prisoner at its Bagram Air Base. Soon thereafter the military issued a second release about another detainee death at Bagram. Gall: I just want ed to know more. And I came up against a blank wall." The body of one of the det ainees had been returned, a young taxi driver known as Dilawar. Gall met with Di lawar s family, and his brother handed Gall a death certificate...that the militar y had issued. It said, homicide. The press release announcing Dilawar s death stated. ..heart attack, a conclusion repeated by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. But the death certificate, the authenticity of which the military later confirme d to Gall, stated that Dilawar who was just twenty-two years old died as a resul t of blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disea se. Gall filed a story. It sat for a month. I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run. Gall s story...had been at the center of an editorial fight. Roger Co hen, then the Times s foreign editor: I pitched it, I don t know, four times at pageone meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. My single greatest frustr ation as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one. The story ran on page fourteen under the headline "U.S.Military Investigating Death of Af ghan in Custody." The Times also reported that officers who had overseen the Bag ram prison at the time were promoted; another, who had lied to investigators, wa

s transferred to help oversee interrogations at Abu Ghraib and awarded a Bronze Star. Note: Why does it take a university journal to ask the hard questions? Again and again, news that should be front-page headlines is buried on insignificant page s or not reported at all. This key article from one of the most respected school s of journalism in the world tells it all about the unreported and underreported violent abuse of prisoners condoned by elements of the U.S. military. Don't mis s reading this most powerful story in its entirety.

Media Shrug Off Mass Movement Against War 2005-09-28, Media Channel http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/1192 Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday. But if you relied on televi sion for your news, you'd hardly know the protests happened at all. According to the Nexis news database, the only mention on the network newscasts that Saturda y came on the NBC Nightly News, where the massive march received all of 87 words . CNN anchor Aaron Brown offered an interesting explanation (9/24/05): "There wa s a huge 100,000 people [march] in Washington protesting the war in Iraq today, and I...feel like I've heard from all 100,000 upset that they did not get any co verage, and it's true they didn't get any coverage." Note: See also Detroit News blog on this topic: http://info.detnews.com/weblog/i ndex.cfm?blogid=5304

Stampeding Congress, Again 2007-08-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/opinion/03fri1.html?ex=1343793600&en=269721... Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has repeatedly demonst rated that it does not feel bound by the law or the Constitution. It cannot even be trusted to properly use the enhanced powers it was legally granted after the attacks. Yet, once again, President Bush has been trying to stampede Congress i nto a completely unnecessary expansion of his power to spy on Americans. The fig ht is over the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the go vernment to obtain a warrant before eavesdropping on electronic communications t hat involve someone in the United States. Mr. Bush decided after 9/11 that he wa s no longer going to obey that law. He authorized the National Security Agency t o intercept international telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans and o ther residents of this country without a court order. He told the public nothing and Congress next to nothing about what he was doing, until The Times disclosed the spying in December 2005. Ever since, the White House has tried to pressure Congress into legalizing Mr. Bush s rogue operation. The administration and its .. . supporters in Congress argue that American intelligence is blinded by FISA and have seized on neatly timed warnings of heightened terrorist activity to scare everyone. It is vital for Americans, especially lawmakers, to resist that argume nt. It is pure propaganda. [The question at issue is] whether we are a nation ru led by law, or the whims of men in power.

I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty. 2007-05-27, Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR20070525020... When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pond ering my responsibility for his death. Among the hundreds of messages that my wi fe and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me persona lly culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid an d comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son's death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings. This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, rep eated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. What exactly is a father's duty when his son is sent into harm's way? Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing h is utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen. As a citizen, I h ave tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. fore ign policy. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washin gton would listen and respond. This, I can now see, was an illusion. The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm ele ctions signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in ou r present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of tho se, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disrega rd for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people." To be fai r, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrat s who control Congress than with the president and his party. Note: The author, Andrew Bacevich, is a conservative professor on international relations at Boston University. The title of his highly praised 2006 book, The N ew American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, establishes the case f or an American empire which is not benign. For more on the war machine, click he re.

Canada offers forum for lecturer barred from U.S. 2007-04-11, Globe and Mail (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070411.IRAQI11/TPStory/Nat... A highly regarded Iraqi epidemiologist who wants to tell Americans about an alar ming rise in cancer levels among Iraqi children will come to Canada instead beca use he couldn't get a visa to the United States. Unable to travel to the Univers ity of Washington, Riyadh Lafta -- best known for a controversial study that est imated Iraq's body count in the U.S.-led war in Iraq at more than half a million -- will arrive at Simon Fraser University in B.C. this month to give a lecture and meet with research associates. "The University of Washington wanted him, but the U.S. denied his entry," said his colleague at SFU, Tim Takaro. Once in Cana da, Dr. Lafta will present estimates that paint a damning portrait of the war's ravages on children: that birth defects are on the rise since the war began, and that the number of children dying from cancers such as leukemia has risen tenfo ld. Dr. Lafta had tried for six months to get a visa into Seattle to speak in Wa shington, and was ignored a half-dozen times, Dr. Takaro said.

Documents Shed Light on C.I.A.'s Use of Ex-Nazis 2006-06-06, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/washington/06cnd-nazi.html?ex=1307246400&en... The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to C.I.A. documents that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis

as informers after World War II. The United States government...had no policy a t the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The documents show the C.I.A. "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "forced us to confront not only the mora l harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis. As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers an d having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the C.I.A. to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hit ler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view tha t most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet K.G.B. Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has p ersuaded the government to declassify more than 8 million pages of documents. Bu t the group ran into resistance starting in 2002 from the C.I.A., which sought t o withhold operational files from the 1940's and 50's. Note: For more on clandestine government use of Nazi scientists in developing to p-secret mind control programs with links for verification, see http://www.WantT oKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg

Planted PR Stories Not News to Military 2005-12-18, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-infowar18dec18,0,6619536... U.S. military officials in Iraq were fully aware that a Pentagon contractor regu larly paid Iraqi newspapers to publish positive stories about the war, and made it clear that none of the stories should be traced to the United States, accordi ng to several current and former employees of Lincoln Group, the Washington-base d contractor. In contrast to assertions by military officials in Baghdad and Was hington, interviews and Lincoln Group documents show that the information campai gn waged over the last year was designed to cloak any connection to the U.S. mil itary. "In clandestine parlance, Lincoln Group was a 'cutout' -- a third party - that would provide the military with plausible deniability," said a former Lin coln Group employee. A number of workers who carried out Lincoln Group's offensi ve, including a $20-million two-month contract to influence public opinion in Ir aq...describe a campaign that was unnecessarily costly, poorly run and largely i neffective at improving America's image in Iraq. Lincoln Group...had little publ ic relations or communications experience when it won its first psychological op erations contract last year. Yet it has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the information war, and now has 20 Pentagon contracts.

Blackwater Down 2005-09-22, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/22/opinion/main878822.shtml The men from Blackwater USA arrived in New Orleans right after Katrina hit. The company known for its private security work guarding senior U.S. diplomats in Ir aq beat the federal government and most aid organizations to the scene. About 15 0 heavily armed Blackwater troops dressed in full battle gear spread out into th e chaos of New Orleans. When asked what authority they were operating under, one guy said, "We're on contract with the Department of Homeland Security." Then, p ointing to one of his comrades, he said, "He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem i t necessary." Says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Ri ghts, "These private security forces have behaved brutally, with impunity, in Ir

aq. To have them now on the streets of New Orleans is frightening and possibly i llegal." Blackwater is operating under a federal contract...[that] was announced just days after Homeland Security Department spokesperson Russ Knocke told the Washington Post he knew of no federal plans to hire Blackwater. With President B ush using the Katrina disaster to try to repeal Posse Comitatus (the ban on usin g U.S. troops in domestic law enforcement)...the war is coming home in yet anoth er ominous way. As one Blackwater mercenary said, "This is a trend. You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."

'Soldiers of Conscience': To kill or not kill 2008-10-15, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/14/DDBL13G653.DTL As independent documentary filmmakers from Berkeley, husband and wife Gary Weimb erg and Catherine Ryan knew the Army's press office might be suspicious of their request to interview soldiers for a film about the morality of killing. Much to their surprise, though, the Army brass not only granted access to recruits on t heir way to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the couple's new film, "Soldiers of Consci ence," which airs Thursday on PBS, also struck such a deep chord among the milit ary, it's now to be shown in sophomore ethics classes at West Point. "They sent us a very nice, but terse, statement after they viewed it," Weimberg recalled of the military press aides who signed off on the finished product. "It read: This is approved. And, Thank you." In "Soldiers," Weimberg and Ryan focus on eight y oung soldiers, four of whom decide they can't pull the trigger after they reach the battlefield. Viewers may wonder why anyone with pacifist tendencies would jo in the Army, but each soldier has a trench epiphany - what the military calls a "crystallization of conscience" - and it's clear only the realities of wars can dredge up such emotions. The filmmakers do their utmost to ignore politics - the ir subjects barely mention their commander in chief's arguments for war - focusi ng, instead, on how soldiers marshall the will to attack. "It's not a film about Iraq," Ryan said. "Even in the wars that are supposed to be 'good wars' and fou ght for 'good reasons,' this question gets raised, and these stories occur." Note: For many key reports on the realities of the Iraq and Afghan wars, click h ere.

Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security 2008-06-18, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/arts/18minerva.html?partner=rssuserland&emc... The Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scie ntists and direct the nation s brainpower to combating security threats like the C hinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative named Minerva, after the Roman godd ess of wisdom (and warriors) to the government s effort to pump up its intellectua l capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. A lthough the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, system atic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. But if the un customary push to engage the nation s evolutionary psychologists, demographers, so ciologists, historians and anthropologists in security research as well as the p rospect of new financial support in lean times has generated excitement among so me scholars, it has also aroused opposition from others, who worry that the Defe nse Department and the academy are getting too cozy. Cooperation between univers ities and the Pentagon has long been a contentious issue. The Pentagon put out i ts first requests for proposals last week. Minerva will award $50 million over f ive years. Another set of grants administered by the National Science Foundation

is expected to be announced by the end of this month. [Gates] contacted Robert M. Berdahl, [former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley and] th e president of the Association of American Universities which represents 60 of t he top research universities in the country in December to help design Minerva. Note: For many revealing reports on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.

New Details on Tillman's Death 2007-07-27, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3419299 Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bu llet holes in Pat Tillman's forehead and tried without success to get authoritie s to investigate whether the former NFL player's death amounted to a crime. "The medical evidence did not match up with the ... scenario as described," a doctor who examined Tillman's body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanist an in 2004 told investigators. The doctors ... said that the bullet holes were s o close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away. The medical examiners' suspicions were outlined in 2,300 pages of testimony released to the AP this week by the Defense Departm ent in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Among other information contained in the documents: Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mai ls for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal f riendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, pun ishments. The three-star general who kept the truth about Tillman's death from h is family and the public told investigators some 70 times that he had a bad memo ry and couldn't recall details of his actions. No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene, no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equ ipment struck. The military initially told the public and the Tillman family tha t he had been killed by enemy fire. Only weeks later did the Pentagon acknowledg e he was gunned down by fellow Rangers. With questions lingering about how high in the Bush administration the deception reached, Congress is preparing for yet another hearing next week.

Kucinich Introduces Impeachment Articles Against Cheney 2007-04-24, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/24/AR20070424015... We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that th ey are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that, among the se, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights , governments are instituted among men ... and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. These words from the Declaration of Independence are instructive. Be cause not only whenever any form of government, but whenever any government offi cial becomes destructive of the founding purposes, that official or those offici als must be held accountable. Because I believe the vice president's conduct of office has been destructive to the founding purposes of our nation ... I have in troduced House Resolution 333, Articles of Impeachment Relating to Vice Presiden t Richard B. Cheney. It became obvious to me that this vice president, who was a driving force for taking the United States into a war against Iraq under false pretenses, is once again rattling the sabers of war against Iran with the same i ntent to drive America into another war, again based on false pretenses. Precedi ng the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the vice president was fully informed that n o legitimate evidence existed of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Despite al

l evidence to the contrary, the vice president actively and systematically sough t to deceive the citizens and the Congress ... about an alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The vice president pressured the intelligence commu nity to change their findings to enable the deception of the citizens and the Co ngress of the United States. Note: To sign a petition in support of impeachment, click here.

The Dubai Deal You Don't Know About 2006-03-09, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1171773,00.html Dubai Ports World, the firm at the center of the controversy, announced today th at it would give up its bid to manage U.S. ports, agreeing to transfer the contr acts to a U.S. entity." Yet while one Dubai company may be giving up on U.S. port s, another one shows no signs of...giving up a contract with the Navy to provide shore services for vessels in the Middle East. The firm, Inchcape Shipping Serv ices (ISS)...was sold to a Dubai government investment vehicle for $285 million. Why is a Dubai shipping services company doing business with the Pentagon when handing over U.S. port operations to the emirate would supposedly compromise nat ional security? ISS will be responsible for providing all the logistics requireme nts of U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships in ports throughout the [Middle East] reg ion. The release also notes that ISS may be asked to provide services for U.S. mi litary training exercises and contingency operations inland. ISS s partner for those services? None other than KBR, the division of Halliburton -- Vice President Di ck Cheney s old firm -- that has won billions of dollars in contracts for the Iraq war and reconstruction. Ironically, Halliburton's name has come up as a possibl e candidate to be the "U.S. entity" to take over the U.S. ports management from Dubai Ports World.

Not to See the Fallen Is No Favor 2007-05-28, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/business/media/28carr.html?ex=1338004800&en... While troop numbers are surging, the media that cover them are leaking away, wor n out by the danger and expense of covering a war that refuses to end. Many of t he journalists who are in Iraq have been backed into fortified corners, rarely v enturing out to see what soldiers confront. And the remaining journalists who ar e embedded with the troops in Iraq the number dropped to 92 in May from 126 in A pril are risking more and more for less and less. Since last year, the military s embedding rules require that journalists obtain a signed consent from a wounded soldier before the image can be published. Images that put a face on the dead, t hat make them identifiable, are simply prohibited. Ashley Gilbertson, a veteran freelance photographer who has been to Iraq seven times ... said the policy, as enforced, is coercive and unworkable. They are not letting us cover the reality o f war, he added. I think this has got little to do with the families or the soldie rs and everything to do with politics. Until last year, no permission was require d to publish photographs of the wounded, but families had to be notified of the soldier s injury first. Now, not only is permission required, but any image of cas ualties that shows a recognizable name or unit is off-limits. And memorials for the fallen in Iraq can no longer be shown, even when the unit in question invite s coverage. James Glanz, a Baghdad correspondent ... for The New York Times ... said that This tiny remaining corps of reporters becomes a greater and greater pr oblem for the military brass because we are the only people preventing them from telling the story the way they want it told.

Japan s Textbooks Reflect Revised History 2007-04-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/world/asia/01japan.html?ex=1333080000&en=3f... In another sign that Japan is pressing ahead in revising its history of World Wa r II, new high school textbooks will no longer acknowledge that the Imperial Arm y was responsible for a major atrocity in Okinawa, the government announced late Friday. The Ministry of Education ordered publishers to delete passages stating that the Imperial Army ordered civilians to commit mass suicide during the Batt le of Okinawa, as the island was about to fall to American troops in the final m onths of the war. The decision was announced as part of the ministry s annual scre ening of textbooks used in all public schools. The ministry also ordered changes to other delicate issues to dovetail with government assertions, though the scr eening is supposed to be free of political interference. The decision on the Bat tle of Okinawa ... came as a surprise because the ministry had never objected to the description in the past. The fresh denial of the military s responsibility in the Battle of Okinawa and in sexual slavery long accepted as historical facts i s likely to deepen suspicions in Asia that Tokyo is trying to whitewash its mili tarist past even as it tries to raise the profile of its current forces. The min istry s new position appeared to discount overwhelming evidence of coercion, parti cularly the testimony of victims and survivors themselves. Note: History many times is written -- or in this case re-written -- by those in power.

Los Alamos scientist criticizes federal approach to arsenal 2007-02-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/13/MNGI1O3N0G1.DTL One of the country's top weapons designers said he believes it is time for the U nited States to consider a radical shift in policy that would ultimately elimina te the nuclear arsenal. Joseph Martz, leader of a team designing a new generatio n of warheads at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a series of intervi ews last week that he is troubled by how the debate on nuclear weapons policy in Washington is focused narrowly on the number of weapons needed for the future . .. rather than on how to eradicate them entirely. Lab officials originally refus ed to give Martz permission to be interviewed for this article. Martz, however, said he decided to speak anyway in order to press ideas that he believes can red uce the risk of nuclear war and carve out a central role for the weapons labs, w hich have been threatened with budget cuts. Martz emphasized that he was express ing only his personal views and not those of the lab. But his comments still rep resent the first time in recent years that a senior scientist inside the weapons program has proposed making disarmament a concrete policy goal. Martz's aim is to help policymakers understand that, because of a more sophisticated grasp of w eapons science, the United States can slowly dismantle its warheads and still pr otect itself. The country could also bolster its credibility as a leading voice for disarmament by ratifying the long-stalled treaty banning underground testing .

Navy May Deploy Anti-Terrorism Dolphins 2007-02-12, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2870040 Dozens of dolphins and sea lions trained to detect and apprehend waterborne atta

ckers could be sent to patrol a military base in Washington state, the Navy said Monday. The base is home to submarines, ships and laboratories and is potential ly vulnerable to attack by terrorist swimmers and scuba divers. Several options are under consideration, but the preferred plan would be to send as many as 30 C alifornia sea lions and Atlantic Bottlenose dolphins from the Navy's Marine Mamm al Program, based in San Diego. Dolphins ... are trained to detect underwater mi nes; they were sent to do this in the Iraqi harbor of Umm Qasr in 2003. Sea lion s can carry in their mouths special cuffs attached to long ropes. If the animal finds a rogue swimmer, it can clamp the cuff around the person's leg. The indivi dual can then be reeled in for questioning. The last time the animals were used operationally in San Diego was in 1996, when they patrolled the bay during the R epublican National Convention. The Navy has been training marine mammals since t he 1960s and keeps about 100 dolphins and sea lions. Most are in San Diego, but about 20 are deployed at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Ga. The Navy is seeking public comment for an environmental impact statement on the proposal.

Journalist in legal battle with military 2007-01-05, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/05/DDG4HNCE5R1.DTL The questions from the civilian spokesman at Fort Lewis started sounding suspici ous to Sarah Olson. He had called to ask the Oakland freelance journalist about the accuracy of quotes in her story about Lt. Ehren Watada, which had appeared o n the liberal Web site Truthout.org. As the telephone conversation progressed, O lson realized that the military was using her to fortify its case against Watada , whom it was prosecuting as the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. While Watada faces a court-martial next month for conduct unbecoming a n officer, the U.S. military pursues Olson. Last month, military prosecutors sub poenaed the 31-year-old writer and radio journalist, asking her to appear at his court-martial, scheduled to begin next month, to verify what Watada said. If Ol son doesn't testify, she faces six months in jail or a $500 fine and a felony ch arge for a story she was paid $300 to write. Olson doesn't want to be part of a legal action that she believes limits someone's free speech. She came to journal ism six years ago ... hoping to create more places for dissenting or seldom-hear d voices, not fewer. "Journalists should not be asked to participate in the pros ecution of political speech," Olson said. [She] isn't being asked to reveal unpu blished work. "What I don't understand is why they (prosecutors) can't get this information digitally," said Fidell, president of the National Institute of Mili tary Justice. Olson doesn't have a problem with journalists testifying in court. She doesn't want journalists to be coerced to testify in cases that could limit free speech. Note: Truthout.org is one of the main sources of our information. Interesting th at one of their reporters should be targeted in this way. For stories by 20 awar d-winning journalists on how the media is controlled, click here.

Calif. Couple Calls for Orgasm for Peace 2006-11-19, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/19/AR20061119008... Two peace activists have planned a massive anti-war demonstration for the first day of winter. But they don't want you marching in the streets. The Global Orgas m for Peace was conceived by Donna Sheehan, 76, and Paul Reffell, 55, whose immo dest goal is for everyone in the world to have an orgasm Dec. 22 while focusing on world peace. "The orgasm gives out an incredible feeling of peace during it a nd after it," Reffell said Sunday. "Your mind is like a blank. It's like a medit

ative state. And mass meditations have been shown to make a change." The couple have studied evolutionary psychology and believe that war is mainly an outgrowth of men trying to impress potential mates, a case of "my missile is bigger than your missile," as Reffell put it. By promoting what they hope to be a synchroniz ed global orgasm, they hope to get people to channel their sexual energy into so mething more positive. The couple said interest appears strong, with 26,000 hits a day to their Web site, http://www.globalorgasm.org. "The dream is to have eve ryone in the world (take part)," Reffell said. "And if that means laying down yo ur gun for a few minutes, then hey, all the better."

Documents Describe U.S. Auditors' Battles With Halliburton 2006-03-29, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-halliburton29mar29,1,... Frustrated government auditors pleaded, cajoled and finally threatened Halliburt on Co. executives who repeatedly failed to comply with government reporting requ irements under a key Iraq contract with a $1.2-billion potential price tag. The 15-page report cites findings by auditors that Halliburton overcharged -- "appar ently intentionally" -- on the contract by using hidden calculations, and attemp ted in one instance to bill the government for $26 million in costs it did not i ncur. The report blamed the Department of Defense for awarding the contract desp ite warnings from auditors that Halliburton's cost estimating system had "signif icant deficiencies." Although federal officials have criticized the company and threatened to cancel its contracts, Halliburton remains the largest private cont ractor in Iraq. The contract, awarded in January 2004, was one of three Iraq pac ts for the company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Although the other two agreements...have faced heavy criticism as no-bid contracts...Tuesday's rep ort was the first to focus on the third Halliburton contract. "You are hereby no tified that the government considers that you have universally failed to provide adequate cost information as required under the subject contract," a U.S. contr acting officer wrote in an Aug. 28, 2004, letter to an executive of KBR, the Hal liburton unit formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root.

Abusive G.I.'s Not Pursued, Survey Find 2006-02-23, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/international/middleeast/23abuse.html The longest sentence for any member of the American military linked to a torture -related death of a detainee in Iraq or Afghanistan has been five months, a huma n rights group reported Wednesday. In only 12 of 34 cases has anyone been punish ed for the confirmed or suspected killings, said the group, Human Rights First, which is based in New York and Washington. Beyond those cases, in almost half of 98 known detainee deaths since 2002, the cause was never announced or was repor ted as undetermined. "In dozens of cases documented here, grossly inadequate rep orting, investigation and follow-through have left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths," it said in the report, based on milita ry court records, news reports and other sources. The Pentagon says it conscient iously investigates such deaths. When asked Wednesday for a status report on inv estigations and prosecutions in individual cases of abuse, the Pentagon said it could not offer a comprehensive compilation because the information was too scat tered. Army lawyers at the Pentagon do not "have access to the information becau se other Army commands have the documents," Maj. Wayne Marotto, a spokesman, sai d.

Advise and assent 2006-02-19, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-nsa19feb19,0,5503861.story That the United States Senate has a body called the Intelligence Committee is an irony George Orwell would have truly appreciated. In a world without Doublespea k, the panel, chaired by GOP Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, would be known by a mor e appropriate name -- the Senate Coverup Committee. Although the committee is of ficially charged with overseeing the nation's intelligence-gathering operations, its real function in recent years has been to prevent the public from getting h old of any meaningful information about the Bush administration. Hence its never -ending delays of the probe into the bogus weapons intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. And its squelching, on Thursday, of an expected investigat ion into the administration's warrantless spying program.

U.N. adviser: West killing Africa with gun sales 2006-02-02, CNN/Reuters http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/02/02/africa.guns.reut/index.html A senior United Nations aid official called on Thursday for a halt to arms sales to Africa, saying it would be more effective in addressing the continent's pove rty than charity rock concerts or debt relief. Dennis McNamara, special U.N. adv iser on internal displacement, slammed world powers for neglecting some 12.5 mil lion Africans uprooted within their countries, who form half of the world's inte rnally displaced persons (IDPs). He accused the West of supplying the weapons fu elling African conflicts which leave civilians homeless -- and prey to war crime s, hunger, disease and rape -- while greedy companies exploit the oil and minera l wealth. "Guns are at the heart of the problem ... There is one slogan I would like to suggest for 2006: No Arms Sales to Africa. Zero. Not an embargo, not a s anction, a voluntary cessation of all arms sales to Africa," McNamara told a new s briefing." The kids on the streets of Nairobi, Khartoum, Abidjan and Monrovia have guns in their pockets or up their sleeves ... We provided the arms. We the West, we the G8," he added, referring to the Group of Eight industrialized natio ns.

Congressional Testimony of DOD Inspector General - Report No. D-2001-120 2001-05-08, Department of Defense Inspector General's Website http://www.dodig.osd.mil/Audit/reports/fy01/01-120.pdf Statement of Robert J Lieberman, Deputy Inspector General, Department of Defense , Before the Subcommittee on Governmental Efficiency, Financial Management and I ntergovernmental Relations, House Committee on Government Reform of Defense Fina ncial Management. The extensive DoD efforts to compile and audit the FY 2000 fin ancial statements, for the Department as a whole and for the 10 subsidiary repor ting entities like the Army, Navy and Air Force General Funds, could not overcom e the impediments caused by poor systems and unreliable documentation of transac tions and assets. Some examples of the problems in these year-end statements fol low. Department-level accounting adjustment entries used to compile the financia l statements were $4.4 trillion, with $1.1 trillion of those unsupported by reli able explanatory information and audit trails. This is an improvement from FY 19 99, when $7.6 trillion of adjustments were made with $2.3 trillion unsupported, but remains a good indication of the need for wholesale changes to the financial data reporting systems. Accurate reporting of inventory and property remains a continuing challenge for each of the Military Departments and Defense Logistics Agency because of problems in logistics and other feeder systems. Although the D oD has put a full decade of effort into improving its financial reporting, it se

ems that everyone involved- the Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, the audit community, and DoD managers -have been unable to determine or clearly artic ulate exactly how much progress has been made.

Sonar Called Likely Stranding Cause 2006-04-28, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/27/AR20060427020... Federal marine specialists have concluded that Navy sonar was the most likely ca use of the unusual stranding of melon-headed whales in a Hawaiian bay in 2004. T he appearance of as many as 200 of the normally deep-diving whales in Hanalei Ba y in Kauai occurred while a major American-Japanese sonar training exercise was taking place. The report is the latest in a series of scientific reviews linking traditional mid-frequency naval sonar to whale strandings. The active sonar use d by navies sends out loud pings of sound that seem to frighten and disorient wh ales. The effect was documented off Greece in 1996 and established later during naval exercises in the Bahamas, off the Canary Islands and off Spain. In the 200 0 Bahamas stranding, a local marine biologist collected some of the whales that died onshore and froze them for later study -- which helped NOAA conclude that s onar was the likely cause. Michael Jasny, a senior consultant with NRDC, said th e NOAA report was worrisome. "Once again, the Navy's denial has been contradicte d by the official government investigation. It's time for the Navy to stop this needless infliction of harm."

Death Of A General 2006-04-09, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/06/60minutes/main1476781.shtml How far should a soldier go when interrogating a prisoner? Is torture OK? What i f the prisoner knew where Saddam Hussein was hiding? How far is too far? That wa s the dilemma facing Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer while interrogating a n Iraqi major general, among the most important prisoners of the time. During in terrogation, the general died. Welshofer says he thought Mowhoush might know whe re Saddam was hiding. Welshofer questioned Mowhoush, didn t lay a hand on him, and got nothing out of him. So...Welshofer got creative. He remembered that years b efore...he helped stuff American soldiers into oil drums to induce claustrophobi a and panic. In Iraq, Welshofer did much the same thing, this time, with a sleep ing bag. Mowhoush...was 56 years old and not in good shape. Welshofer took an el ectrical cord, wrapped it around Mowhoush s middle to hold the bag in place. Then he straddled him. But when Mowhoush didn t give him the answers he was looking for , Welshofer says he put his hand over his mouth. "I saw that the water pooled in his mouth, and it was at that point that I realized...the general s dead," Welsho fer recalls. It happened in Abu Ghraib. It happened in Afghanistan. It happened in Guantanamo Bay. When you see this across three different arenas and in many d ifferent places, it is no longer just a few guys got it in their head to do this . It is coming from somewhere else. And it s got to come from above.

'Liberation was just a big lie' 2009-11-19, Toronto Star (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/afghanmission/article/727873---liberation-... She sleeps in safe houses, with a rotating squad of bodyguards securing the door s. She goes out only in a billowing burqa. Even her wedding was held in secret. Elected the youngest member of the Afghan parliament and suspended for her outsp

oken criticism of the country's top officials Malalai Joya has been labelled the bravest woman in Afghanistan. Small, soft-spoken and now 31, she has survived a t least four assassination attempts. "Canada should pull its troops out now," sh e said in Toronto, where she was promoting her book A Woman Among Warlords, co-w ritten with Canadian peace activist Derrick O'Keefe. And, she says, U.S. Preside nt Barack Obama, who is considering a surge in troop levels to battle Al Qaeda a nd the Taliban, should think again. "The United States should go, too. As long a s foreign troops are in the country we will be fighting two enemies instead of o ne." Yes, she says, there is a risk of civil war ... but it would still be bette r than "night raids, torture and aerial bombardment" that killed hundreds of Afg han civilians while the Taliban made steady gains. "Liberation was just a big li e." Joya believes Afghans are now better prepared to battle the Taliban alone. " resistance has increased, and people are becoming more aware of democracy and hu man rights. They need humanitarian and educational support." But not, she adds, at the point of a gun. "It will be a long struggle," she wrote. "A river is made drop by drop ... you can kill me, but you can never kill my spirit." Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the realities of the wars in Afghan istan and Iraq, click here.

Justice Says Scientist Tried to Share US Secrets 2009-10-20, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/20/us/politics/AP-US-Espionage-Charge... A scientist who allegedly tried to sell classified secrets to Israel had worked on the U.S. government's Star Wars missile shield program, and the Justice Depar tment declared Tuesday that he had tried to share some of the nation's most guar ded secrets. Arrested in an FBI sting operation, Stewart David Nozette was jaile d without bond and accused in a criminal complaint of two counts of attempting t o communicate, deliver and transmit classified information. In an interview, Sco tt Hubbard, a former colleague, said that Nozette was primarily a defense techno logist who had worked on the Reagan-era Star Wars effort formally named the Stra tegic Defense Initiative. ''This was leading edge, Department of Defense nationa l security work,'' said Hubbard, a professor of aerospace at Stanford University who worked for 20 years at NASA. Nozette held a special security clearance equi valent to the Defense Department's top secret and ''critical nuclear weapon desi gn information'' clearances. Authorities became worried about possible espionage activity by Nozette after an investigation by NASA's inspector general in 2006 began looking at whether Nozette submitted false claims for expenses that were n ot actually incurred. In probing Nozette's finances in that case, investigators found indications he might be working for a foreign government, and they launche d a national security investigation that eventually led to the undercover FBI st ing. Note: There's definitely something strange going on here.

Ministers must explain destruction of 'torture flight' papers, says panel of MPs 2009-08-09, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/09/diego-garcia-flights-mps-documents Ministers must explain why crucial documents relating to CIA "torture flights" t hat stopped on sovereign British territory were destroyed, a panel of MPs has sa id. In particular, the MPs ... call for an explanation for the missing papers, w hich might explain the role of Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory, in the US's "extraordinary rendition" programme. The report says: "We recommend tha t the government discloses how, why and by whom the records relating to flights

through Diego Garcia since the start of 2002 were destroyed." Foreign secretary David Miliband admitted 18 months ago that two US planes refuelled on the Indian Ocean island. The committee now wants a detailed account of the record-keeping and disposal policy regarding flights through the territory and "elsewhere throu gh UK airspace". It also criticises the government's inability to offer assuranc es that ships anchored outside Diego Garcia's waters were not involved in the re ndition programme. "The government must address the use of UK airspace for empty flights that may be part of a rendition circuit," says the report. Amnesty Inte rnational said the MPs' verdict underlined the need for a full, independent inqu iry into the UK's involvement in "war on terror" and human rights abuses. The co mmittee also voiced disquiet over claims that British intelligence officers were complicit in the torture of detainees held overseas. According to documents rev ealed by the high court last month, an MI5 officer visited Morocco three times d uring the time British resident Binyam Mohamed claims he was secretly interrogat ed and tortured there. Note: For many reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of "the war on terror," click here.

Global economic crisis called biggest U.S. security threat 2009-02-13, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-security-threat13-2009fe... The nation's new intelligence chief [has warned] that the global economic crisis is the most serious security peril facing the United States, threatening to top ple governments [and] trigger waves of refugees. The economic collapse "already looms as the most serious one in decades, if not in centuries," said Dennis C. B lair, director of national intelligence, in [testimony before the Senate Intelli gence Committee]. Blair's focus on the economic meltdown represents a sharp cont rast from the testimony of his predecessors in recent years, who devoted most of their attention in the annual threat assessment hearing to the issues of terror ism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Time is probably our greatest threat, " Blair said. "The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the li kelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests." He said that one-quarte r of the world's nations had already experienced low-level instability attribute d to the economic downturn, including shifts in power. He cited anti-government demonstrations in Europe and Russia, and he warned that much of Latin America an d the former Soviet satellite states lacked sufficient cash to cope with the spr eading crisis. "Countries will not be able to export their way out of this one b ecause of the global nature" of the crisis, Blair said. U.S. intelligence analys ts fear there could be a backlash against American efforts to promote free marke ts because the crisis was triggered by the United States. "We're generally held to be responsible," Blair said. Note: For the complete text of Blair's testimony, click here. For an excellent a nalysis, click here. For more on the realities behind the economic crisis, click here.

Under Obama, same stance on rendition suit 2009-02-10, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/09/BAGS15QB5B.DTL President Obama's Justice Department signaled in a San Francisco courtroom Monda y that the change in administrations has not changed the government's position o n secrecy and the rights of foreign prisoners - and that lawsuits by alleged vic tims of CIA kidnappings and torture must be dismissed on national security groun

ds. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ... is considering a suit accusing a San Jose company, Jeppesen Dataplan, of arranging so-called ex traordinary rendition flights for the CIA. Although Obama has issued orders bann ing torture and closing secret CIA prisons, his administration has sent mixed si gnals on extraordinary rendition and the legitimacy of court challenges. Obama's nominee for CIA director, Leon Panetta, said last week that he approved of rend ition for foreign prosecution or brief CIA detention. The American Civil Liberti es Union, which represents five men suing Jeppesen for allegedly flying them to foreign torture chambers, said this case is the new administration's chance to l ive up to its promises. ACLU attorney Ben Wizner told the court that the suppose dly ultra-secret rendition program is widely known. He noted that Sweden recentl y awarded $450,000 in damages to one of the plaintiffs, Ahmed Agiza, for helping the CIA transport him to Egypt, where he is still being held and allegedly has been tortured. "The notion that you have to close your eyes and ears to what the whole world knows is absurd," Wizner said. Note: For lots more from major media sources on the disturbing trend toward ever -greater restrictions on civil liberties and due process, click here.

US using British atomic weapons factory for its nuclear programme 2009-02-09, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/09/us-uk-atomic-weapons-nuclear-power The US military has been using Britain's atomic weapons factory to carry out res earch into its own nuclear warhead programme. US defence officials said that "ve ry valuable" warhead research has taken place at the Atomic Weapons Establishmen t at Aldermaston in Berkshire as part of an ongoing and secretive deal between t he British and American governments. Campaign groups warned any such deal was in breach of international law. Kate Hudson, of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said: "Any work preparing the way for new warheads cuts right across the UK's co mmitment to disarm, which it signed up to in the nuclear non-proliferation treat y. That this work may be contributing to both future US and British warheads is nothing short of scandalous." The extent of US involvement at Aldermaston came t o light in an interview with John Harvey, policy and planning director at the US National Nuclear Security Administration. Harvey said: "There are some capabili ties that the UK has that we don't have and that we borrow... that I believe we have been able to exploit [and] that's been very valuable to us." In the same in terview, Harvey admitted that the US and UK had struck a new deal over the level of cooperation, including work on ... a new generation of nuclear warhead known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).

General Says Shoot Dealers in Afghanistan 2009-01-31, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/world/asia/31nato.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&... NATO s senior military commander has proposed that the alliance s soldiers in Afghan istan shoot drug traffickers without waiting for proof of their involvement with the Taliban insurgency, according to a report in the online edition of Der Spie gel magazine. The commander, Gen. John Craddock of the United States, floated th e idea in a confidential letter on Jan. 5 to Gen. Egon Ramms, a German officer w ho heads the NATO command center responsible for Afghanistan. General Craddock w rote that it was no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence th at each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets th e criteria of being a military objective." A NATO official, speaking on conditio n of anonymity, confirmed the wording of the letter. The proposal was widely cri ticized, with politicians [in Berlin] saying that it would flout international l

aw and alter NATO s mission in Afghanistan. Such an order, they said, would signal a major shift in how the alliance intended to deal with the Afghan insurgency, along with the opium trade that finances the Taliban and other militant groups. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO s secretary general, has ordered an investigation into how the general s letter was obtained by Spiegel Online. Note: The Times failed to mention the rift this has created in NATO and more. Cl ick here for a revealing article about this in one of Germany's top publications .

Cheney was key in clearing CIA interrogation tactics 2008-12-16, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-cheney16-2008dec16... Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approvin g severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanam o Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely. Cheney's comments ... mark the fir st time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA's us e of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a ... method kno wn as waterboarding. "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in hel ping get the process cleared," Cheney said in an interview with ABC News. Asked whether he still believes it was appropriate to use the waterboarding method on terrorism suspects, Cheney said: "I do." His comments come on the heels of discl osures by a Senate committee showing that high-level officials in the Bush admin istration were intimately involved in reviewing and approving interrogation meth ods that have since been explicitly outlawed and that have been condemned intern ationally as torture. Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, the CIA "in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talk ed to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it." Waterboarding involves strapping a prisoner to a tilted surface, covering h is face with a towel and dousing it to simulate the sensation of drowning. CIA D irector Michael V. Hayden has said that the agency used the technique on three A l Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. Cheney has long defended the technique. But h e has not previously disclosed his role in pushing to give the CIA such authorit y. Note: For lots more from major media sources on US torture and other war crimes committed in the Iraq and Afghan wars, click here.

U.N. Rights Investigator Expelled by Israel 2008-12-16, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html?partner=rss... Israeli authorities on Monday expelled Richard Falk, a United Nations investigat or of human rights in the Palestinian territories, saying he was unwelcome becau se of what the government has regarded as his hostile position toward Israel. Mr . Falk, an American, arrived in Israel on Sunday. He was held [overnight] at the airport and placed on the first available flight back to Geneva, his point of d eparture. Mr. Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, has the title of United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur for the Palestinian t erritories. He has long been criticized in Israel for what many Israelis say are unfair and unpalatable views. He has compared Israel s treatment of the Palestini ans to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspi racy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies betwee n the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a cl

osed book. In his capacity as a United Nations investigator, Mr. Falk issued a st atement this month describing Israel s embargo on Gaza ... as a crime against huma nity. Regardless of Mr. Falk s views, some Israelis questioned the wisdom of banni ng him, noting that it would hardly make his reports more sympathetic. Jessica M ontell, the executive director of B Tselem, an Israeli group that monitors human r ights in the occupied territories, said that ... barring his entry was an act unb efitting of democracy. Note: Israel quite explicitly raised the issue of Falk's call for a genuine inve stigation of the 9/11 attacks in its explanation of his deportation. Why would t he state of Israel oppose such an investigation? For information from major medi a sources on this and many other questions about what really happened on 9/11, c lick here.

US controls bird flu vaccines over bioweapon fears 2008-10-11, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-10-11-3349819523_x.htm Deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a singl e sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of o ther viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism." The rea son: Fear that they will be used for biological warfare. Under this little-known policy, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria and Sudan may not get the vaccines unles s they apply for special export licenses, which would be given or refused accord ing to the discretion and timing of the U.S. Three of those nations -- Iran, Cub a and Sudan -- also are subject to a ban on all human pandemic influenza vaccine s as part of a general U.S. embargo. The regulations, which cover vaccines for e verything from Dengue fever to the Ebola virus, have raised concern within the m edical and scientific communities. Officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they were not even aware of the policies until contacted by The Associated Press ... and privately expressed alarm. They make "no scientific sense," said Peter Pales e, chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Some experts say the idea of using vaccines for bioweapons is far-fetc hed.

Command for Africa Is Established by Pentagon 2008-10-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/africa/05command.html?partner=rssuser... For decades, Africa was rarely more than an afterthought for the Pentagon. But s ince the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a new view has gained acceptance among senio r Pentagon officials and military commanders: that ungoverned spaces and ill-gov erned states ... pose a growing risk to American security. Last week ... Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, inaugurated the newest regional headquarters, Africa Command [AFRICOM], which is responsible for coordinating American military affairs on the continent . Already ... analysts at policy advocacy organizations and research institutes are warning of a militarization of American foreign policy across Africa. Mr. Ga tes said the new command was an example of the Pentagon s evolving strategy of for ging what he called civilian-military partnerships, in which the Defense Departmen t works alongside and supports the State Department and the Agency for Internati onal Development. While that thinking has influenced the work of all of the mili tary s regional war-fighting commands, it is the central focus of Africa Command. And over the past two years, it has quietly become the central focus of the mili tary s Southern Command, once better known for the invasions of Grenada and Panama

. A number of specialists in African and Latin American politics at nongovernmen tal organizations express apprehension, however, that the new emphasis of both t hese commands represents an undesirable injection of the military into American foreign policy, a change driven by ... desires for natural resources. Note: For lots more on war and war planning from reliable sources, click here.

Standard Warfare May Be Eclipsed By Nation-Building 2008-10-05, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/04/AR20081004020... The Army on [October 6] will unveil an unprecedented doctrine that declares nati on-building missions will probably become more important than conventional warfa re and defines "fragile states" ... as the greatest threat to U.S. national secu rity. The doctrine ... holds that in coming years, American troops are not likel y to engage in major ground combat against hostile states as they did in Iraq an d Afghanistan, but instead will frequently be called upon to operate in lawless areas. Such "stability operations" will last longer and ultimately contribute mo re to the military's success than "traditional combat operations," according to the Army's new Stability Operations Field Manual. The stability operations doctr ine is an engine that will drive Army resources, organization and training for y ears to come ... and Army officials already have detailed plans to execute it. T he operations directive underpinning the manual "elevated stability operations t o a status equal to that of the offense and defense," the manual reads, describi ng the move as a "fundamental change in emphasis" for the Army. Today, such frag ile states, if neglected, will pose mounting risks for the United States, accord ing to Lt. Col. Steve Leonard, the manual's lead author. Weak states "create vas t ungoverned areas that are breeding grounds for the threats that we fear the mo st." The manual adds to a growing body of doctrine focused on the military's non traditional skills, most notably the Army's 2006 counterinsurgency manual. Civil ian officials and nongovernmental groups voice [concern] that the military's pus h to expand its exercise of "soft power" ... marks a growing militarization of U .S. foreign policy. Note: To download the new Stability Operations, U.S. Army Field Manual 3-07, cli ck here. For lots more on war and war planning from reliable sources, click here .

U.S. deserter feared torture orders 2008-09-06, Toronto Star (One of Canada s leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/491933 Peter Jemley is unique among the growing ranks of war resisters who have sought refuge in Canada. He wants Canada to accept him as a refugee because he's oppose d to torture. Jemley argues that as one of only a small number of Arabic linguis ts with top security clearance, he could be forced to violate international law by participating in the interrogations of terrorism suspects. It was something h e hadn't considered when he enlisted in 2005 and was handpicked to undergo two y ears of intense training due to his adeptness with languages. Only last February did he discover that his government had sanctioned new rules on how terrorism s uspects could be interrogated. He believes it's torture and when he realized he might be asked to be a part of it, he fled. "It's a soldier's obligation to say 'no' if their commander is doing things that are criminally complicit," Jemley, now 42, said in a recent interview in Toronto. "I think everyone is agreeing now that torture is really what has been going on ... I have every reason to believ e that I'd be ordered to do such things." Detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and t

he undisclosed CIA prisons around the world have claimed widespread abuse. The C IA has admitted to using 'coercive techniques' during interrogations, such as wa terboarding, a process whereby agents simulate drownings. Much of the legal comm unity considers this treatment torture and point to international laws such as t he Geneva Conventions, which were established after WWII to impose legal restric tions on the barbarity of war.

Brain will be battlefield of future, warns US intelligence report 2008-08-13, The Guardian (One of the U.K. s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/13/military.neuroscience Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have bee n told. In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading sci entists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologi es. They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, inc luding behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person's state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision. On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with "pharmacological land mines" that rele ase drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electron ic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says. "The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possi ble that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information fr om a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," the report states. T he report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct curren t stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firi ng of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person's ability to tel l a lie. Note: This is the public report, for little-known information relating what has already been going on, click here.

Military's Social Science Grants Raise Alarm 2008-08-03, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/02/AR20080802015... The Pentagon's $50 million Minerva Research Initiative, named after the Roman go ddess of wisdom and warriors, will fund social science research deemed crucial t o national security. Initial proposals were due July 25, and the first grants ar e expected to be awarded by year's end. But the Network of Concerned Anthropolog ists ... said dependence on Pentagon funding could make universities an "instrum ent rather than a critic of war-making." In a May 28 letter to federal officials , the American Anthropological Association said that ... its members are "deeply concerned that funding such research through the Pentagon may pose a potential conflict of interest." David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin's University in Lacey, Wash., and the author of a book on anthropological intelligence in Wo rld War II, [said] the Pentagon effort is flawed. "It sets up sort of a Soviet s ystem, or top-down system," Price said. "If you look at the big picture, this wi ll not make us smarter -- this will make us much more narrow. It will only look at problems Defense wants us to in a narrow way." Recently, the Army's Human Ter rain System has embedded social scientists in military units in Iraq and Afghani stan with the aim of helping commanders understand local culture and customs. Th e project has drawn criticism from many academics. Two scholars have been killed . The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which describes itself as an advocat

e for ethical anthropology, said the research topics could "contribute to creati ng more national and human insecurity by trafficking in the construction of . . . a connection between Islam and violence." Note: For many revealing reports on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.

Oil: A global crisis 2008-05-25, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/oil-a-global-crisis-834... The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, accordi ng to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher ene rgy prices alone. The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the Wor ld Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), [said] that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the re cord $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war. He sp oke after oil prices set a new record on 13 consecutive days over the past two w eeks. They have now multiplied sixfold since 2002. Goldman Sachs predicted last week that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next y ear. Dr Salameh, director of the UK-based Oil Market Consultancy Service, and an authority on Iraq's oil, said it is the only one of the world's biggest produci ng countries with enough reserves substantially to increase its flow. Production in eight of the others the US, Canada, Iran, Indonesia, Russia, Britain, Norway and Mexico has peaked, he says, while China and Saudia Arabia, the remaining tw o, are nearing the point at of decline. Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped some 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this had now fallen to just tw o million barrels. Dr Salameh [said] that Iraq had offered the United States a d eal, three years before the war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil fiel ds on "generous" terms in return for the lifting of sanctions. "This would certa inly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he said. "But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil."

Justice Dept. OKs harsh interrogation tactics 2008-04-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/washington/27intel.html?ex=1366948800&en=68... The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives a ttempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law. The legal interpretation , outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for inte rrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some lati tude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh t reatment of detainees. While the Geneva Conventions prohibit outrages upon person al dignity, a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which int errogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to ma ke case-by-case judgments. The new documents provide more details about how the administration intends to determine whether a specific technique would be legal, depending on the circumstances involved. Some legal experts critical of the Jus tice Department interpretation said the department seemed to be arguing that the prospect of thwarting a terror attack could be used to justify interrogation me thods that would otherwise be illegal. What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not com

mitted an offense, said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at D uke University. The humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners is prohibit ed by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Note: For many disturbing reports of increasing threats to civil liberties, clic k here.

Presidential candidates diverge on U.S. joining war crimes court 2008-01-02, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/02/MNLUU4LBH.DTL The International Criminal Court isn't discussed much in the presidential campai gn, but few issues are more revealing of a candidate's perspective on the United States' legal and political relations with the rest of the world. The court was established in 2002 to deal with cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity a nd genocide. Headquartered in the Dutch city of The Hague, it was conceived as a permanent successor to the Nuremberg tribunals formed to try Nazi leaders after World War II. It now has 105 members, including virtually all current U.S. alli es, but not the United States itself. President Bush has attacked the court rele ntlessly, saying it could subject Americans to politically motivated prosecution s abroad. He has renounced the 1998 treaty that created the court, pressed other nations to disregard it, and signed legislation - nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act" by critics - authorizing military action to free any citizen of the United States or an allied nation held for trial by the court. The presidential candid ates ... took differing positions in the only congressional vote on the issue, t he 2002 legislation allowing military action to free prisoners at The Hague. Cli nton and McCain voted for the bill, as did then-Sen. John Edwards, who now favor s U.S. membership in the court. Three other Democrats, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sens. Joseph Biden and Chris Dodd, voted against the measure. International law scholars say the candidates' positions are illuminating because the disagreement s over the court represent some of the most critical foreign-policy questions in the post-Cold War world - U.S. autonomy and its limits, the role of internation al law and the multinational bodies that enforce it, and the balance between pow er and accountability. "The court can be seen as a bellwether of their approach to the rule of law and international institutions," said Michael Scharf, a law p rofessor at Case Western Reserve University. Note: Do you think the current administration might have something to fear here?

Military relying more on drones, mostly in Iraq 2008-01-01, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22463596/ The military's reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Ira q, The Associated Press has learned. And new Defense Department figures obtained by The AP show that the Air Force more than doubled its monthly use of drones b etween January and October, forcing it to take pilots out of the air and shift t hem to remote flying duty to meet part of the demand. The dramatic increase in t he development and use of drones across the armed services reflects what will be an even more aggressive effort over the next 25 years, according to the new rep ort. Pentagon officials said that even as troops begin to slowly come home this year, the use of Predators, Global Hawks, Shadows and Ravens will not likely slo w. "I think right now the demand for the capability that the unmanned system pro vides is only increasing," said Army Col. Bob Quackenbush, deputy director for A rmy Aviation. "Even as the surge ends, I suspect the deployment of the unmanned

systems will not go down, particularly for larger systems." About 120 Air Force pilots were recently transferred to staff the drones to keep pace with demands, the Air Force said. Some National Guard members were also called up to staff the flights. And more will be doing that in the coming months, as the Air Force add s bases where pilots can remotely fly the aircraft. One key reason for the incre ase is that U.S. forces in Iraq grew from 15 combat brigades to 20 over the spri ng and early summer, boosting troop totals from roughly 135,000 to more than 165 ,000. Slowly over the next six months, five brigades are being pulled out of Ira q that will not be replaced, as part of a drawdown announced by the administrati on. The increased military operations all across Iraq last summer triggered grea ter use of the drones and an escalating call for more of the systems.

AP Chief Slams Case Against Photographer 2007-11-24, San Francisco Examiner/Associated Press http://www.examiner.com/a-1066320~AP_Chief_Slams_Case_Against_Photographer.html The U.S. military is making a mockery of American democratic principles by bring ing a criminal case against an Associated Press photographer in Iraq without dis closing the charges against him, AP President and CEO Tom Curley said Saturday. "This is a poor example - and not the first of its kind - of the way our governm ent honors the democratic principles and values it says it wants to share with t he Iraqi people," Curley wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. The U .S. military notified the AP last weekend that it intended to submit a written c omplaint against Bilal Hussein that would bring the case into the Iraqi justice system as early as Nov. 29. Military officials have refused to disclose the cont ent of the complaint to the AP, despite repeated requests. Hussein's lawyer will enter the case "blind," with no idea of the evidence or charges, Curley wrote. "In the 19 months since he was picked up, Bilal has not been charged with any cr ime, although the military has sent out a flurry of ever-changing claims. Every claim we've checked out has proved to be false, overblown or microscopic in sign ificance," said Curley. Hussein, a 36-year-old native of Fallujah, was part of t he AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo team in 2005. He was detained in Ramadi on April 12, 2006. "We believe Bilal's crime was taking photographs the U.S. govern ment did not want its citizens to see. That he was part of a team of AP photogra phers who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for work in Iraq may have made Bilal eve n more of a marked man," Curley wrote. Curley said the military has refused to a nswer questions from Hussein's attorney, former federal prosecutor Paul Gardephe , since announcing its intentions to seek a case against him. The military has l eaked baseless allegations against Hussein to friendly media outlets, Curley wro te, but it will not even share the exact date of the hearing with the AP. Note: For a powerful summary of a former Marine general's view of war, "War is a Racket", click here.

Clinton rakes in cash from the US weapons industry 2007-10-19, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3075691.ece The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but ab andoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also eme rged as Wall Street's favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama. An analysis of cam paign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money in to her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times o ver with future defence contracts. Employees of the top five US arms manufacture

rs Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Rep ublicans. "The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the c onclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed," said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York. Republican administratio ns are by tradition much stronger supporters of US armaments programmes and Pent agon spending plans than Democratic governments. Relations between the arms indu stry and Bill Clinton soured when he slimmed down the military after the end of the Cold War. His wife, however, has been careful not to make the same mistake. After her election to the Senate, she became the first New York senator on the a rmed services committee, where she revealed her hawkish tendencies by supporting the invasion of Iraq. Her position on Iran is among the most warlike of all the candidates Democrat or Republican. While on the armed services committee, Mrs C linton has befriended key generals and has won the endorsement of General Wesley Clarke, who ran Nato's war in Kosovo. The arms industry has duly taken note. Note: For a revealing personal account of the "War Racket" by a U.S. general, cl ick here.

U.S. Weighed Radioactive Poisons 2007-10-09, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR20071008014... In one of the longest-held secrets of the Cold War, the U.S. Army explored the p otential for using radioactive poisons to assassinate "important individuals" su ch as military or civilian leaders, according to newly declassified documents ob tained by The Associated Press. Approved at the highest levels of the Army in 19 48, the effort was a well-hidden part of the military's pursuit of a "new concep t of warfare" using radioactive materials from atomic bombmaking to contaminate swathes of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations . Military historians who have researched the broader radiological warfare progr am said in interviews that they had never before seen evidence that it included pursuit of an assassination weapon. No targeted individuals are mentioned in ref erences to the assassination weapon in the government documents declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the AP in 1995. The de cades-old records were released recently to the AP, heavily censored by the gove rnment to remove specifics about radiological warfare agents and other details. The documents give no indication whether a radiological weapon for targeting hig h-ranking individuals was ever used or even developed by the United States. They leave unclear how far the Army project went. One memo from December 1948 outlin ed the project and another memo that month indicated it was under way. The main sections of several subsequent progress reports in 1949 were removed by censors before release to the AP. The broader effort on offensive uses of radiological w arfare apparently died by about 1954, at least in part because of the Defense De partment's conviction that nuclear weapons were a better bet. Whether the work m igrated to another agency such as the CIA is unclear. Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on government-sponsored ass assinations and assassination programs, click here.

Nuremberg Actions' Brian Willson celebrates 20 years of resistance 2007-09-01, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/01/BA4VRRKCU.DTL Twenty years ago today, a 46-year-old former Air Force captain sat down on the t racks in front of a train loaded with bombs at the Concord Naval Weapons Station

. The ex-captain's name was S. Brian Willson. He was there to block the train .. . to protest U.S. arms shipments to Central America. But nothing was blocked tha t day. Instead, the train barreled into him at 16 miles an hour, slicing off his legs and one ear and laying open his skull - and igniting what quickly became t he nation's biggest anti-war movement in the decades between the Vietnam and Ira q eras. Today, however, there will be more than a memory on those dusty tracks. Willson plans to come back to the spot where he lost his legs to remember and pr ay for global harmony. It's a different time, with different wars, but he says h e feels just as passionate as he did back then. "Maybe we'll have 10 people ther e, maybe 30, who knows?" Willson said by phone from his home in Arcata (Humboldt County). "I guess it'll be whatever it is. I do know this, though: We have to p reserve our history. That's one good reason to be there, as painful as the memor ies will be for me. I have to look on life as a journey, and all I can say is I' m still on track," said Willson. "Running me over with a train wasn't just crimi nal, it was stupid. But it has not in any way stopped me. My life is good," he s aid. "I like the whole idea of pursuing what I call right livelihood, reducing m y footprint on Earth. I enjoy it." The protest never truly ended. A couple of ti mes a year, peace groups use the tracks as a setting for small anti-war gatherin gs - and every Monday, just as he has for the past 20 years, 53-year-old Concord resident Greg Getty, sits at the tracks at 9 a.m. and says a prayer in Willson' s name.

Defense Dept. pays $1B to outside analysts 2007-08-29, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-08-29-dia_N.htm The Defense Department is paying private contractors more than $1 billion in mor e than 30 separate contracts to collect and analyze intelligence for the four mi litary services and its own Defense Intelligence Agency, according to contract d ocuments and a Pentagon spokesman. The disclosure marks the first time a U.S. in telligence service has made public its outside payments. Intelligence payments t o contractors have climbed dramatically since the terror attacks in September 20 01, but none had been made public, according to a report filed in April by the O ffice of the Director of National Intelligence. Outside contracting ... places c ritical security tasks and sensitive information in the hands of private parties , says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy specialist at the Federation of Am erican Scientists, a Washington privacy group. "Private contractors don't have t o undergo congressional oversight or justify their budgets to appropriators," Af tergood says. "We're starting to create a new kind of intelligence bureaucracy, one that is both more expensive and less accountable (than government's own inte lligence agencies)." Most of the contracts, which extend up to five years, pay f or analysis of intelligence data and for related services, such as translation a nd interpretation of photo and electronic intelligence. A small fraction, which [a Pentagon spokesman] declined to specify, pay for private spies. Private contr actors often hire former intelligence officers, sometimes leasing them back at h igher salaries to the agencies that first recruited and trained them.

Army gets new 'enhanced blast' weapon to fight Taliban 2007-08-23, Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,2154380,00.html British soldiers in Afghanistan are being supplied with a new "super weapon" to attack Taliban fighters more effectively, defence officials said yesterday. The "enhanced blast" weapon is based on thermobaric technology used in the powerful bombs dropped by the Russians to obliterate Grozny, the Chechen capital, and in US "bunker busters". Defence officials insisted yesterday that the British bombs

were different. "They are optimised to create blast [rather than heat]", one sa id, adding that it would be misleading to call them "thermobaric". So-called the rmobaric weapons have been used by the US against suspected al-Qaida and Taliban underground bases. Combined heat and pressure kill people over a wide area by s ucking the air out of lungs and destroying internal organs. Defence officials de scribed the new weapon as a shoulder-launched "light anti-structure munition". T he new weapons would be more effective against buildings and structures used by the Taliban, they said. Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, descr ibed the weapons as a "serious step change" for the British army. He added: "The continuing issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has enormous importance in the battle for hearts and minds. If these weapons contribute to the deaths of civilians then a primary purpose of the British deployment is going to be made yet more difficult." The deployment of the weapons should have been announced to MPs, Sir Menzies said. "We need much more transparency."

Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned 2007-08-14, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/80fa0a2c-49ef-11dc-9ffe-0000779fd2ac.html The US government is on a burning platform of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the coun try s top government inspector has warned. David Walker, comptroller general of th e US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country s future in a report that lays out what he called chilling long-term simulations . These include dramati c tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign g overnments of holdings of US debt. Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman e mpire, Mr Walker warned there were striking similarities between America s current s ituation and the factors that brought down Rome, including declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. In my view , it s time to learn from history. Mr Walker s views carry weight because he is a non -partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often descri bed as the investigative arm of the US Congress. In an interview with the Financ ial Times, Mr Walker said he had mentioned some of the issues before but now wan ted to turn up the volume . Some of them were too sensitive for others in governmen t to have their name associated with. I m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake -up call, he said. As comptroller general I ve got an ability to look longer-range a nd take on issues that others may be hesitant, and in many cases may not be in a position, to take on."

When a US soldier in Iraq won't soldier 2007-08-13, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0813/p20s01-usmi.html No one looked comfortable at the sentencing hearing. Not family and friends who packed the US military courtroom's straight-backed benches. Not the rookie Army prosecutor in stiff dress greens who flushed with every "Your Honor." Not Judge R. Peter Masterton, whose usually animated face was now grave. And not the convi cted deserter Army medic Agustn Aguayo on the stand in a US military court in cen tral Germany last March, pleading for understanding. "I'm sorry for the trouble my conscience has caused my unit," Private 1st Class Aguayo said, his voice thic k with emotion. "I tried to obey the rules, but in the end [the problem] was at the very core of my being." Aguayo craned to face the judge. "When I hear my ser geants talking about slashing people's throats," he said, crying openly, "if I'm not a conscientious objector, what am I when I'm feeling all this pain when peo

ple talk about violence?" Every war has its deserters, troops who abandon their posts. And every war has its converts to pacifism. The Defense Department report s that 5,361 active-duty service members deserted the US Armed Forces last year; nearly 37,000 since October 2001. In today's all-volunteer force, that means a desertion rate of less than half a percent much lower than the Vietnam War draft era, when it reached a 1971 high of 7.4 percent. In the past six years, 325 Arm y soldiers have applied to be recognized as conscientious objectors, soldiers wh o no longer believe in war; 58 percent were accepted. Still, Aguayo's story is r evealing of the mental battles of these thousands who change their minds during a bloody war and, arguably, of many who don't. Note: For a powerful statement about the reality of war written by a highly deco rated U.S. general, click here.

Bechtel meets goals on fewer than half of its Iraq rebuilding projects 2007-07-26, International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/26/africa/26reconstruct.php One of the largest American contractors working in Iraq, Bechtel National, met i ts original objectives on fewer than half of the projects it received as part of a $1.8 billion reconstruction contract, while most of the rest were canceled, r educed in scope or never completed as designed. But the report, by the Special I nspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent agency, places a large share of the blame for the failures on the government overseers at the United St ates Agency for International Development who administered the contract. [USAID] assigned just two people in Iraq to oversee the giant contract, which included some 24 major projects and 150 subcontractors and stipulated that all invoices b e approved or denied in just 10 days. The report is the first of a planned serie s of audits of Western contractors that have received large slices of the roughl y $40 billion in American taxpayer money that has been spent on the troubled pro gram to rebuild Iraq. Stuart Bowen Jr., who heads the special inspector general' s office, said the United States government clearly shared responsibility with t he company for the project failures. "I would say there's fault on both sides," Bowen said in an interview Wednesday. He added that neither the aid agency nor t he United States Army Corps of Engineers, which also oversaw aspects of the cont ract, ever came close to filling all their staff positions in Iraq. "This isn't so much an indictment of Bechtel as it is a criticism of the system," said Steph en Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington.

Marine says beatings urged in Iraq 2007-07-15, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-marines15jul15,0,7740534.... A Marine corporal, testifying Saturday at the murder trial of a buddy, said that Marines in his unit began routinely beating Iraqis after being ordered by offic ers to "crank up the violence level." Cpl. Saul H. Lopezromo said Marines in his platoon, including the defendant, Cpl. Trent D. Thomas, were angry when officer s criticized them as not being as tough as other Marine platoons. "We're all har d-chargers, we're not there to mess around, so we took it as an insult," Lopezro mo said. Within weeks of allegedly being scolded, seven Marines and a Navy corps man went out late one night to find and kill a suspected insurgent in the villag e of Hamandiya near the Abu Ghraib prison. Unable to find their target, the Mari nes and corpsman dragged another man from his house, fatally shot him, and then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to make it look like he had been ki lled in a shootout, according to court testimony. "We were told to crank up the violence level," said Lopezromo, who testified for the defense. He indicated tha

t during daily patrols the Marines became much rougher with Iraqis. Asked by a j uror to explain, he said, "We beat people, sir." Lopezromo said he believed that officers knew of the beatings, and ... said he saw nothing wrong in what Thomas and the others did. "I don't see it as an execution, sir," he told the judge. " I see it as killing the enemy." He added that Marines, in effect, consider all I raqi men as part of the insurgency. Prosecution witnesses testified that Thomas shot the 52-year-old Iraq at point-blank range after he had already been shot by other Marines and was lying on the ground. Lopezromo said a procedure called "d ead-checking" was routine. Marines are taught "dead-checking" in boot camp ... h e said.

Popular Web sites now off-limits to troops 2007-05-15, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/15/MNG2NPQUQ41.DTL Most of the 131 people Pfc. Amber Thill lists as friends on her MySpace.com page serve in the military. Some, like Thill's husband, are deployed to Iraq; others are serving in Afghanistan. MySpace, the 20-year-old Thill says, "is how most o f us communicate." This online link between troops serving overseas and their fr iends and families was interrupted Monday when the Defense Department announced that it had cut off access to MySpace, YouTube and 11 other popular file-sharing and networking Web sites on the Pentagon's 5 million computers and 15,000 netwo rks. The new policy, which military officials say is intended to reduce the amou nt of traffic snagging the Defense Department's overburdened worldwide network, comes on the heels of an Army regulation last month enforcing new, strict rules on soldier bloggers. The new regulation for the first time created a blanket ban on sites many troops use to share news, photos, video and audio with their fami ly and friends. Military officials said they blocked the Web sites because they took up too much bandwidth. Military bloggers say the new rules are part of a co ncerted effort to suppress online publications by troops in the field. On many b ases in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Department computers and networks are the only ones available to the troops. "These blogs, these posts on MySpace were the last tenuous connection that an everyday American ... has to what the American military is, who the troops are," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, who r uns the military blog www.blackfive.net. "This last tenuous connection will get severed by those regulations." It will definitely decrease the amount of communi cations back home," said Burden.

Israel developing anti-militant "bionic hornet" 2006-11-17, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2660621 Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspap er reported on Friday. The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet," would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers. It is one of several weapons being developed b y scientists to combat militants. Others include super gloves that would give th e user the strength of a "bionic man" and miniature sensors to detect suicide bo mbers. Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres [said] "The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million aga inst a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons." Prototypes fo r the new weapons are expected within three years, he said.

Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office 2006-11-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03reconstruct.html?ex=1320... Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, e xposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Hall iburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hun dreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces. And tucked aw ay in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ag o is what some of Mr. Bowen s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly emba rrassing the administration: a pink slip. An obscure provision...terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq R econstruction. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee. It has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know h ow the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which r econciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. Neither the H ouse nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the confe rence, all involved agree. Mr. Bowen s office has 55 auditors and inspectors in Ir aq and about 300 reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripp ing any other oversight agency in the country.

Scientists Create Cloak of Invisibility 2006-10-09, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2587624 Scientists are boldly going where only fiction has gone before to develop a Cloa k of Invisibility. It isn't quite ready to hide a Romulan space ship from Capt. James T. Kirk or to disguise Harry Potter, but it is a significant start and cou ld show the way to more sophisticated designs. In this first successful experime nt, researchers from the United States and England were able to cloak a copper c ylinder. It's like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and clo aks the road ahead behind an image of the sky. "We have built an artificial mira ge that can hide something from would-be observers in any direction," said cloak designer David Schurig, a research associate in Duke University's electrical an d computer engineering department. Cloaking used special materials to deflect ra dar or light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream. The new work points the way for an improved version that coul d hide people and objects from visible light. Conceptually, the chance of adapti ng the concept to visible light is good, Schurig said in a telephone interview. But, he added, "From an engineering point of view it is very challenging." The c loaking of a cylinder from microwaves comes just five months after Schurig and c olleagues published their theory that it should be possible. In an ideal situati on, the cloak and the item it is hiding would be invisible. An observer would se e whatever is beyond them, with no evidence the cloaked item exists. Note: Remember that technologies developed in top-secret military, intelligence, and other government projects are generally at the very least 10 years in advan ce of anything being developed in the public domain.

U.S. War Prisons Legal Vacuum for 14,000 2006-09-17, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2456625

The U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons...keeping 14, 000 detainees beyond the reach of established law. Disclosures of torture and lo ng-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U .N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. Tens of thousands now have pas sed through U.S. detention. Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps , often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later witho ut apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 perce nt of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the i nternational Red Cross. The detention system often is unjust and hurts the war o n terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere. Human rights group s count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that wer e never explained. The new manual banning torture doesn't cover CIA interrogator s. Thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law' s oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned. The U. S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the "war on terror" ends . [Inmates] have been held without charge for three to four years. [Guantanamo's ] population today...stands at 455. Only 10 of the Guantanamo inmates have been charged with crimes. In only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the con firmed or suspected killings of detainees. The stiffest sentence in a torture-re lated death has been five months in jail. In almost half of 98 detainee deaths, the cause was either never announced or reported as undetermined.

The Path from 9/11 2006-09-13, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/rory_oconnor/2006/09/the_path_from_911.html Attention still must be paid...to the many questions about 9/11 that remain unan swered...such as why the Pentagon held back so much information about air defens e deficiencies from the 9/11 commission that Chairmen Kean and Hamilton came clo se to asking the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation; such as why the Able Danger intelligence program...was ignored and closed down; such as why Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape from Afghanistan when cornered in Tora Bora. There is little doubt that that the 9/11 commission report has become the Warren commission report of our time. Chairman Thomas Kean's recent paid involv ement with ABC's fictitious "historical" docudrama is but the latest reminder th at the 9/11 tragedy has yet to be investigated fully or fairly. Both Kean and hi s Democratic Party counterpart Lee Hamilton now acknowledge...that they and thei r fellow commissioners bowed to political pressure when they didn't fully questi on New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani about his management decisions and emergency res ponses. Other commissioners complained repeatedly about White House obstacles pu t in their path. The commissioners also allowed the president and vice president to testify together (and not under oath) and went along with other administrati on demands, such as the one that only a minority of the commissioners could see a minority of the documents requested - and even then had to vet their notes wit h the White House before sharing them with the full Commission! We must continue to "press for truth" in connection with the events of September 11, 2001. Note: The author is the executive director of the stunning new documentary 9/11: Press for the Truth. To watch this powerful, inspiring documentary which is ava ilable for free viewing, click here. And for an excellent new list of top offici als who have publicly slammed the 9/11 Commission Report, click here.

US helped Israel plan Lebanon offensive 2006-08-14, Christian Science Monitor/New Yorker http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0814/dailyUpdate.html

A special report in The New Yorker says the Bush administration was closely invo lved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks against Hizbullah in Lebano n, and US officials hoped that by helping Israel destroy or disarm the militant Islamic group, it would make it easier for the US to launch a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The report, written by investigative journalist Se ymour Hersh, who also helped break the story about abuses at the Abu Ghraib pris on and in the 70s broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, alleges Isr aeli officials travelled to Washington to talk to US officials, in particular Vi ce President Dick Cheney, about the plan. A Pentagon consultant said that the Bu sh White House "has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a pre-empt ive blow against Hezbollah." CBS News reports that Israeli officials "fiercely d enied" that it had sought a "greenlight" from Washington, and that it had no adv ance plan to attack Hizbullah. Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. They really wa nt to go after Iran." Last month the San Francisco Chronicle reported that "Isra el's military response...was unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago". The report said that a senior Israeli army officer had been briefing diplomats, journalists and think-tanks for more than a year about the plan. It quoted Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at [Israel's] Bar-Ilan U niversity, who said: "Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for w hich Israel was most prepared."

Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai 2006-08-06, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-vietnam6aug06,0,92368... Kill anything that moves. Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying. Bac k home in California, Henry published an account of the slaughter. Yet he and ot her Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and fa bricators. No one was ever prosecuted. Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth. The files are part of a once-s ecret archive...that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam w ere more extensive than was previously known. The Times...obtained copies of abo ut 3,000 pages -- about a third of the total -- before government officials remo ved them from the public shelves, saying they contained personal information tha t was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The documents detail 320 alleg ed incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators. Many war crimes did not make it into the archive. The archive...includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass. The records d escribe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese. Hundreds of soldiers...describ ed a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses...w ere uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam. Ultimately, 57 [s oldiers] were court-martialed and just...fourteen received prison sentences rang ing from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator. He served se ven months of a 20-year term. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.

A new report says the Pentagon's finances are in disarray 2006-05-12, San Jose Mercury News/Knight Ridder http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/14557387.htm The Defense Department's accounting practices are in such disarray that defense officials can't track how much equipment the military owns, where it all is or e xactly how they spend defense dollars every year. The report by Business Leaders

for Sensible Priorities called the Pentagon's financial-management practices an embarrassment. "Today, if the Defense Department were a private business it wou ld be involved in a major scandal," said Kwai Chan, a former top official with t he Government Accountability Office and the report's author. The nonpartisan gro up, made up of more than 600 current and retired business executives from U.S. c ompanies, thinks that federal spending priorities are undermining national secur ity. A report this year from the White House's Office of Management and Budget f ound that 20 out of 23 defense programs that auditors looked at...didn't use str ong financial-management practices. In reports to Congress in recent years, the GAO found $100 million that could be collected annually from defense contractors who underpaid federal taxes. The federal government had collected less than 1 p ercent of that. $1.2 billion in Army supplies shipped to Iraq [also] couldn't be accounted for. As a result, military units ended up short on "tires, tank track s, helicopter spare parts, radio batteries and other basic items." The Defense D epartment's Office of the Inspector General has pronounced the department "un-au ditable." Note: The article failed to mention Rumsfeld's own admission "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," as reported on CBS. Th e CBS article goes on to state that "[the Pentagon's] own auditors admit the mil itary cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends." See this highly underrep orted article at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main32598 5.shtml

400 dolphins found dead on Zanzibar coast 2006-04-28, CNN/Associated Press http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/04/28/dolphins.ap/index.html Hundreds of dead dolphins washed up Friday along the shore of a popular tourist destination on Zanzibar's northern coast, and scientists ruled out poisoning. Th e bottleneck dolphins, which live in deep offshore waters, had empty stomachs, m eaning that they could have been disoriented and were swimming for some time to reorient themselves. They did not starve to death and were not poisoned. In the United States, experts were investigating the possibility that sonar from U.S. s ubmarines could have been responsible for a similar incident in Marathon, Florid a, where 68 deep-water dolphins stranded themselves in March 2005. A U.S. Navy t ask force patrols the East Africa coast as part of counterterrorism operations.

Palace Revolt 2006-02-06, Newsweek http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11079547/site/newsweek/ They were loyal conservatives and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for i t. James Comey...resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. Come y's farewell speech...contained...an unusual passage. Comey thanked "people who came to my office, or my home, or called my cell phone late at night, to quietly tell me when I was about to make a mistake; they were the people committed to g etting it right....Some of them did pay a price for their commitment to right, b ut they wouldn't have it any other way." These Justice Department lawyers, backe d by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimi ted powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Con stitution, [they] fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods wi thin the law. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their effor

ts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men. They did not see the struggle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray -- as painfully close calls with unavoidable pitfalls. They worried deeply about whether their principles might put Americans at home and abroad at risk. T heir story...is a quietly dramatic profile in courage. Note: If you want to understand the complexities involved behind the scenes at t he top levels of US politics, I most highly recommend reading this entire articl e. It is five webpages in length.

Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memo 2006-02-03, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1700881,00.html Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was "solidly" behind US plans to i nvade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion's legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up t o the war published today. A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not ther e was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a ba nned Iraqi weapons programme. Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried a bout the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN c olours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN r esolutions]". The revelation that Mr Blair had supported the US president's plan s to go to war with Iraq even in the absence of a second UN resolution contrasts with the assurances the prime minister gave parliament shortly after. On Februa ry 25 2003 - three weeks after his trip to Washington - Mr Blair told the Common s that the government was giving "Saddam one further, final chance to disarm vol untarily". Downing Street did not deny the existence of the memo last night. Note: Why was this initially hardly mentioned in the US media? For lots more, se e our War Information Center.

Unceremonious end to Army career: Outspoken general fights demotion 2005-05-29, Baltimore Sun http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.riggs29may29,1,2860514.story John Riggs spent 39 years in the Army, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery during the Vietnam War and working his way up to become a three-star gen eral. Last year, Riggs was told by senior Army officials that he would be retire d at a reduced rank, losing one of his stars because of infractions considered s o minor that they were not placed in his official record. He was given 24 hours to leave the Army. A senior officer's loss of a star is a punishment seldom used , and then usually for the most serious offenses, such as dereliction of duty or command failures. So what cost Riggs his star? His Pentagon superiors said he a llowed outside contractors to perform work they were not supposed to do. Some of the general's supporters believe the motivation behind his demotion was politic s. Riggs was blunt and outspoken on a number of issues and publicly contradicted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by arguing that the Army was overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan and needed more troops.

Secret FBI Report Questions Al Qaeda Capabilities

2005-03-09, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=566425&page=1 No 'True' Al Qaeda Sleeper Agents Have Been Found in U.S. A secret FBI report ob tained by ABC News concludes that while there is no doubt al Qaeda wants to hit the United States, its capability to do so is unclear. The 32-page assessment sa ys flatly, "To date, we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the US, " seemingly contradicting the "sleeper cell" description prosecutors assigned to seven men in Lackawanna, N.Y., in 2002. It also differs from testimony given by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who warned in the past that several sleeper cells were probably in place.

Commandos Get Duty on U.S. Soil 2005-01-23, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/national/nationalspecial3/23code.html Mr. Arkin, in the online supplement to his book (codenames.org/documents.html ), says the contingency plan, called JCS Conplan 0300-97, calls for "special-missi on units in extra-legal missions to combat terrorism in the United States" based on top-secret orders that are managed by the military's Joint Staff. Mr. Arkin provided The New York Times with briefing slides prepared by the Northern Comman d, detailing the plan and outlining the military's preparations for the inaugura tion. Three senior Defense Department and Bush administration officials confirme d the existence of the plan and mission, but disputed Mr. Arkin's characterizati on of the mission as "extra-legal."

UK 'sells' bomb material to Iran 2002-09-23, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2275249.stm British officials have approved the export of key components needed to make nucl ear weapons to Iran and other countries known to be developing such weapons. An investigation by BBC Radio 4 programme File on Four will disclose that the Depar tment of Trade and Industry allowed a quantity of the metal, Beryllium, to be so ld to Iran last year. That metal is needed to make nuclear bombs. Britain has ha d an arms embargo to Iran since 1993 and has signed up to an international proto col which bans the sale of Beryllium to named countries, including Iran. Berylli um is a metal with a limited number of high-tech uses in civilian industry, but is mostly used in defence applications and is a vital component in a nuclear bom b. The programme has also interviewed a leading nuclear weapons expert in the UK who says that the Beryllium and other items which the DTI has licensed to Iran add up to a shopping list for a nuclear weapons programme. The UK has an arms em bargo against Iran, but not a trade embargo. The programme highlights the weakne sses in the UK's new export control system, which was set up to stop the prolife ration of nuclear weapons. Iranian procurement agents have been working in the U K to get sensitive material back to Iran, and that Pakistan has also been succes sful in procuring material for its nuclear programme from here.

In Iraq, a human life is worth $2,500; in Manhattan, $1.8 million 2007-05-20, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/20/... What is the value of a human life? This came to mind recently, thanks to U.S. Ma rines, who, in early March, went on a killing rampage near Jalalabad in Afghanis

tan. A platoon of elite Marine Special Operations troops was ambushed by a suici de bomber in a minivan and one was wounded. Initially, it was reported that as m any as 10 Afghans were killed and 34 wounded as the platoon fled the site. Later , it was admitted that the Marines had wielded "excessive force" after the ambus h had ended. The Marines were reported to have murdered "12 people -- including a 4-year-old girl, a 1-year-old boy and three elderly villagers.'' According to a report by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, a "16-year-old newly married gi rl was cut down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to her family's farmhou se." After much protest in Afghanistan, Col. John Nicholson met with the familie s of the Afghans who had been killed and wounded by the Marines. He offered this official apology: "I stand before you today, deeply, deeply ashamed and terribl y sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people." And then he paid about $2,000 per death to family members. The military calls these "con dolence payments." We also know something about how the U.S. government evaluate d the worth of the lives of slaughtered American innocents after the Sept. 11, 2 001, attacks. The family or spouse of a loved one murdered that day was also giv en a monetary value -- $1.8 million. The U.S. government has indeed offered the world an evaluation of what price slaughter should exact in the deaths of innoce nts: The value of a civilian slaughtered ... on Sept. 11: $1.8 million. The valu e of a civilian slaughtered by U.S. Marines near Jalalabad, Afghanistan: $2,000. Note: For more astonishing information on how the military mishandles your tax d ollars, click here.

Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran 2007-01-07, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2535310,00.html Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran s uranium enrichment facilities w ith tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to bl ow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear bunker-busters , according to sev eral Israeli military sources. The attack would be the first with nuclear weapon s since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagas aki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb. Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open t unnels into the targets. Mini-nukes would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout. As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Ir anian nuclear project will be demolished, said one of the sources. Israeli and Am erican officials have met several times to consider military action. Military an alysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Teh ran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack. Some analysts warned that Iranian retaliation for such a strike could range from disruption of oil supplies to the West to terror ist attacks against Jewish targets around the world. Robert Gates, the new US de fence secretary, has described military action against Iran as a last resort , lead ing Israeli officials to conclude that it will be left to them to strike. Note: The fact that this is being announced in the press is quite peculiar. For more on war, click here.

America's Double Standard on Democracy in the Middle East 2006-12-22, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1572574,00.html What's good for Beirut is not good for Gaza, according to Washington's playbook.

And that discrepancy undermines the credibility of U.S. claims to be promoting democracy in the region. In Lebanon as in Gaza, democratically elected governmen ts are being challenged by political opponents demanding fresh elections and in each place, the standoff threatens to spark a civil war. Yet, the response of th e U.S. and Britain to each crisis has been so different as to provoke accusation s of double-standards and questions about the West's commitment to democracy in the Arab world. Despite Hamas's democratic victory at the polls in January, the West has imposed a blockade on financial aid to the Palestinian Authority becaus e Hamas refuses to recognize Israel. This apparent double-standard in the West's stances on Lebanon and on Gaza has not gone unnoticed by Arab commentators. "Ho w could the U.S. support the democratically elected government in Lebanon and do just the opposite in Palestine?" asked Talal Salman, the publisher of Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper. Promoting democracy in the Arab world has ostensibly been a cornerstone of Bush Administration policy. [Yet] the focus of the democratizati on drive has always been on Washington's regional enemies Iraq, Iran and Syria ather than on autocratic friends. So, while the Bush Administration continues .. . talk of promoting democracy in the Middle East, many in the Arab world have a jaundiced view of Washington's intentions: Democracy, yes, but only when the out come serves the interests of the U.S.

The War Dividend: The British companies making a fortune out of conflict-riven I raq 2006-03-13, Independent (one of the UK's top newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article350959.ece British businesses have profited by at least 1.1bn since coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein three years ago. The company roll-call of post-war profiteers in cludes some of the best known names in Britain's boardrooms. The evidence of mas sive investments and the promise of more multimillion-pound profits to come was discovered in a joint investigation by Corporate Watch, an independent watchdog, and The Independent. The findings show how much is [at] stake if Britain were t o withdraw military protection from Iraq. British company involvement at the top of Iraq's new political and economic structures means Iraq will be forced to re ly on British business for many years to come. A total of 61 British companies a re identified as benefiting from at least 1.1bn of contracts and investment in th e new Iraq. But that figure is just the tip of the iceberg. It could be as much as five times higher, because many companies prefer to keep their relationship s ecret. The waters are further muddied by the Government's refusal to release the names of companies it has helped to win contracts in Iraq. The report acknowled ges that British business still lags behind the huge profits paid to American co mpanies. In five years, the 1.1bn of contracts identified in the report will be d warfed by what Britain and the US hope to reap from investments. Highly lucrativ e oil contracts have yet to be handed out. Note: For more powerful information on war-profiteering revealed by a highly dec orated U.S. general see http://www.WantToKnow.info/warisaracket

Christmas truce still stirs Europe 90 years later 2005-11-24, Yahoo/Reuters http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:SV_nwSXUZL0J:news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051124/... Even 91 years after peace interrupted the war, French generals still can't fatho m why their soldiers disobeyed orders and joined the German enemy in the silence d battlefields for a forbidden Christmas truce. But Christian Carion, director o f a stirring new film about the spontaneous 1914 ceasefire in World War One, sai d he was moved all the more when the British military asked to send copies of hi

s decidedly anti-war film to their troops overseas. French generals said: 'You g o ahead and make your movie but without us, we don't want to be partners to this rebellion.' I said: 'Rebellion? It was 90 years ago? Is that still a 'rebellion '? They said 'Yes'. The heart-warming film of the real-life story about enemies who left the trenches in northern France, east of Paris, to sing carols together , swap chocolate, drink toasts and bury their dead for a few days in 1914 has ne vertheless been seen by a lot of French people. "Joyeux Noel" ["Merry Christmas" in English] rose to the top of the French box office after its November 9 premi ere at home with 600,000 tickets sold the first week. Carion said the box office count hit the 1 million mark on Thursday -- a record for a film with subtitles in France. Note: It is most interesting that an Internet search reveals the Yahoo News was the only media outlet to pick up this engaging Reuters story. There is a clear t rend in the media to avoid stories that paint war in a negative light. For the f ull, inspiring Christmas truce story: http://www.WantToKnow.info/christmastruce

Bush team sought to snuff CIA doubts 2005-10-26, San Francisco ChronicleCongressional Quarterly http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/26/MNG62FDUGL1.DTL In the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon's policy of dtente was under attack by some former military officials and conservative policy intellectuals, Ford admi nistration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were among those challengin g as too soft the CIA's estimate of Moscow's military power. Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to create a "Team B." CIA Director William Colby rejected the Team B ide a and was fired. Colby's successor as head of the spy agency, George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, accepted it. Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by cr eating his own intelligence shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Hussein's nuclear weapons, which later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House. "In retrospect, and with the Team B report an d records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. amb assador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Inte lligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criti cized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlargi ng the impression of danger and threat." When Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz wanted to secretly back Saddam Hussein against the Iranians, Schultz by passed the CIA and sent Rumsfeld, then a businessman, to Baghdad to seal the dea l.

Navy Shows Off Anti-Terror Dolphins 2007-04-13, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-04-13-anti-terror-dolphins_N.htm About 75 dolphins and 25 sea lions are housed at Naval Base Point Loma in San Di ego Harbor as part of a Navy program to teach them to detect terrorists and mine s underwater. The base briefly opened its doors to the media Thursday for the fi rst time since the start of the war in Iraq. The display came a few weeks after the Navy announced plans to send up to 30 dolphins and sea lions to patrol the w aters of Washington state's Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, which is home to nuclear s ubmarines, ships and laboratories. Both species can find mines and spot swimmers in murky waters. Working in unison, the dolphins can drop a flashing light near a mine or a swimmer. The sea lions carry in their mouths a cable and a handcuff -like device that clamps onto a terrorist's leg. Sailors can then use the cable to reel in the terrorist. The Navy's sea mammal program started in the late 1950

s and grew to comprise 140 animals during the Cold War. Note: Yet the navy's sophisticated new sonar systems are killing dolphins and wh ales around the globe. For more on this, click here. And what if the dolphins an d sea lions go on strike for better wages? ;o)

New Device Will Sense Through Concrete Walls 2006-01-04, Defense Link (Website of U.S. Department of Defense) http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2006/20060103_3822.html Troops conducting urban operations soon will have the capabilities of superheroe s, being able to sense through 12 inches of concrete to determine if someone is inside a building. The new "Radar Scope" will give warfighters searching a build ing the ability to tell within seconds if someone is in the next room. By simply holding the portable, handheld device up to a wall, users will be able to detec t movements as small as breathing. The Radar Scope, developed by DARPA, is expec ted to be fielded to troops in Iraq as soon as this spring. Weighing just a poun d and a half, the Radar Scope will be about the size of a telephone handset and cost just about $1,000, making it light enough for a soldier to carry and inexpe nsive enough to be fielded widely. The Radar Scope will be waterproof and rugged , and will run on AA batteries.

CNN tours Gitmo prison camp 2005-07-07, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/07/06/gitmo.tour/index.html Military rules prevent crew from getting full picture. President Bush himself ch allenged reporters to visit the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay amid allegati ons that American troops mistreated suspected Islamic terrorists held there, so CNN took him up on the offer. "These people are being treated humanely. Very few prison systems around the world have seen such scrutiny as this one," Bush said Wednesday. "And for those of you who are here and have doubt, I suggest buying an airplane ticket and going down and look -- take a look for yourself." But mil itary ground rules -- including censoring video shot at the facility -- made it nearly impossible for a CNN crew that visited the prison the same day to get a f ull picture of the prison. A lawyer for some of the detainees called press tours of the camp "one big charade." CNN employees who visited the prison were not al lowed to speak to the prisoners.

How the leaked documents questioning war emerged from 'Britain's Deep Throat' 2005-06-27, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1669292_2,00.html Ministry of Defence figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that virtually none were used in March and April; but between May and August an average of 10 tons were dropped each month, with the RAF taking just a s big a role in the spikes of activity as their US colleagues. Then in September t he figure shot up again, with allied aircraft dropping 54.6 tons. If this was a covert air war, both Bush and Blair may face searching questions. In America onl y Congress can declare war, and it did not give the US president permission to t ake military action against Iraq until October 11, 2002. Blair s legal justificati on is said to come from UN Resolution 1441, which was not passed until November 8, 2002.

Gitmo detainees denied witnesses: Lawyer calls legal proceedings 2006-11-16, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15759610

shams

The U.S. military called no witnesses, withheld evidence from detainees and usua lly reached a decision within a day as it determined that hundreds of men detain ed at Guantanamo Bay were enemy combatants, according to a new report. The analysi s of transcripts and records...found that hearings that determined whether a pri soner should remain in custody gave the accused little opportunity to contest al legations against him. These were not hearings. These were shams, said Mark Denbea ux, an attorney and Seton Hall University law professor who along with his son, Joshua, is the author of the report. The military held Combatant Status Review T ribunals for 558 detainees...between July 2004 and January 2005 and found all bu t 38 were enemy combatants. Handcuffed detainees appeared before a panel of thre e officers with no defense attorney, only a military personal representative. Repr esentatives said nothing in the hearings 14 percent of the time and made no subst antive comments in 30 percent. In 74 percent of the cases, the government denied requests to call witnesses who were detained at the prison. The report is based on transcripts...released earlier this year in response to a Freedom of Informat ion Act lawsuit... The Military Commissions Act, which President Bush signed on Oct. 17, strips all non-U.S. citizens held under suspicion of being an enemy com batant of their right to challenge their detention in civilian courts with petit ions of habeas corpus.

Beam weapons almost ready for battle 2006-01-11, MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10805240/ LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - There is a new breed of weaponry fast approaching. They are l abeled "directed-energy weapons," and they may well signal a revolution in milit ary hardware -- perhaps more so than the atomic bomb. Directed-energy weapons ta ke the form of lasers, high-powered microwaves and particle beams. Their adoptio n for ground, air, sea, and space warfare depends not only on using the electrom agnetic spectrum, but also upon favorable political and budgetary wavelengths to o. After more than two decades of research, the United States is on the verge of deploying a new generation of weapons that discharge beams of energy, such as t he Airborne Laser and the Active Denial System, as well as the Tactical High Ene rgy Laser, or THEL. Then there s Active Denial Technology -- a non-lethal way to u se millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy to stop, deter and turn back an advanc ing adversary. This technology, supported by the U.S. Marines, uses a beam of mi llimeter waves to heat a foe s skin, causing severe pain without damage, and makin g the adversary flee the scene. By tuning the resonance of a laser onto Earth s io nosphere, you can create audible frequencies. Like some boom box in the sky, the laser-produced voice could bellow from above down to the target below: "Put dow n your weapons."

CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy 2009-11-18, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cia-secret-prison-found/story?id=9115978 The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding acad emy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a f ormer U.S. intelligence official [said]. Where affluent Lithuanians once rode sh ow horses and sipped coffee at a caf, the CIA installed a concrete structure wher

e it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terro rists at a time. Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of wh at they called a CIA front company, Elite LLC, which purchased the property and built the "black site" in 2004. Lithuania agreed to allow the CIA prison after P resident George W. Bush visited the country in 2002 and pledged support for Lith uania's efforts to join NATO. "The new members of NATO were so grateful for the U.S. role in getting them into that organization that they would do anything the U.S. asked for during that period," said former White House counterterrorism cz ar Richard Clarke. "They were eager to please and eager to be cooperative on sec urity and on intelligence matters." Lithuania was one of three eastern European countries, along with Poland and Romania, where the CIA secretly interrogated su spected high-value al-Qaeda terrorists, but until now the precise site had not b een confirmed. Note: For many revealing articles exposing the hidden realities of the "war on t error", click here.

'For Afghans, there is no refuge' 2009-11-18, Toronto Star (One of Toronto's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/news/world/afghanistan/article/727230---for-afghans-th... For most of her life, the young Afghan woman was fleeing war. But everywhere she went it stalked her. "She was very quiet and shy, and you could barely hear her speak," said Ashley Jackson of Oxfam. "When the civil war began in the early 19 90s, she left Kabul and went to the border. But her son was killed by a rocket a ttack. She went to Pakistan and lived in a refugee settlement, and her daughter was taken by a man who wanted her. When the Taliban fell and the family finally got back to Kabul, her husband was killed. For Afghans, there is no refuge." The story of the Afghan woman is one of 700 that form a shocking pattern of abuse, trauma and death suffered by Afghans caught in three decades of war misery that did not end with the defeat of the Taliban and entry of thousands of Canadian an d international troops. Their stories are detailed in a study, The Cost of War, published ... by Oxfam, the Afghan Civil Society Forum, ... and five other human itarian groups that spent months travelling through the country's 14 provinces t o collect the experiences of ordinary people. It shows Afghans blame poverty and corruption more than the Taliban for the continuing conflict. Seventy per cent of interviewees believe poverty is driving the conflict; 48 per cent blame the c orruption of the Afghan government; and 36 per cent blame the Taliban. Eighteen per cent hold international forces responsible, and 17 per cent blame lack of wo rld support. "People have been driven from their homes multiple times, arrested, tortured and abused," said Jackson, the study's author. "The numbers are startl ing." Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the realities of the wars in Afghan istan and Iraq, click here.

Intelligence Policy to Stay Largely Intact 2008-11-11, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122636726473415991.html President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bus h administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party. Mr. Obama is being advis ed largely by a group of intelligence professionals ... who have supported Repub licans. The intelligence-transition team is led by former National Counterterror ism Center chief John Brennan and former CIA intelligence-analysis director Jami

Miscik, say officials close to the matter. Mr. Brennan is viewed as a potential candidate for a top intelligence post. Ms. Miscik left amid a slew of departure s from the CIA under then-Director Porter Goss. Mr. Brennan is a leading contend er for one of the two jobs, say some advisers. He declined to comment. Gen. Jame s L. Jones, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander; Thomas Fingar , the chief of analysis for the intelligence director; Joan A. Dempsey, who serv ed in top intelligence and Pentagon posts; former Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, wh o served on the 9/11 Commission; and [Rep. Jane] Harman have also been mentioned . Ms. Harman has also been cited as a potential secretary of homeland security. Note: According to the New York Times, John O. Brennan, president-elect Obama's intelligence-transition leader and a top candidate for director of national inte lligence or the CIA in the Obama administration, "[was] a senior adviser to [CIA Director George] Tenet in 2002 [and] was present at the creation of the C.I.A. s controversial detention and interrogation program." Jane Harman has been the pri ncipal Congressional proponent of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terro rism Prevention Act, with its McCarthyesque provisions for criminalizing politic al thought. For more on increasing threats to civil liberties from reliable sour ces, click here.

Helping people at home may become a permanent part of the active Army 2008-09-08, Army Times http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/ The 3rd Infantry Division s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 mo nths in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle. Now they re training for the same m ission with a twist at home. Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade em ergencies and disasters. This new mission marks the first time an active unit ha s been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coo rdinate defense support of civil authorities. The mission will be a permanent on e. They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to dea l with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in res ponse to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack. The 1st BCT s soldiers also will learn how to use the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded, 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutie r said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons d esigned to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them. It s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they re fielding. They ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consoli dated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we re undertaking we w ere the first to get it. Note: Positioning military troops in country to deal with internal matters viola tes the posse comitatus act, though the administration will argue that there is a national emergency allowing this.

New Unit of DIA Will Take the Offensive On Counterintelligence 2008-08-12, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/17/AR20080817022... The Defense Intelligence Agency's newly created Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center is going to have an office authorized for the first ti me to carry out "strategic offensive counterintelligence operations," according

to Mike Pick, who will direct the program. Such covert offensive operations are carried out at home and abroad against people known or suspected to be foreign i ntelligence officers or connected to foreign intelligence or international terro rist activities. The investigative branches of the three services -- the Army's Counterintelligence Corps, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and th e Naval Criminal Investigative Service -- have done secret offensive counterinte lligence operations for years, and now DIA has been given the authority. Two yea rs ago, the DIA asked then-Undersecretary of Defense Stephen A. Cambone for auth ority to run offensive operations along with a newer Pentagon intelligence agenc y, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA). Cambone agreed to a two-year t rial. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently approved the merger of CIFA int o the new DIA center. Senior Defense Department officials and the combat command ers overseas will now decide what to do with the DIA's new offensive operational authority. Note: For penetrating reports on the realities of the "war on terror" from major media sources, click here.

Contaminated sand slated for Idaho dump site 2008-05-02, Seattle Times/Associated Press http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004387018_apidtoxicsand1stld... Nearly 80 rail cars loaded with contaminated sand from Kuwait are headed toward a dump in southwestern Idaho. American Ecology Corp. is shipping about 6,700 ton s of sand containing traces of depleted uranium and lead to a hazardous waste di sposal site 70 miles southeast of Boise. The company has previously disposed of low-level radioactive waste and hazardous materials from U.S. military bases ove rseas at facilities in Idaho, Nevada and Texas, said American Ecology spokesman Chad Hyslop, who is based in Boise. "As you can imagine, the host countries of t hose bases don't want the waste in their country," Hyslop said. Neither do leade rs of the Snake River Alliance, a nuclear watchdog group, who have vowed to moni tor the site. "Depleted uranium is both a toxic metal and a radioactive substanc e," said Andrea Shipley, the group's executive director. "That is a concern." Th e sand coming to Idaho from Camp Doha, a U.S. Army Base in Kuwait, was contamina ted with uranium after military vehicles and munitions caught fire during the fi rst Iraq war in 1991. Depleted uranium, twice as dense as lead, has been used as a component in armor plating to protect tanks and for armor-piercing projectile s. American Ecology operates the only commercial hazardous waste disposal site i n Idaho on 1,100 acres of land in the Owyhee desert. Disposal operations cover 1 00 acres in the middle of the property, Hyslop said, and about a third of the ma terial disposed at the Idaho site is from the U.S. military. The company dispose d of uranium-contaminated Bradley fighting vehicles there in 2006. Note: If Kuwait is rejecting this contaminated sand, why is the U.S. taking it?

Patriot missiles: Iraq Veterans Against the War 2008-03-02, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3444835.ece Some of them will be okay. They will live with the secrets. They can dissociate from what happened in combat because it was part of the job. They will keep the secrets out of duty the silence is part of a code, and they honour that code abo ve all else. But for others, the secrets they keep are like a poison, slowly rel easing toxins of shame and remorse. Who can they tell anyway? They talk to each other other veterans who have seen what they ve seen, done what they ve done, and wh o can relate to the burden of carrying these secrets for the rest of their lives

. In 1971, the protest group Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered at a hote l in Detroit. More than 100 veterans talked about the atrocities they had witnes sed in southeast Asia. The event lasted for three days and was named Winter Sold ier after Thomas Paine s famous article. These are the times that try men s souls, he wrote of the terrible winter of 1776. This month, for four days in Washington, D C, beginning on March 13, there will be a second Winter Soldier gathering 37 yea rs after the first. Organised by the protest group Iraq Veterans Against the War , US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan since the 9/11 attack on New York will tes tify about their experiences. They will present photographs and videos, recorded with mobile phones and digital cameras, to back up their allegations of brutali ty, torture and murder. The veterans ... seek to shine a light on the bigger pic ture: that the Abu Ghraib prison regime and the Haditha massacre of innocent Ira qis are not isolated incidents perpetrated by bad seeds as the military suggests, but evidence of an endemic problem. They will say they were tasked to do terribl e things and point the finger up the chain of command. Note: For many revelations of the realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, cl ick here.

'Doomsday' Vault Opens to Protect Seeds 2008-02-26, Associated Press http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jRw_99fcIqca5u6uzuVRuiogts2gD8V1HNK80 It's been dubbed a Noah's Ark for plant life and built to withstand an earthquak e or a nuclear attack. Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the "doomsday" vault is designed by Norway to protect the world's seeds from gl obal catastrophe. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup to the world's 1,400 other seed banks, was to be officially inaugurated in a ceremony Tuesday on the northern rim of civilization attended by about 150 guests from 33 countries. The frozen vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, war, natural disasters and other thr eats. Norway's government owns the vault in Svalbard, a frigid archipelago 620 m iles from the North Pole. The Nordic country paid $9.1 million for construction, which took less than a year. Other countries can deposit seeds for free and res erve the right to withdraw them upon need. Giant air conditioning units have chi lled the vault to just below zero, a temperature at which experts say many seeds could survive for 1,000 years. Inside the concrete entrance ... a roughly 400-f oot-long tunnel of steel and concrete leads to three separate 32-by-88-foot cham bers where the seeds will be stored. The first 600 boxes with 12 tons of seeds a lready have arrived from 20 seed banks around the world, Norwegian Agriculture M inister Terje Riis-Johansen said. Each chamber can hold 1.5 million packets hold ing all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat.

The Army's $200 Billion Makeover 2007-12-07, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/AR20071206028... In the [U.S.] Army's vision, the war of the future is increasingly combat by mou se clicks. It's as networked as the Internet, as mobile as a cellphone, as intui tive as a video game. The Army has a name for this vision: Future Combat Systems , or FCS. The project involves creating a family of 14 weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network. It has turned into the most ambitious modernization of the Army since World War II and the most expensive Army weapons program ever, military officials say. It's a lso one of the most controversial. Even as some early versions of these weapons make their way onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, members of Congres

s, government investigators and military observers question whether the Defense Department has set the stage for one of its biggest and costliest failures. At r isk, they say, are billions of taxpayer dollars spent on exotic technology that may never come to fruition. Future Combat Systems "has some serious problems," s aid Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), chairman of the House air and land forces subco mmittee. "Since its inception, costs have gone up dramatically while promised ca pability has steadily diminished." Today, the Army program involves more than 55 0 contractors and subcontractors in 41 states and 220 congressional districts. " When a program gets to a certain size, in the billions, it employs so many peopl e in so many districts you can't kill it. It's kind of like the Titanic. How do you move it five degrees?" said a congressional staffer and former Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing r eview of the program. The GAO said the cost has increased 79 percent, to $163.7 billion, from $91.4 billion, its original estimate in 2003. Note: For highly revealing reports from major media sources on corruption in gov ernment contracting, click here.

US college rejects Jewish professor over anti-Israel stance 2007-06-11, The Guardian (one of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2100590,00.html One of the most rancorous disputes in American academia has ended with a promine nt political scientist ... being denied tenure at one of the country's top-10 pr ivate universities. Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, [is a professor at] the political sciences department of DePaul University in Chicago. Mr Finkelstein has argued in his books that claims of anti-semitism are used to dampen down criticism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and that the H olocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain. His outspo ken position as a Jewish intellectual critical of Israel and of some elites with in the Jewish community has prompted passionate debate. Prominent intellectuals such as [Noam Chomsky] have spoken out in Mr Finkelstein's favour, but others ha ve decried him. His most bitter opponent is Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law profe ssor, who campaigned heavily to prevent tenure being granted. Soon after Mr Fink elstein applied for it, Mr Dershowitz sent DePaul faculty members a dossier of w hat he categorised as the "most egregious academic sins, outright lies, misquota tions, and distortions" of the political scientist. The dispute has roots that g o deeper still, with Mr Finkelstein devoting much of his most recent book, Beyon d Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, to an attac k on Mr Dershowitz's own work. Mr Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, h as responded to the decision ... by condemning the vote as an act of political a ggression. "I met the standards of tenure DePaul required, but it wasn't enough to overcome the political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict."

I blame myself for our downfall in Iraq 2007-06-06, The Telegraph (one of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/10/wirq110.xml A former American army torturer has laid bare the traumatic effects of American interrogation techniques in Iraq - on their victims and on the perpetrators them selves. Tony Lagouranis conducted mock executions, forced men and boys into agon ising stress positions, kept suspects awake for weeks on end, used dogs to terri fy detainees and subjected others to hypothermia. But he confesses that he was d eeply scarred by the realisation that what he did has contributed to the downfal l of American forces in Iraq. Mr Lagouranis, 37, suffered nightmares and anxiety

attacks on his return to Chicago. Between January 2004 and January 2005, he tor tured suspects, most of whom he says turned out to be innocent. He says that he realised he had entered a moral dungeon when he found himself reading a Holocaus t memoir, hoping to pick up torture tips from the Nazis. "When I first got back I had a lot of anxiety. I had a personal crisis because I felt I had done immora l things and I didn't see a way to cope with that. I saw a psychologist. I had a lot to work through." He says that helped prevent him becoming "a totally broke n human being". Mr Lagouranis has written a recently published book about his ex periences, Fear Up Harsh, a term for intimidating a detainee by shouting at him. He makes clear that torture has cost America its moral authority in Iraq by det aining innocent people and treating them badly. He writes: "My actions, combined with the actions of the arresting infantry who left bruises on their prisoners, and the actions of the officers who wanted to get promotions, repeated in micro cosm all over this country, had a cumulative effect. I could blame Bush and Rums feld, but I would always have to also blame myself." Note: For a top US general's comments on the psychological abuse soldiers suffer as a result of war, click here.

House rejects bills to limit war power 2007-05-18, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/18/... Even as the congressional Democratic leadership fights with President Bush over changing his Iraq war policy, the House rejected two measures that would have ba rred the Bush administration from military operations against Iran without congr essional approval. The votes in the Democratic-controlled House received little press attention because they came late Wednesday night amid a crush of amendment s to the $646 billion fiscal year 2008 military authorization bill. The bill inc ludes $142 billion for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I thought it was pathetic that members would not stand up for their constitutional prerogativ es,'' Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said Thursday. DeFazio had proposed a measure that said no military operations could be undertaken against Iran without specif ic congressional approval, barring an Iranian attack against the United States o r its military. "It shouldn't matter where members stand on the issue'' of possi ble military action against Iran, DeFazio said. "You should stand up for your co nstitutional prerogative.'' Rep. Barbara Lee [commented] "The president's saber rattling against Iran is only increasing and is eerily similar to the march to w ar with Iraq. We must act to prevent another war of pre-emption." DeFazio's amen dment lost handily, 136-288. The second measure [which] barred the Defense Depar tment from using any money authorized for 2007-2008 under the bill to plan a "ma jor contingency operation'' in Iran ... also lost. Note: The lopsided defeat of Rep. DeFazio's amendment described in this clearly indicates that a majority in both parties are clearly committed rting the war machine. Click here for a highly decorated U.S. general's this. Another San Francisco Chronicle article from the same day reveals party consensus against any new Congressional ethics legislation. article to suppo take on the two-

Soldiers Tell True Stories of Their War 2006-11-12, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/12/INGTTM4TKU1.DTL Justin LeHew, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment...Recipient of Navy Cross: Ther e was black smoke billowing out...and I went to pull a Marine out of the back. A s I was pulling him, his upper torso separated from his bottom torso, and all I

had in my hands was his upper body. I handed Doc half of a Marine and said, "Put this in the back of the Humvee because Marines don't leave our dead and wounded on the battlefield." Jeff Englehart, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division: The bo dy parts ... I don't know. It's not a video game. It's very real. But you think about -- this was a little girl. She was obviously innocent. No way you could ac cuse a child that young of being guilty. Her life was snuffed out in a second ju st from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There's no way to get emotio nal about it. You're just numb to it. A lot of soldiers joke about it. Look at t hat little foot and the bastard child that got blown up, but I guarantee that so ldier thinks about it a little bit more deeper than that. Daniel B. Cotnoir, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force...Marine Corps Times "Marine of the Year": We recove red bodies out of a burnt helicopter that literally were just cremated. The only reason we knew we had two was because we counted the vertebrae and there were t oo many vertebrae to be one. The sad part is it's someone's son and that's all y ou've got left. Garett Reppenhagen, cavalry scout/snipe, 2-63 Armored Battalion, 1st Infantry Division: Some of the guys were laughing about it. It was their fi rst time in combat and they were excited about it because they felt like they we nt through some rite of passage. I'm just thinking, You guys are f -- idiots. We just killed a bunch of f -- dudes who were on our side! I asked one of them, "W ould you be so happy if they were Americans?" Note: For a top general's revealing description of how soldiers suffer more than all others, click here.

Can the 20th hijacker of Sept. 11 stand trial? 2006-10-24, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361462/ Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him l ike a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was to ld that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male inte rrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and for ced to perform dog tricks. That much is known. These details were among the find ings of the U.S. Army s investigation of al-Qahtani's aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But only now is a picture emerging of how the interrogatio n policy developed, and the battle that law enforcement agents waged, inside Gua ntanamo and in the offices of the Pentagon, against harsh treatment of al-Qahtan i and other detainees by military intelligence interrogators. In interviews with MSNBC.com the first time they have spoken publicly former senior law enforcemen t agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, working to build legal cas es against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used...a fter Guantanamo's prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimately carried thei r battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who approv ed the more aggressive techniques. And they described their disappointment when military prosecutors told them not to worry about making a criminal case against al-Qahtani, the suspected "20th hijacker" of Sept. 11, because what had been do ne to him would prevent him from ever being put on trial.

US 'plans stealth shark spies' 2006-03-02, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4767428.stm Pentagon scientists are planning to turn sharks into "stealth spies" capable of tracking vessels undetected, a British magazine has reported. They want to remot

ely control the sharks by implanting electrodes in their brains, The New Scienti st says. It says the aim is "to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails". The research is being funded by the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects A gency (DARPA). It aims to build on latest developments in brain implant technolo gy which has already seen scientists controlling the movements of fish, rats and monkeys. Such devices are already being used by scientists at Boston University to "steer" a spiny dogfish in a fish tank. The next step for the Pentagon scien tists will be the release of blue sharks with similar devices into the ocean off the coast of Florida. Remote-controlled sharks...have advantages that robotic u nderwater surveillance vehicles just cannot match: they are silent, and they pow er themselves. Note: This article fails to mention that electronic implants we used over 40 yea rs ago to control the behavior of bulls, as reported on the front page of the Ne w York Times on May 17, 1965. To see the Times article, go to http://www.WantToK now.info/delgadobullnytimes.pdf. For lots more reliable information on governmen t mind control programs: http://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol

Explosive Controversy Heats Up 2006-12-14, CBS News, Sacramento Affiliate http://cbs13.com/topstories/local_story_348215850.html There's an explosion planned at [a] test site in the Central Valley, and residen ts fear it could launch radioactive material into their air. Now there's a fight to stop those planned tests at Site 300, just outside of Tracy near the Lawrenc e Livermore Lab. The Lawrence Livermore Lab has been setting off 60 to 80 blasts a year; most have been small, but next year two larger 300-pound explosions are planned using depleted uranium. For Tracy shoe shop owner Bob Sarvey, that mean s the potential of a radioactive release. Sarvey showed CBS13 the risk assessmen t from the local government and says someone must be worried to have added a can cer risk footnote, and that's before any review of potential radioactivity. Note: For an ABC report on the dangers of depleted uranium, click here. For a CB C (One of Canada's top TV stations) report which goes much deeper, click here. W hy are they exploding this dangerous, radioactive material into the air just out side of the San Francisco area?

New laws to punish whistle blowers 2006-07-02, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2252720,00.html John Reid, the home secretary, is planning a new official secrets law to punish intelligence officers who blow the whistle on government policy by leaking secre t information. He wants longer jail sentences and the removal of a key legal def ence of 'necessity' for whistleblowers. The crackdown is aimed at preventing cas es such as that of Katharine Gun, a former translator at GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre, who leaked a memo showing that in the months before the Ir aq war in 2003 the Americans wanted GCHQ's help in bugging the homes and offices of UN security council members. The government dropped its case against her aft er she threatened to use the necessity defence that she broke the law to prevent a greater 'crime' in the form of an invasion of Iraq. Ministers are also concer ned at the growing number of leaks of sensitive documents by dissident officials , including those relating to the MI5 investigation into the July 7 bombings. It will be the first change to the official secrets legislation since 1989 when th e government removed the right of whistleblowers to claim a defence of public in

terest.

Global military spending hits $1.12 trillion 2006-06-12, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2065482 U.S. spending in Iraq and Afghanistan helped push up global 2005 military expend iture by 3.5 percent to $1.12 trillion. The USA is responsible for 48 percent of the world total, distantly followed by the UK, France, Japan and China with 4 t o 5 percent each. U.S. spending was behind about 80 percent of the gain in 2005. Note: If you crunch the numbers you find that the U.S. spends literally ten time s as much as the next highest spending country on military expenditures. Is it a ny wonder the U.S. is seen as a warring nation?

National security whistle-blowers allege retaliation 2006-02-16, Sacramento Bee (leading newspaper of California's capital city) http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/politics/story/3168792p-11877323c.html Military and intelligence officers told spellbound lawmakers Tuesday that their careers had been ruined by superiors because they refused to lie about Able Dang er, Abu Ghraib and other national security controversies. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaff er...told a House Government Reform subcommittee that he and other intelligence officers and contractors working on the top-secret program code-named "Able Dang er" had identified Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, but were p revented from passing their findings to the FBI. "Many of us have a personal com mitment to ... going forward to expose the truth and wrongdoing of government of ficials who, before and after the 9/11 attacks, failed to do their job." Shaffer contradicted recent statements by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, who denied having met with Shaffer and other Able Dange r operatives in Afghanistan in October 2003. "I did meet with him," Shaffer said . "I have the business card he gave me. I find it hard to believe that he could not remember meeting me." The commission's chairman and vice chairman, former Ne w Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, released a statement say ing the panel had looked into the work of Able Danger and found it "historically insignificant." Note: Though Able Danger received wide media coverage when it first came out six months ago, CNN was the only major media outlet to give significant coverage to this most important news. Yet CNN did not post the text of the program on their website. Why isn't our media covering this vital topic? For lots more on this, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/911information and http://www.WantToKnow.info/abl edanger911

Global Violence Has Decreased, U.N. Says 2005-10-17, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1225195 Armed conflicts have declined by 40 percent since the end of the Cold War primar ily because the United Nations was finally able to launch peacekeeping and confl ict-prevention operations around the world, according to a new study. The first Human Security Report paints a surprising picture of war and peace in the 21st c entury: a dramatic decline in battlefield deaths, plummeting instances of genoci de, and a drop in human rights abuses. The only form of political violence that

appears to be getting worse is international terrorism, a serious threat but one that has killed fewer than 1,000 people a year on average over the past 30 year s. Tens of thousands were killed annually in armed conflicts during that time. A Rand Corp. study earlier this year concluded that the United Nations was succes sful in 66 percent of its peace efforts, but even the 40 percent success rate so me believe is more accurate would be an achievement considering that prior to th e 1990s "there was nothing going on at all." Note: See also New York Times article reporting US murder rate at lowest in 40 y ears.

Pakistan: A Problematic Ally 2007-03-29, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/29/terror/main2623620.shtml Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has doggedly made the case to Washington that he is the finger in the dike holding back a wav e of Islamic extremism. Having successfully argued his own indispensability, Gen eral Musharraf has reaped billions of dollars in economic aid and arms sales whi le encountering little challenge from Washington over his backsliding from steps toward democratic rule. Military aid to Pakistan grew from under $10 million in the three years prior to 9/11 to more than $4 billion in the three years after. But now it is political protest, fueled by Musharraf's steps to consolidate and extend his power, that is washing over Pakistan. That is presenting the U.S. wi th a classic dilemma of the war on terrorism: Does a key leader's security value outweigh his authoritarian practices? Earlier this month, Musharraf suspended t he country's Supreme Court chief justice. Ever since, Pakistan's middle classes one of the chief beneficiaries of the military leader's eight-year rule have tak en to the streets. Also fueling the uproar are suspicions that Musharraf is pavi ng the way to another term as both president and chief military leader. Musharra f cited "abuse of power" when he suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaud hry on March 9. Chaudhry had also expressed his view that it was not legal under the constitution for Musharraf to seek another presidential term while remainin g the Army chief. The Bush administration has ... has expressed concern over som e clashes that have turned violent but has reiterated support for Musharraf as a valuable ally in the war on terror. Note: Once again security triumphs over democracy as the U.S. pours billions of tax dollars into this dictatorship which has been known to harbor terrorists.

FBI: Recruiters Caught in Drug Probe 2006-12-17, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2732908 A dozen Army and Marine recruiters who visited high schools were among the perso nnel caught in a major FBI cocaine investigation, and some were allowed to keep working while under suspicion. The recruiters, who worked in the Tucson area, we re targets of a federal sting called Operation Lively Green, which ran from 2001 to 2004 and was revealed last year. So far, 69 members of the military, prison guards, law enforcement employees and other public employees have been convicted of accepting bribes to help smuggle cocaine. The FBI allowed many recruiters to stay on the job even though they were targeted by the investigation. Some were still recruiting three years after they were photographed running drugs in unifo rm. Most of the recruiters pleaded guilty and will be sentenced in March. Some h onorably retired from the military.

Note: For a description of serious government involvement in major drug traffick ing by a former top DEA agent, click here. Immediately following is a similar st ory by a Pulitzer-winning journalist.

Abu Ghraib leaked report reveals full extent of abuse 2006-02-17, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1711844,00.html 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse 660 images of adult pornography 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts Nearly two years after the first pictures of naked and humiliated Iraqi detainee s emerged from Abu Ghraib prison, the full extent of the abuse became known for the first time yesterday with a leaked report from the US army's internal invest igation into the scandal.

Bush wants right to use military if bird flu hits 2005-10-04, ABC/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1183192 President George W. Bush asked Congress on Tuesday to consider giving him powers to use the military to enforce quarantines in case of an avian influenza epidem ic. "If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quaran tine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine?" Bush asked at a news conference. The active duty military is currently forbidden fro m undertaking law enforcement duties by the federal Posse Comitatus Act. Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Military judge bars release of Abu Ghraib photos 2005-09-20, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1143363 A day before the trial of Lynndie England, the U.S. soldier who held an Iraqi pr isoner on a leash at Abu Ghraib prison, a military judge on Tuesday barred the r elease of photos which have already been published around the world. England is pictured in some of the most notorious Abu Ghraib photographs. In one image, she points and jeers at the genitals of a naked prisoner; in another, she poses wit h the father of her baby, Charles Graner, in front of a pyramid of naked Iraqi p risoners. Some photos have not been made public. England is the last of a series of low-level American soldiers convicted of abuses at Abu Ghraib, once a notori ous site of torture under Saddam Hussein. Six have pleaded guilty and two others , including Graner, have been convicted at military trial.

Anthony J. Russo, 71; Rand staffer helped leak Pentagon Papers 2008-08-08, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-russo8-2008aug08,0,3350490.story Anthony J. Russo, a Rand researcher in the late 1960s who encouraged Daniel Ells

berg to leak the Pentagon Papers and stood trial with him in the Vietnam War-era case that triggered debates over freedom of the press and hastened the fall of a president, has died. In 1971, Russo helped Ellsberg copy a classified governme nt history of the Vietnam War that Ellsberg later supplied to the New York Times , ... dubbed the Pentagon Papers. The secret study provided evidence of lying by government officials, including several presidents, about the scope and purpose s of the war. "I explained [to Ellsberg] how the so-called enemy, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese, were actually the legitimate parties and how the U.S. presence was illegal, immoral and unwise. I supplied him with reams of document ation," Russo later wrote. He was fired from Rand a short time later. Russo said that when he heard about the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he urg ed Ellsberg to "turn that over to the newspapers." Publication of the first inst allments in June [1971] sparked an FBI manhunt for Ellsberg. Russo was harassed by police and placed under surveillance. When he was subpoenaed by a grand jury, he refused to testify against Ellsberg and was jailed for 45 days. A few days b efore Christmas 1971, both men were indicted on charges of conspiracy, theft and espionage. "I will be eternally grateful to Tony for his courage and partnershi p," Ellsberg said. "He set an example of willingness to risk everything for his country and for the Vietnam that he loved that very few, unfortunately, have emu lated." Note: For background information on "false-flag operations" like the Gulf of Ton kin incident, click here.

The War Endures, but Where s the Media? 2008-03-24, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/business/media/24press.html?ex=1364011200&e... Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days w hen it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers an d the Internet. Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-cove red topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummete d, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for E xcellence in Journalism. The drop in coverage parallels ... a decline in public interest. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that more than 50 percent of A mericans said they followed events in Iraq very closely in the months just before and after the war began, but that slid to an average of 40 percent in 2006, and has been running below 30 percent since last fall. The three broadcast networks n ightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 20 04, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. And by the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much t ime on Iraq as earlier in the year. Since the start of last year, the Project fo r Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tra cked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast tele vision networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 perce nt in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year. And reporting on events in Iraq has fallen by more than two-thirds from a year ago. Note: For a powerful summary of major media censorship, click here.

Kucinich protests U.S. army training school 2007-11-19, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21879985

Longshot Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich joined thousands of pro testers in a demonstration Sunday against a U.S. Army school that opponents accu se of fostering human rights abuses in Latin America. Kucinich used the occasion to emphasize his opposition to the Bush administration for leading the U.S. int o war in Iraq and now threatening to attack Iran. "We reject war as an instrumen t of foreign policy," the Ohio congressman told the crowd, estimated by local po lice to number about 10,000. Kucinich said one of his first acts if elected pres ident would be to shut down the school at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains La tin American soldiers, police and government officials. The Army's School of the Americas moved to Fort Benning from Panama in 1984 and was replaced in 2001 by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, under the Defense Dep artment. The annual protests outside the gate to the military installation are t imed to commemorate six Jesuit priests who were killed along with their housekee per and her daughter in El Salvador on Nov. 19, 1989. Some of the killers had at tended the School of the Americas. The military has acknowledged that some gradu ates committed abuses after attending the School of the Americas, but has said i n the past that no cause-and-effect relationship has ever been established. The new Western Hemisphere Institute has mandatory human rights courses, but the dem onstrators contend changes at the school are only cosmetic. Kucinich said in an interview that he will continue lobbying for the closure of the school even if h is longshot candidacy for president fails.

Theories abound on Israeli bombing of Syria 2007-10-02, Miami Herald/McClatchy News http://www.miamiherald.com/news/world/story/258294.html Nearly a month after an Israeli military airstrike in Syria generated political aftershocks from Washington to North Korea, the Israeli government lifted its of ficial veil of secrecy Tuesday. It didn't provide much new information about wha t took place on Sept. 6, however. While its government censor cleared the way fo r journalists here to report that the incident had taken place, rigid rules rema ined in effect that ban reporting what the target was, what troops were involved or why the strike was ordered. Israel lifted its ban on reporting that the atta ck took place after Syrian President Bashar Assad told the British Broadcasting Corp. that Israeli jets had hit an "unused military building." But Israeli offic ials refused to say anything about the attack, and almost no one who would be ex pected to know -- from government officials to former intelligence officers -- i s talking. The dearth of information has allowed fertile speculation: The strike was a dry run for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The target was an Ira nian missile cache bound for Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. The attack hit a fle dgling Syrian-North Korean nuclear weapons program. Or it was meant to thwart ef forts to provide Hezbollah with a "dirty bomb" to use against Israel. One of the latest theories is that North Korea told the United States it had sold nuclear technology to Syria, which prompted the U.S. to pass that information to Israel, leading Israel to attack the technology. The problem of separating fact from fi ction is compounded by the practice on all sides of routinely leaking distorted, exaggerated or downright bogus information to conceal the truth and wage psycho logical warfare. "Everything reported about the raid is wrong and is part of a p sychological warfare that will not fool Syria," Deputy President Farouq Shara sa id in Damascus.

Navy Can Keep Using Sonar for Two Years 2007-01-23, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/23/AR20070123012...

The Defense Department gave the Navy permission Tuesday to keep training with so nar for another two years, a move denounced by activists who say the sound waves can harm dolphins and other marine mammals. Navy officials had sought the two-y ear exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act, allowed under the 2004 Nati onal Defense Authorization Act. The ranges are off Hawaii, Southern California a nd the East Coast. "We cannot stop training for the next two years," said Don Sc hregardus, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for the environment. "That wou ld put our sailors in the Navy at considerable risk." Environmentalists cite inc idents of whales, porpoises and dolphins that have become stranded en masse on b eaches after being exposed to sonar. "The Navy has more than enough room in the oceans to train effectively without injuring or killing endangered whales and ot her marine species," said Joel Reynolds, senior attorney at the Natural Resource s Defense Council, which is suing the Navy over its sonar use. Navy officials sa id they're claiming a two-year exemption because a federal judge in California r uled last year that the Navy needed to do more detailed analysis of the effect i ts sonar training would have on the environment. The Navy says the new exemption will allow sailors to go ahead with 40 separate exercises over the next two yea rs. Note: For major media news articles on the damaging effects of certain advanced types of sonar in question on whole schools of dolphins and whales, click here.

White House accused of censorship 2006-12-19, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-censor19dec19,0,1846868.... A former National Security Council official said Monday that the White House tri ed to silence his criticism of its Middle East policies by ordering the CIA to c ensor an op-ed column he wrote. Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Mid dle East affairs at the National Security Council, or NSC, and a former CIA anal yst, said the White House told a CIA censor board to excise parts of a 1,000-wor d commentary on U.S. policy toward Iran that he had offered to the New York Time s. He said the agency's action "was fabricated to silence an established critic of the administration's foreign policy incompetence at a moment when the White H ouse is working hard to fend off political pressure to take a different approach ." Leverett said there were two key paragraphs that the CIA board wanted to cut. The first was about U.S. cooperation with Iran concerning Afghanistan about the time of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The second dealt with an offer by Iran to the United States in early 2003 to discuss the possibility of a "grand bargain" that would settle several disputes between the two countries. He said both epis odes had been publicly discussed by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell an d his former deputy, Richard L. Armitage. "There is no basis for claiming that t hese issues are classified and not already in the public domain," he said. Like other former CIA employees, he is required to submit manuscripts for articles, b ooks and speeches to the agency for review. Note: For a clip of Mr. Leverett talking about this on video, click here.

Odd gift ideas for your stalkings 2006-12-17, Toronto Star (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you ... somet hing fun for Christmas. Conspiracy Culture, at 1696 Queen St. W., offers unique "niche" shopping. "Anything conspiratorial is what's hot. People are just kind o f trying to get in touch with alternative opinions and theories," said co-owner

Patrick Whyte. The hot ticket for Yuletide is Terrorstorm on DVD, ($17.99) "a hi story of government-sponsored terrorism" that focuses on Britain and the U.S., W hyte said, adding the film's director, Alex Jones, was stopped by Canada Customs when he came to investigate a Bilderberg meeting last June. The Bilderberg Grou p is a shadowy elite organization (and even the non-paranoid concede this much) that holds annual invitation-only meetings of business and political leaders. Pr ime Minister Stephen Harper was purportedly photographed leaving one event a few years ago and likely attended last June's Ottawa meeting, although nobody is sa ying anything which makes Bilderberg so conspiracy-worthy. Note: For lots more on the highly secretive, elite Bilderberg Group, click here. To watch the Terrorstorm video free online at Google Video, click here. The fir st hour of Terrorstorm is absolutely awesome! It's one of the best compilations we've seen. Sadly, after the first hour it goes fairly rapidly downhill, but don 't miss the first hour of it!

U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons 2006-11-04, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/03/AR20061103017... The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk. The governme nt says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extre mely grave damage." The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsvill e resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the "black" sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The gover nment, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asser ts that the detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public. An attorney for Khan's family, responded in a court document yester day "the executive is attempting to misuse its classification authority...to con ceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct." Khan's family did not learn of his whereabouts until Bush announced his transfer in September, more than three years after he was seized. Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law profe ssor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners "ca n't even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.'" Note: Interesting that not only the government documents, but even this article avoids mentioning the word torture, when that is clearly what this is all about.

Former CIA spy branded a traitor wants to clear his name 2006-10-23, Seattle Post-Intelligencer http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/289584_fallenspy23.html Edwin Wilson...was hurtling into history as one of this nation's most infamous t raitors until three years ago when a federal judge concluded he'd been buried wi th the help of government lies. Now 78 and paroled, Wilson works in his Seattle office...to prove he didn't earn the spectacular fall from skilled CIA agent to despised federal prisoner. In books about his downfall, he is the villain: a rut hless renegade who left the CIA and made himself rich by selling arms and traini ng terrorists for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Three years ago, a federal judg e in Texas threw out a major conviction...and blasted the government for coverin

g up the truth. Wilson had finally gotten documents [proving] that despite his 1 971 retirement, the CIA was still secretly using him to gather intelligence. The government had denied it for years. The people Wilson is suing former officials i n the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Justice Department and the CIA, including two men who are now federal judges contend they can't be held liable for doing their j obs, even if his rights were violated. Wilson spent 22 years in prison. U.S. Dis trict Judge Lynn Hughes found that about two dozen government lawyers were invol ved in hiding information from Wilson's defense attorney. In his blistering opin ion, Hughes noted that the CIA had more than 80 contacts with Wilson after he le ft the agency, which, among other things, had used him to "trade weapons or expl osives for sophisticated Soviet military equipment like MiG-25 fighters, tanks, mi ssiles and ocean mines with Libya." A CIA agent had even discussed with Wilson tha t "sending tons yes, tons of explosives to a hostile power could be authorized" if t he U.S. got good enough information for it, the judge wrote. Note: For another famous case of a major "traitor" who was framed by the U.S. go vernment, click here.

Cost of Iraq war nearly $2b a week 2006-09-28, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/09/28/cost_of_iraq_... A new congressional analysis shows the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week -- nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict t hree years ago and 20 percent more than last year -- as the Pentagon spends more on establishing regional bases. The total cost of military operations at home a nd abroad since 2001...will top half a trillion dollars. The spike in operating costs -- including a 20 percent increase over last year in Afghanistan, where th e mission now costs about $370 million a week -- comes even though troop levels in both countries have remained stable. [A] major factor...is "the building of m ore extensive infrastructure to support troops and equipment in and around Iraq and Afghanistan," according to the report. Based on Defense Department data, the report suggests that the construction of so-called semi-permanent support bases has picked up in recent months, making it increasingly clear that the US milita ry will have a presence in both countries for years to come. The United States m aintains it is not building permanent military bases in Iraq or Afghanistan. "Yo u would expect [operating costs] to level off if you have the same level of peop le," said the report's principal author, Amy Belasco, a national defense special ist at the Congressional Research Service. "It's a bit mysterious." The Pentagon has not provided Congress with a detailed accounting of all the war funds, maki ng it impossible to conduct a full, independent estimate. Note: Many hundreds of billions of dollars have been reported missing by top med ia sources. Do you think it's possible there might be some corruption going on h ere?

Beijing secretly fires lasers to disable US satellites 2006-09-26, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s top newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/26/wchina226.xml China has secretly fired powerful laser weapons designed to disable American spy satellites by "blinding" their sensitive surveillance devices. The hitherto unr eported attacks have been kept secret by the Bush administration for fear that i t would damage attempts to co-opt China in diplomatic offensives against North K orea and Iran. Sources told the military affairs publication Defense News that t here had been a fierce internal battle within Washington over whether to make th

e attacks public. In the end, the Pentagon's annual assessment of the growing Ch inese military build-up barely mentioned the threat. "After a contentious debate , the White House directed the Pentagon to limit its concern to one line," Defen se News said. The document said that China could blind American satellites with a ground-based laser firing a beam of light to prevent spy photography as they p ass over China. According to senior American officials: "China not only has the capability, but has exercised it." American satellites like the giant Keyhole cr aft have come under attack "several times" in recent years. Note: Why are so few major media picking up this important news? A Google news s earch shows that the New York Sun is the only major media to have reported this news in the U.S.

Grenades 'caused Beslan tragedy' 2006-08-29, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5294548.stm A Russian investigator has said grenades fired by surrounding Russian forces cou ld have triggered the Beslan school bloodbath in September 2004. Yuri Savelyev's conclusions contradict the official view that bombs planted by the hostage-take rs in the school gym went off just before the gun battle. Mr Savelyev is a membe r of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating the siege, in which 331 people died. Mr Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, said that during the investigation, he "discovered that the consequences of those blasts could not at all be explained by the explosions of the home-made devices installed by the re bels". The head of the commission, Stanislav Kesayev, said he had confidence in Mr Savelyev's conclusions. "He had more resources than our commission. He relied on his own knowledge as a weapons specialist and mathematician," Mr Kesayev tol d the radio. For weeks after the siege Russian officials had denied the use of f lamethrowers. Note: The Russian school bombing is very likely one of many examples of a falseflag operation -- a terrorist act staged secretly by a government and blamed on another group or government in order to achieve a certain agenda. To understand more about that agenda, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/brighterfuture. To see Te rrorstorm, an excellent, free documentary on false flag operations, click here.

The Other Big Brother 2006-01-30, Newsweek http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965509/site/newsweek/ The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfi t may have gone too far. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of abo ut 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. The de monstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to or ganizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. A Defense document sho ws that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. There are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its author ity and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. The deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that...reports may have contained info rmation on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The nu

mber of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a sen ior Pentagon official.

UN says sonar threatens dolphin, whale survival 2005-11-24, ABC/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1343081 Naval maneuvers and submarine sonars in oceans are a new factor among many threa tening dolphins, whales and porpoises that depend on sound to survive, the Unite d Nations and marine experts said on Wednesday. "These low frequency sounds trav el vast distances, hundreds if not thousands of kilometers from the source," [Ma rk Simmonds of the Whale and Dolphin Society] told Reuters. UNEP said underwater sonar and military maneuvers threatened more than 4 percent of species, althoug h Simmonds indicated all were affected. In October, a coalition of environmental groups sued the U.S. Navy over its use of sonar, saying the ear-splitting sound s violated environmental protection laws. The report by UNEP and the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) says species like the Beluga whale, Blanville's beake d whale and the Goosebeak whale are seriously at risk from noise pollution.

Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan 2005-09-11, Washington Post http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9289875/ The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The d raft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stock piles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. The draft, dated March 15, wou ld provide authoritative guidance for commanders to request presidential approva l for using nuclear weapons, and represents the Pentagon's first attempt to revi se procedures to reflect the Bush preemption doctrine. The first example for pot ential nuclear weapon use listed in the draft is against an enemy that is using "or intending to use WMD" against U.S. or allied, multinational military forces or civilian populations.

Military examines 'beaming up' data, people 2005-08-29, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/29/MNGA0EENPC1.DTL The military has a long history of funding research into topics that seem straig ht out of science fiction, even occultism. These range from "psychic" spying to "antimatter"-propelled aircraft and rockets to strange new types of superbombs. In recent years, many physicists have become excited about a phenomenon called " quantum teleportation," which works only with infinitesimally tiny particles. Da vis, who has a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Arizona, has wor ked on NASA robotic missions. His 79-page Air Force study seriously explored a s eries of possibilities, ranging from "Star Trek"-style travel to transportation via so-called wormholes in the fabric of space to psychic travel through solid w alls. Davis expressed great enthusiasm for research allegedly conducted by Chine se scientists who, he says, have conducted "psychic" experiments in which humans used mental powers to teleport matter through solid walls. He claims their rese arch shows "gifted children were able to cause the apparent teleportation of sma ll objects" (radio micro-transmitters, photosensitive paper, mechanical watches, horseflies, other insects, etc.). If the Chinese experiments are valid and coul

d be repeated by American scientists, Davis told The Chronicle in a phone interv iew Thursday, then, in principle, the military might some day develop a way to t eleport soldiers and weapons.

Weapons in space put the world at risk 2005-07-13, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/232239_spaceweapons13.html Within the next few weeks, President Bush is expected to release his administrat ion's new national space policy. There have been a series of reports since 2001 that essentially advocate deploying space weapons. The Commission to Assess Unit ed States National Security Space Management and Organization, initially chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, argued that the United States must take steps to avoid a "s pace Pearl Harbor." The Rumsfeld report said there is no current bar to "placing or using weapons in space, applying force from space to Earth, or conducting mi litary operations in and through space." Not so coincidentally, seven of the 13 members of the Rumsfeld space commission had ties to aerospace companies that co uld stand to gain from the launching of a major space weapons program. There are also plans afoot to develop Hypervelocity Rod Bundles, frequently called "Rods from God," designed to drop from space and hit targets on Earth. Note: Why aren't other major newspapers reporting this critical news?

Ridge reveals clashes on alerts 2005-05-10, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-10-ridge-alerts_x.htm?POE=NEW... The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist att acks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only fl imsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says. Ridge, who re signed Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration official s who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled. Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his ag ency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

Man's Claims May Be a Look at Dark Side of War on Terror 2005-04-12, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-masri12apr12,0,904030.sto... ULM, Germany -- Khaled el-Masri says his strange and violent trip into the void began with a bus ride on New Year's Eve 2003. When he returned to this city five months later, his friends didn't believe the odyssey he recounted. Masri said h e was kidnapped in Macedonia, beaten by masked men, blindfolded, injected with d rugs and flown to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned and interrogated by U.S. intelligence agents. He said he was finally dumped in the mountains of Albania. A Munich prosecutor has launched an investigation and is intent on questioning U .S. officials about the unemployed car salesman's claim that he was wrongly targ eted as an Islamic militant. Masri's story, if true, would offer a rare firsthan d look at one man's disappearance into a hidden dimension of the Bush administra tion's war on terrorism. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. authorities have used overseas detention centers and jails to hold or interrogate suspected terrorists , such as at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many of the estimated 9,000 prisoners in U.S. military custody were captured in Iraq, but others, like Masri, were allegedly

picked up in another country and delivered to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan or elsewhere for months of confinement. Note: If the above link fails, click here.

No Secrets: Eyes on the CIA 2005-03-07, Newsweek http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7037720/site/newsweek/ Aviation obsessives with cameras and Internet connections have become a threat t o cover stories established by the CIA to mask its undercover operations and per sonnel overseas. U.S. intel sources complain that "plane spotters" -- hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or departing local airports and post the pix on the Internet -- made it possible for CIA critics recently to assemble details o f a clandestine transport system the agency set up to secretly move cargo and pe ople -- including terrorist suspects -- around the world.

Spy network putrid, army man tells PM 2004-04-14, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/13/1081838723574.html A high-ranking military analyst has accused the Federal Government of systematic ally putting foreign policy objectives ahead of intelligence, seriously undermin ing the work of its own spies. A saga that has wracked the military for six year s has culminated in General Peter Cosgrove's senior intelligence analyst during the East Timor conflict, Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins, writing to the Prime Minster demanding a Royal Commission into the spy services. The letter says ther e has been a litany of intelligence failures. "I strongly urge you, Prime Minist er, to appoint an impartial and wide-ranging Royal Commission into intelligence, " the letter says. "To do otherwise would merely cultivate an artificial scab ov er the putrefaction beneath". A navy lawyer, Captain Martin Toohey, conducted a review of Colonel Collins's grievances and found his intelligence on Timor was b locked at high levels in the DIO. Captain Toohey said the DIO reported what "the government wants to hear" on East Timor. He found it vindictively and unfairly placed Colonel Collins's name on an Australian Federal Police search warrant loo king for leaked intelligence documents, effectively ending his career as an inte lligence officer. The Herald can reveal the DIO shut down an intelligence-sharin g network at the height of the East Timor operation and ordered, in early 2000, that no more intelligence be gathered from West Timor, where atrocities against East Timorese refugees occurred.

Reuters says US troops obstruct reporting of Iraq 2005-09-28, ABC/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1166312 The conduct of U.S. troops in Iraq, including increasing detention and accidenta l shootings of journalists, is preventing full coverage of the war reaching the American public, Reuters said on Wednesday. Reuters said U.S. forces were limiti ng the ability of independent journalists to operate. At least 66 journalists an d media workers, most of them Iraqis, have been killed in the Iraq conflict sinc e March 2003. U.S. Forces acknowledge killing three Reuters journalists. But the military say the soldiers were justified in opening fire. Reuters believes a fo urth journalist working for the agency, who died in Ramadi last year, was killed by a U.S. sniper.

When Computers Attack 2007-06-24, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/weekinreview/24schwartz.html?ex=1340337600&... Anyone who follows technology or military affairs has heard the predictions for more than a decade. Cyberwar is coming. Although the long-announced, long-awaite d computer-based conflict has yet to occur, the forecast grows more ominous with every telling: an onslaught is brought by a warring nation, backed by its brain s and computing resources; banks and other businesses in the enemy states are de stroyed; governments grind to a halt; telephones disconnect. Industrial remote-c ontrol technologies known as Scada systems, for Supervisory Control and Data Acq uisition ... allow remote monitoring and control of operations like manufacturin g production lines and civil works projects like dams. So security experts envis ion terrorists at a keyboard remotely shutting down factory floors or opening a dam s floodgates to devastate cities downstream. But how bad would a cyberwar real ly be especially when compared with the blood-and-guts genuine article? And is t here really a chance it would happen at all? Whatever the answer, governments ar e readying themselves for the Big One. The United States is arming up. Robert El der, commander of the Air Force Cyberspace Command, told reporters ... that his newly formed command, which defends military data, communications and control ne tworks, is learning how to disable an opponent s computer networks and crash its d atabases. We want to go in and knock them out in the first round, he said, as repo rted on Military.com.

Hearing like a rally as Utahns rail against Divine Strake test 2007-01-19, Salt Lake Tribune http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_5043048 Southern Utah residents welcomed the opportunity Thursday to speak their piece a bout the proposed Divine Strake explosion test. Person after person stepped to t he microphone during the first of Gov. Jon M. Huntsman's two Divine Strake publi c hearings. Outrage, grief and frustration spilled out from about five dozen peo ple who blame atomic testing in the 1950s at the nearby Nevada Test Site for a g rim litany of illnesses and deaths. "It always surprises me we have to fight thi s," said Claudia Peterson, whose family has been plagued with cancer that she be lieves is caused by the atomic testing. "I don't think we should have to fight s o hard to have a happy, healthy life." They doubt the federal government's asser tion the test will not send a mushroom cloud of radiation-tainted litter into Ut ah. They also want Divine Strake stopped to ensure that the U.S. government does not begin testing and using nuclear weapons once again. Department of Environme ntal Quality Director Dianne Nielson, representing the Republican governor, list ened for more than two hours in a packed Dixie State College auditorium. Physici st Raymond H. Cyr urged Nielson to "be all over the measures" if the tests do go forward. Richard Andrews complained about lies from the federal government over the impacts of past tests. "I don't know about anyone else," he said, "but I do n't trust them." Applause roared from the audience of more than 200 after his re marks, as they did many times after speakers talked about the lingering impacts of past tests. St. George resident Carl Palmer was the sole speaker in support o f the tests. Note: For more on this highly controversial bomb given the bizarre name of "Divi ne Strake," click here.

White House proposes retroactive war crimes protection 2006-08-10, Boston Globe/Associated Press http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/08/10/white_house_... The Bush administration drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retr oactively protect policy makers from possible criminal charges for authorizing a ny humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who ha ve seen the proposal. At issue are interrogations carried out by the CIA and the degree to which harsh tactics such as water-boarding were authorized by adminis tration officials. When interrogators engage in waterboarding, prisoners are str apped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning. One section of the d raft would outlaw torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, but it does not contai n prohibitions from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions against "outrages upon p ersonal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Another sec tion would apply the legislation retroactively. The initiative is "not just prot ection of political appointees, but also CIA personnel who led interrogations." Interrogation practices "follow from policies that were formed at the highest le vels of the administration."

House overwhelmingly backs Israel in vote 2006-07-20, Houston Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/4060793.html The House, displaying a foreign affairs solidarity lacking on issues like Iraq, voted overwhelmingly Thursday to support Israel in its confrontation with Hezbol lah guerrillas. The resolution, which was passed on a 410-8 vote, also condemns enemies of the Jewish state. House Republican leader John Boehner cited Israel's "unique relationship" with the United States as a reason for his colleagues to swiftly go on record supporting Israel in the latest flare-up of violence in the Mideast. Yet as Republican and Democratic leaders rally behind the measure in r are bipartisan fashion, a handful of lawmakers have quietly expressed reservatio ns that the resolution was too much the result of a powerful lobbying force and attempts to court Jewish voters. Note: It's interesting to note that very few major media picked up this revealin g story.

Sea Lions and Dolphins May Join War Games 2006-06-22, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2109358 Alongside the submarines, ships and airplanes participating in large-scale milit ary exercises in the Pacific this month, a team of sea lions and dolphins are ex pected to patrol the sea. These marine animals will be flown in from San Diego f or simulated mine recovery and mine detection during the biennial RIMPAC war gam es. Six bottle-nosed dolphins would find the mines, while four California sea li ons would help recover them. High-tech gadgets deployed by the military can't ma tch the natural skills of the dolphins and sea lions. Sea lions have "incredibly good underwater hearing" and can dive to 1,000 feet to attach a recovery line t o a simulated mine, he said. Dolphins use their sonar to find the mines. Marine mammals have been used by the Navy since the early 1960s. The animals save the N avy an estimated $1 million a year. The $15 million Marine Mammal Program has 75 dolphins and 30 sea lions at its San Diego facility. Opponents of the program s ay the military should not train animals for use in warfare.

Regaining My Humanity - A Career Soldier Chooses Jail for Reasons of Conscience 2006-03-22, TruthOut http://www.WantToKnow.info/060322soldierasksforgiveness I was deployed to Iraq in April 2003 and returned home for a two-week leave in O ctober. Going home gave me the opportunity to put my thoughts in order and to li sten to what my conscience had to say. I realized that none of the reasons we we re told about why we were in Iraq turned out to be true. Coming home gave me the clarity to see the line between military duty and moral obligation. By putting my weapon down, I chose to reassert myself as a human being. I have not deserted the military nor been disloyal to the men and women of the military. I have not been disloyal to a country. I have only been loyal to my principles. Many have called me a coward, others have called me a hero. I believe I can be found somew here in the middle. To those who have called me a hero, I say that I don't belie ve in heroes, but I believe that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. To day, as I sit behind bars I realize that there are many types of freedom, and th at in spite of my confinement I remain free in many important ways. What good is freedom if we are afraid to follow our conscience? What good is freedom if we a re not able to live with our own actions? I am confined to a prison but I feel, today more than ever, connected to all humanity. Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience.

Adultery Inquiry Costs General His Command 2005-08-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/politics/11general.html?ex=1281412800&en=06... A four-star general who was relieved of command this week said Wednesday through his lawyer that the Army took the action after an investigation into accusation s that he was involved in a consensual relationship with a female civilian. The lawyer, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said the case "involves an adult relationsh ip with a woman who is not in the military, nor is a civilian employee of the mi litary or the federal government." The general, Kevin P. Byrnes, was relieved Mo nday by the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, just a few months bef ore General Byrnes was scheduled to retire as head of the Army Training and Doct rine Command. Relieving a four-star general of command is unusual, and several A rmy officers said they considered the punishment surprisingly harsh for a genera l who was nearing retirement anyway. Note: There is very likely much more going on here than meets the eye.

White House wants suit against Yoo dismissed 2009-12-08, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/08/MN061AVC89.DTL The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusin g former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a t errorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyer s who advise the president on national security issues. Yoo, a UC Berkeley law p rofessor, worked for the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003. He was the author of a 2002 memo that said rough treatment of captives amounts to torture only if it causes the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily functi on or even death." The memo also said the president may have the power to author ize torture of enemy combatants. In the current lawsuit, Jose Padilla, now servi ng a 17-year sentence for conspiring to aid Islamic extremist groups, accuses Yo o of devising legal theories that justified what he claims was his illegal deten

tion and abusive interrogation. The Justice Department represented Yoo until Jun e, when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the suit could proceed. The department then bowed out, citing unspecified conflicts, and was replaced by a g overnment-paid private lawyer. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was ... held for three y ears and eight months in a Navy brig, where, according to his suit, he was subje cted to sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and stress positions, kept for le ngthy periods in darkness and blinding light, and threatened with death to himse lf and his family. Note: For lots more on government attacks on civil liberties, click here.

Report: Feds Refusing FBI Terror Cases 2006-11-06, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/06/ap/national/mainD8L77N501.shtml The Justice Department increasingly has refused to prosecute FBI cases targeting suspected terrorists over the past five years, according to private researchers who reviewed department records. The report being released Monday by the Transa ctional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University raises questions abo ut the quality of the FBI's investigations. Prosecutors declined to bring charge s in 131 of 150, or 87 percent, of international terrorist case referrals from t he FBI between October 2005 and June 2006. That number marks the peak of general ly steady increases from the 2001 budget year, when prosecutors rejected 33 perc ent of such cases from the FBI. The data "raise troubling questions about the bu reau's investigation of criminal matters involving individuals the government ha s identified as international terrorists," the report said. It noted that prosec utions in traditional FBI investigations since 2001 including drug cases, white co llar crimes and organized crimes have decreased while the number of agents and oth er employees has risen. "So with more special agents, many more intelligence ana lysts, and many fewer prosecutions the question must be asked: What is the FBI d oing?" the report said. Note: With the current administration's frequent claims to be tough on terrorism , does this make any sense? Could it be that some of the accused are being prote cted from prosecution?

Five myths about war and terrorism 2006-11-01, Ode Magazine (Wonderfully inspiring magazine), Nov. 2006 Issue http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4372 If we believe what we see in the media, the world is on fire. The impression we get is that conflicts are increasing all around the globe while the stockpile of deadly weapons constantly expands. All this is very troubling and quite untrue. T he exhaustive Human Security Report offers a very different picture of our world . The 2005 report finds clear evidence that the world is becoming a more peacefu l place. Myth 1: War is spreading. Yes, the number of armed conflicts increased sharply after World War II, but has just as sharply declined since 1991. In the last 15 years...the number of armed conflicts and wars actually fell at least 40 percent. The number of genocides and political murders declined by no less than 80 percent. In 1950, the average conflict claimed the lives of 38,000 people, w hile in 2002 that figure was 600, a decline of 98 percent. Myth 2: The weapons a rsenal is increasing. International arms trade fell 33 percent between 1990 and 2000, and as a percentage of the value of the world economy, defence spending de clined from 4.2 to 2.7 percent. Myth 3: Civilians are the vast majority of war v ictims. In the most recent wars, civilians account for somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of deaths. Myth 4: Women are the primary victims of war. War continue

s to be waged by men, against men. Ninety percent of the victims are men. Myth 5 : Terrorism is the biggest threat in the world. Over the past 30 years, an avera ge of slightly less than 3,000 people have died at the hands of terrorists each year. The chance of being a victim of terrorism remains exceptionally small. Bet ween alleged and real threats, there is often little correlation.

The death of habeas corpus 2006-10-11, MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15220450/ The president has...managed to kill the writ of habeas corpus. Tonight, a specia l investigation, how that, in turn, kills nothing less than your Bill of Rights. Because the Mark Foley story began to break on the night of September 28...many people may not have noticed the bill passed by the Senate that night. Congress passed the Military Commission s Act to give Mr. Bush the power to deal effectivel y with America s enemies those who seek to harm the country. He has been very clear on who he thinks that is. GEORGE W. BUSH: For people to leak that program and fo r a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America. Tha t fact that we re discussing this program is helping the enemy. OLBERMANN: So, the president said it was urgent that Congress send him this bill as quickly as pos sible, not for the politics of next month s elections, but for America. One bit of trivia that caught our eye was the elimination of habeas corpus, which apparent ly used to be the right of anyone who s tossed in prison to appear in court and sa y Hey, why am I in prison? COUNTDOWN has obtained a copy of [the] Constitution of th e United States, and sources tell us it was originally sneaked through the const itutional convention and state ratification in order to establish America s fundam ental legal principles. There s only one reference to habeas corpus: The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in cases of rebe llion or invasion the public safety may require it.

Why Retired Military Brass Don't Want Torture 2006-09-24, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-kaiser24sep24,1,326876... For all 43 retired generals and admirals, it was a combination of moral outrage and deep disgust over President Bush's proposed legislation on interrogating ter rorist suspects that propelled them. "None of us feels comfortable speaking out publicly," said retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000. "That's not the nature of what military off icers do. [But we] care very, very much about the country and the military." The group of retired flag officers first came together in 2005, when a dozen of the m signed a letter opposing the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as attorney genera l for his role in developing Bush's policies on torture in the war on terror. La te last year, they supported Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) ban on cruel and inhum ane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody anywhere in the world. The retired of ficers believe that the negative consequences of the president's anti-terror pol icies could have been avoided if the administration had followed traditional mil itary practices. No higher-ups were prosecuted for the abuses uncovered at Abu G hraib and elsewhere. What further fuels the officers' outrage is that the polici es they believe have undermined the military were mostly formulated by men, like Bush, who have not seen combat. "Cheney made mention in the days after 9/11 tha t he wanted to operate sort of on the dark side," [Brig. Gen. James] Cullen said . "Here was a guy who never served, and now something terrible had happened, and he wanted to show that he was a tough guy?.So he's going to operate outside the rules of law. Bad message."

Worried CIA Officers Buy Legal Insurance 2006-09-11, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/10/AR20060910012... CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government -reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and leg al expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing. The new enroll ments reflect heightened anxiety at the CIA that officers may be vulnerable to a ccusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights violations and oth er misconduct, including wrongdoing related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The anxieties stem partly from public controversy about a system of secret CIA priso ns in which detainees were subjected to harsh interrogation methods, including t emperature extremes and simulated drowning. The White House contends the methods were legal, but some CIA officers have worried privately that they may have vio lated international law. Bush last week called for Congress to approve legislati on drafted by the White House that would exempt CIA officers and other federal c ivilian officials from prosecution for humiliating and degrading terrorism suspe cts. Agency officials said that interest has been stoked over the years by the $ 2 million legal bill incurred by CIA officer Clair George before his 1992 convic tion for lying to Congress about the Iran-contra arms sales; by the Justice Depa rtment's lengthy investigation of CIA officers for allegedly lying to Congress a bout the agency's role in shooting down a civilian aircraft in 2001 in Peru; and by other events. One former intelligence official said CIA officers have recent ly expressed concern that lawsuits will erupt if details of the agency's interna l probe of wrongdoing related to the September 2001 attacks become public.

Opium Bumper Crop Seen to Benefit Taliban 2006-09-03, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=2390033&page=1 Already the world's largest producer of opium, Afghanistan's 2006 output has soa red a staggering 59 percent, according to a survey by the U.N.'s drug control pr ogram. So this year, the country that the United States invaded five years ago t o stabilize will produce 16,000 tons of opium. Drugs now make up more than half of gross domestic product. Top government officials are tied to the drug trade. Corruption runs rampant. Addiction rates in Afghanistan and neighboring Central Asia, Iran and Pakistan are skyrocketing. Note: How is it possible that the opium production continues to skyrocket in Afg hanistan, when it was decimated the year before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan? Fo r a possible answer, click here.

U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis 2006-07-21, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/22military.html?ex=1311220... The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israe l, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air camp aign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday. The d ecision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little de bate within the Bush administration. Israel's request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military o fficers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Le banon to strike. The new American arms shipment to Israel has not been announced

publicly, and the officials who described the administration's decision to rush the munitions to Israel would discuss it only after being promised anonymity. P entagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and conte nts of the shipment to Israel.

Military drafts war plans for terrorist attacks 2005-08-08, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/07/AR20050807008... Preparing scenarios for action on US soil a shift for Pentagon. The US military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terr orist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios an d anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to off icers who drafted the plans. The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pe ntagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and i s legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Defense officials contin ue to emphasize that they intend for the troops to play a supporting role in hom eland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters, and other civilian response groups. But the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.

More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty 2004-12-01, Army Research Office http://www.aro.army.mil/arowash/rt/news/news_wired.htm Hunting for guerillas, handling roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and cr umbling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq -- all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. And this time, they'll be carrying guns. "Putting something like this into the fiel d, we're about to start something that's never been done before," said Staff Sgt . Santiago Tordillos, waving to the black, 2-foot-six-inch robot rolling around the carpeted floor on twin treads, an M249 machine gun cradled in its mechanical grip. "This opens up great vistas, some quite pleasant, others quite nightmaris h. On the one hand, this could make our flesh-and-blood soldiers so hard to get to that traditional war -- a match of relatively evenly matched peers -- could b ecome a thing of the past," he said. "But this might also rob us of our humanity . We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eye s."

Nevada blast put on hold indefinitely 2006-05-27, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/26/nevada.bomb/ The planned detonation of 700 tons of conventional explosives in the Nevada dese rt next month was postponed indefinitely Friday because of fears over the possib le spread of radiation. The detonation site for the blast, known as "Divine Stra ke," is at the Nevada Test Site, which is 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The p lan was to detonate 1.4 million pounds of fuel oil and fertilizer -- 280 times t he amount used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The prospect has drawn critics , who say the explosion could kick radiation-laced soil into the air, and conspi racists, who say the blast is a front for testing new nuclear weapons.

Note: Many thanks to all of you who emailed expressing concern about Divine Stra ke and were part of the movement to have this test stopped. Together, we make a difference!

US in secret gun deal 2006-05-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,1773106,00.html The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of w hich is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN. The US gover nment arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns fro m Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming t he fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their rec ipient. The command force in Iraq...and the overseeing US general, had claimed " not to have ... received any weapons from Bosnia." A Nato official.. told Amnest y: "There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong han ds." The Moldovan air firm which flew the cargo out of a US air base at Tuzla, n orth-east Bosnia, was flying without a licence. The firm, Aerocom, [was] named i n a 2003 UN investigation of the diamonds-for-guns trade in Liberia and Sierra L eone. Some of the firms used in the Pentagon sponsored deals were also engaged i n illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia and to Saddam Hussein four years ago. The Pentagon commissioned the US security firms Taos and CACI which is known for its involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison controversy in Iraq - to orchestrate the arms purchases and shipments.

There is nothing divine about a bomb test 2006-05-05, Salt Lake Tribune http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_3791081 Divine Strake is the code name for a massive non-nuclear test planned for June 2 . An explosion of 700 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil - ANFO - will send a mushroom cloud perhaps 10,000 feet into the Nevada sky. I suppose reasonable pe ople can disagree about whether to test, but Utahns, downwind from so many nucle ar tests that were supposed to be safe, yet turned out to be deadly, can be forg iven if they're wary. What makes me go nuclear is the use of "Divine" in the nam e. I've really had it with the Bush administration positioning things like they were ordered up by God. There are at least nine other divine tests on the books, including Divine Warhawk and, to really prove the point, Divine Hates. We ignor e poor people...we turn our backs on genocide, and we spend our vast wealth and waste our sharp minds on war. Then we name the effort after deity. As if this ex periment is ordained by God. Could this be why people hate us? We see people acr oss the globe possessed by such a religious vehemence that their humanity is rui ned. Crazed with bloodlust, they must destroy human life, American life, to prov e God is on their side. Americans find this indefensible. Then why is President Bush's team putting the language of the holy to our war efforts? I can only wond er what God might really think of America's "Divine" projects. Who would Jesus b omb? If we fail to grasp that lesson, if we keep confusing the unholy with the s acred, our jihad looks a lot like theirs.

First Mushroom Cloud in Decades Will Rise Over Nevada 2006-03-30, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=1788259

A Pentagon test at a Nevada site this June will likely create the first mushroom cloud seen in the state since the United States ceased above-ground nuclear tes ting in 1963. Mushroom clouds are commonly associated with nuclear blasts, but t his cloud will come from the detonation of a 700-ton explosive charge designed t o test new bunker-busting technologies. Most Nevada residents, however, will nev er see the cloud because the test will take place in the desert -- far away from population centers. The closest city, Las Vegas, is about 90 miles away from te st site. Regardless, the military will put out the word to Las Vegas residents t hat they shouldn't be alarmed in the unlikely chance that they see a mushroom cl oud on the horizon. Mountains surround the flat Nevada site where the test will be conducted. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency hopes the test -- called Divin e Strake -- will help with the effort to develop weapons that can destroy deep u nderground bunkers storing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The yet-to-b e built Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator has raised opposition from some members of Congress who worry the technology will open the door to a new generation of n uclear weapons.

CIA war game simulates major Internet attack 2005-05-26, Washington Post/Reuters http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/26/AR20050526009... The CIA is conducting a cyber-war game this week geared to simulate a major Inte rnet attack by enemy computer hackers, an intelligence official said Thursday. D ubbed "Silent Horizon," the three-day unclassified exercise is based on a scenar io set five years in the future and involves participants from government and th e private sector. Online crime has exploded in recent years, a result of organiz ed crime groups based in Eastern Europe. But investigators so far have uncovered few links to Islamic extremists. Note: Do you think it is the terrorists who want to shut down the Internet, or m ight there be political elites who don't want their hidden agendas exposed?

Pentagon eyeing weapons in space 2006-03-14, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/03/14/pentagon_eye... The Pentagon is asking Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to test weap ons in space, marking the biggest step toward creating a space battlefield since President Reagan's long-defunct "star wars" project. The Defense Department's b udget proposal...includes money for a variety of tests on offensive and defensiv e weapons. Arms-control specialists fear the tests will push the military closer to basing weapons in space than during Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in the mid-1980s -- without a public debate of the potential consequences. The des criptions included in the budget request mark only what is publicly known about the military's space warfare plans. Specialists believe the classified portion o f the $439 billion budget, blacked out for national security reasons, almost cer tainly includes other space-related programs. Under President Bush, the White Ho use has emphasized what's known as "space dominance" -- the notion that the Unit ed States must command space to defend the nation, but the budget request marks a transition from laboratory theory to reality. The Bush administration has soug ht to keep the military's options open despite international opposition to weapo ns in space.

CIA agents 'refused to operate' at secret jails

2006-09-20, MSNBC/Financial Times http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14927851/ The Bush administration had to empty its secret prisons and transfer terror susp ects to the military-run detention centre at Guantnamo this month in part because CIA interrogators had refused to carry out further interrogations and run the s ecret facilities. When Mr Bush announced the suspension of the secret prison pro gramme in a speech before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terror attac ks, some analysts thought he was trying to gain political momentum before the No vember midterm congressional elections. Former CIA officials said Mr Bush's hand was forced because interrogators had refused to continue their work until the l egal situation was clarified because they were concerned they could be prosecute d for using illegal techniques. One intelligence source also said the CIA had re fused to keep the secret prisons going.

Kucinich Plans Another Presidential Bid 2006-12-11, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/11/politics/main2248157.shtml Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2004, s aid Monday he is planning another bid because his party isn't pushing hard enoug h to end the Iraq war. The liberal, anti-war Ohio congressman said he was inspir ed to run because he disagrees with the way some of his fellow Democrats are han dling the war, including approval of a proposal to spend $160 billion more on th e conflict. "Democrats were swept into power on Nov. 7 because of widespread vot er discontent with the war in Iraq," said Kucinich, 60. "Instead of heeding thos e concerns and responding with a strong and immediate change in policies and dir ection, the Democratic congressional leadership seems inclined to continue fundi ng the perpetuation of the war." The anti-war message was also the cornerstone o f Kucinich's 2004 bid, which drew support from some Hollywood celebrities. His p revious presidential proposals also have included a national peace department an d a single-payer, universal health care system. Note: Coverage of the occasional successes of Dennis Kucinich in the 2004 Democr atic primary campaign were clearly suppressed. When Kucinich took second place i n Hawaii with 26% of the vote, almost twice the 14% of John Edwards, most major media gave Edwards name, but didn't even mention Kucinich, saying only that a "t hird candidate" took second place. The media seem not to like anti-war candidate s.

Soldiers in murder case claim order to 'kill all military age males' 2006-07-21, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-21-soldiers-statements_x.htm Four U.S. soldiers accused of murdering suspected insurgents during a raid in Ir aq said they were under orders to "kill all military age males," according to sw orn statements obtained by The Associated Press. "The ROE (rule of engagement) w as to kill all military age males on Objective Murray," Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Gi rouard told investigators, referring to the target by its code name. That target , an island on a canal in the northern Salhuddin province, was believed to be an al-Qaeda training camp. The soldiers said officers in their chain of command ga ve them the order and explained that special forces had tried before to target t he island and had come under fire from insurgents. Girouard, Spc. William B. Hun saker, Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, and Spc. Juston R. Graber are charged with murder and other offenses in the shooting deaths of three of the men during the May 9 r aid. Girouard, Hunsaker and Clagett are also charged with obstruction of justice

for allegedly threatening to kill another soldier if he told authorities what h appened.

Marine Corps Issues Gag Order in Detainee Abuse Case 2006-10-15, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gitmo15oct15,0,2096358.s... The U.S. Marine Corps has threatened to punish two members of the military legal team representing a terrorism suspect being held at Guantanamo Bay if they cont inue to speak publicly about reported prisoner abuse, a civilian lawyer from the defense team said Saturday. The action directed at Lt. Col. Colby Vokey and Sgt . Heather Cerveny follows their report last week that Guantanamo guards bragged about beating detainees. The order has heightened fears among the military defen se lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners that their careers will suffer for exposing flaws and injustices in the system. Defense lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners say the personal stakes are high and point to the Navy's failure to promote Lt. Cmd r. Charles Swift after he successfully challenged the legitimacy of the Pentagon 's war-crimes commissions. Two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled the commissio ns unconstitutional and lacking in due process, Swift was passed over for advanc ement and will be forced by the Navy's up-or-out policy to retire by summer. At least three other military defense lawyers for the 10 charged terrorism suspects have also been passed over for promotion in what some consider a subtle reprima nd of their vigorous defense of their clients.

Bush asked to explain UK war memo 2005-05-12, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/05/11/britain.war.memo/index.html Eighty-nine Democratic members of the U.S. Congress last week sent President Geo rge W. Bush a letter asking for explanation of a secret British memo that said " intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support the Iraq war in mid-2002. Th e timing of the memo was well before the president brought the issue to Congress for approval. The Times of London newspaper published the memo -- actually minu tes of a high-level meeting on Iraq held July 23, 2002 -- on May 1. British offi cials did not dispute the document's authenticity.

Father of beheaded man blames Bush, not Zarqawi 2006-06-08, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2053071 Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded in Iraq in 2004, said on Thursday he f elt no sense of relief at the killing of the al Qaeda leader in Iraq and blamed President Bush for his son's death. The United States said its aircraft killed A bu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insurgent leader who masterminded the death of hundreds in suicide bombings and was blamed for the videotaped beheading of Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor, and other captives. "I don't think that Zarqawi is himself res ponsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq," Berg said in a combative television interview with the U.S. Fox News network. Berg said B ush was to blame for the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghra ib prison near Baghdad. "Yeah, like George Bush didn't OK the torture and death and rape of people in the Abu Ghraib prison for which my son was killed in retal iation?" Zarqawi's organization took responsibility for the execution of Nick Be rg in May 2004. The video was published with a caption saying: "Abu Musab al-Zar qawi slaughtering an American." When an Islamist Web site showed the video of a

man severing Berg's head, the CIA said Zarqawi was probably the one wielding the knife. The father said he was not convinced. "I have been lied to by my own gov ernment," he told Reuters on Thursday. Note: There are many very strange circumstances surrounding the beheading of Nic k Berg. For a report from Australia's leading newspaper on this, see http://www. WantToKnow.info/nickberg

Rights group leader says U.S. has secret jails 2005-06-06, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/05/amnesty.detainee/ The chief of Amnesty International USA alleged Sunday that the Guantanamo Bay de tention camp is part of a worldwide network of U.S. jails, some of them secret, where prisoners are mistreated and even killed. "The U.S. is maintaining an arch ipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which peo ple are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families," Schulz sa id. "And in some cases, at least, we know they are being mistreated, abused, tor tured and even killed." A high-ranking Republican senator said Sunday that heari ngs on abuse allegations at Guantanamo Bay might be appropriate, and a top Democ ratic senator suggested closing down the prison. "Look, it's very difficult to r un a perfect prison," Majority Whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said on CNN's "L ate Edition." "But we have an open country. We have hearings on a whole lot of d ifferent subjects. We might well have hearings on this."

Elections News Articles Excerpts of Key Elections News Articles in Major Media Below are many highly revealing excerpts of important elections articles from th e mainstream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major media websi tes. If any link should fail to function, click here. These elections news artic les are listed by order of importance. For the same articles by date posted to t his list, click here. For the list by date of news article click here. By choosi ng to educate ourselves on these important issues and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. A Single Person Could Swing an Election 2006-06-28, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR20060627014... To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota. The state us es electronic voting machines. The experts...concluded in a report issued yester day that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome. The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritati ve to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting. The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed vo ting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records o f votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits. Republican Reps. Tom C ole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Refo rm Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines.

Several Clay County Officials Arrested On Federal Charges 2009-03-21, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29778909 Five Clay County [Kentucky] officials, including the circuit court judge, the co unty clerk, and election officers were arrested Thursday after they were indicte d on federal charges accusing them of using corrupt tactics to obtain political power and personal gain. The 10-count indictment, unsealed Thursday, accused the defendants of a conspiracy from March 2002 until November 2006 that violated th e Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The defendants w ere also indicted for extortion, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to injure voters' rights and conspiracy to commit voter fraud. According to the indictment, these alleged criminal actions affected the outcome of federal, loca l, and state primary and general elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. Clay County

Circuit Court Judge Russell Cletus Maricle, 65, and school superintendent Dougla s C. Adams, 57, allegedly used their status in the county to influence the appoi ntment of corrupt members to the Clay County Board of Election Officials. [They also] caused election officers to commit acts of extortion, mail fraud, and brib ery. Clay County Clerk, Freddy Thompson, 45, allegedly provided money to electio n officers to be distributed by the officers to buy votes. He also instructed of ficers how to change votes at the voting machine. Paul E. Bishop, 60, ... hosted alleged meetings at his home where money was pooled together by candidates and distributed to election officers, including himself. He was also accused of inst ructing the officers how to change votes at the voting machine. The investigatio n preceding the indictment was conducted by the FBI, Kentucky State Police, and Appalachia Note: For some strange reason, the article is no longer available at the link ab ove. To read it on an MSNBC affiliate website, click here. The media have almost always proclaimed that voting maching tampering has never been proven to affect election outcome. This article demonstrates that not only does it happen, but i t may be much more prevalent than most would think. For more on this indictment, click here. For more reliable information on widespread election fraud, click h ere.

Can You Count on Voting Machines? 2008-01-06, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html?ex=1357275600&en=75d... As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next f ew months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines ha ve become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral p olitics. In hundreds of instances ... they [have failed] unpredictably, and in e xtremely strange ways; voters report that their choices flip from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes sim ply vanish. Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Saraso ta, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person undervote for a race dec ided by fewer than 400 votes. The earliest critiques of digital voting booths ca me from the fringe disgruntled citizens and ... computer geeks but the fears hav e now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renounci ng the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to ge t rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Br unner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahog a crashes arguing that touch-screens may jeopardize the integrity of the voting p rocess. She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting before the Ohio primary, scheduled fo r March 4. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University wh o has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that abo ut 10 percent of the touch-screen machines fail in each election. Note: 10% of the machines fail, yet many still believe the results from previous elections were accurate. For many revealing reports on the serious problems wit h electronic voting machines, click here.

U.S. media have lost the will to dig deep 2007-04-27, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-palast27apr27,0,5178561.story

In an e-mail uncovered and released by the House Judiciary Committee last month, Tim Griffin, once Karl Rove's right-hand man, gloated that "no [U.S.] national press picked up" a BBC Television story reporting that the Rove team had develop ed an elaborate scheme to challenge the votes of thousands of African Americans in the 2004 election. Griffin wasn't exactly right. The Los Angeles Times did ru n a follow-up article. But ... most of the major U.S. newspapers and the vast ma jority of television news programs ignored the story even though it came at a cr itical moment just weeks before the election. In fact, not one U.S. newsperson e ven bothered to ask me or the BBC for the data and research we had painstakingly done. The truth is, I knew that a story like this one would never be reported i n my own country [the U.S.], because investigative reporting ... is dying. Again and again, I see this pattern repeated. Back in December 2000, I received two c omputer disks from the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. An alysis of the data ... indicated that Harris' office had purged thousands of Afr ican Americans from Florida's voter rolls as "felons." Florida now admits that m any of these voters were not in fact felons. Nevertheless, the blacklisting help ed cost Al Gore the White House. I reported on the phony felon purge in Britain' s Guardian and Observer and on the BBC while Gore was still in the race, while t he count was still on. Yet the story of the Florida purge never appeared in the U.S. daily papers or on television ... until months later, that is, after the Su preme Court had decided the election. Note: The American-born author of this article, BBC reporter Greg Palast, has re peatedly exposed major corruption in the British media, yet the U.S. press often ignores his well-researched stories. For possibly the most amazing story he wro te which got virtually no U.S. media coverage, click here.

Voting machines put U.S. democracy at risk 2006-09-20, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/19/Dobbs.Sept20/index.html There is little assurance your vote will count. As we've been reporting almost n ightly...for more than a year, electronic voting machines are placing our democr acy at risk. These machines time and again have been demonstrated to be extremel y vulnerable to tampering and error, and many of them have no voter-verified pap er trail. Only 27 states have laws requiring the use of voter-verified paper tra ils. 15 states [have] no mandated requirements for safeguarding your vote. Durin g the 2004 presidential election, one voting machine...added nearly 3,900 additi onal votes to Bush's total. Officials caught the machine's error because only 63 8 voters cast presidential ballots at that precinct, but in a heavily populated district, can we really be sure the votes will be counted correctly? [In] the Ma y primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio...the electronic voting machines' fo ur sources of vote totals -- individual ballots, paper trail summary, election a rchives and memory cards -- didn't even match up. The report concluded that rely ing on the current system for Cuyahoga County's more than 1.3 million people sho uld be viewed as "a calculated risk." Are we really willing to risk our democrac y? A 2005 Government Accountability Office report on electronic voting confirmed the worst fears of watchdog groups and election officials. "There is evidence t hat some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with rece nt elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes." That is simply unacc eptable. Congress and the White House need to immediately take steps to assure t he integrity of electronic voting with paper trails that could be audited in any recount. Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on the various aspects of t he elections cover-up, see http://www.wanttoknow.info/electionsinformation

In Search of Accurate Vote Totals 2006-09-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/opinion/05tue1.html?ex=1315108800&en=c05607... It's hard to believe that nearly six years after the disasters of Florida in 200 0, states still haven't mastered the art of counting votes accurately. The most troubling evidence comes from Ohio...whose electoral votes decided the 2004 pres idential election. A recent government report details enormous flaws in the elec tion system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before th e 2008 election. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland...recently adopted Di ebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record of e very vote cast. Investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The n umbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained dis crepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records we re destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised. Some of these problems may be explored further in a federal lawsuit challenging Ohio's administration of its 2004 election. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell...has been criticized for many decisions he made on election matters that year. New York's Legislatur e was shamefully slow in passing the law needed to start adopting new voting mac hines statewide. Now localities are just starting to evaluate voting machine com panies as they scramble to put machines in place in time for the 2007 election. Because of a federal lawsuit, New York has to make the switch a year early. Note: Why has the media barely mentioned the federal lawsuit challenging Ohio's administration of the 2004 election? This was the state that determined the winn er. For more on elections cover-up, click here.

CIA expert: Electronic voting not secure 2009-03-25, Miami Herald/McClatchy News http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/966214.html The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting s ystems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and U kraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering. In a presentation that could provide disturbing lessons for the United States, whe re electronic voting is becoming universal, [CIA cybersecurity expert] Steve Sti gall summarized what he described as attempts to use computers to undermine demo cratic elections in developing nations. His remarks have received no news media attention until now. Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission ... that co mputerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering vo ter registration lists to posting results. Stigall said voting equipment connect ed to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren't connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven U.S. states have banned or limited wireless capa bility in voting equipment, but Stigall said elections officials didn't always k now it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines. Stigall said that mo st Web-based ballot systems had proved to be insecure. The commission has been c riticized for giving states more than $1 billion to buy electronic equipment wit hout first setting performance standards. Numerous computer-security experts hav e concluded that U.S. systems can be hacked, and allegations of tampering in Ohi o, Florida and other swing states have triggered a campaign to require all votin g machines to produce paper audit trails. Note: For key articles from reliable sources exposing the many flaws in electron ic voting systems, click here.

McCain's 'big advantage' 2008-06-25, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/24/EDPC11EHS4.DTL Charlie Black, senior adviser to John McCain, caused a fluff by saying that a te rrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a "big advantage" to his candidate. No one mentioned that eight years ago, the Project for a New American Century called fo r "a new Pearl Harbor" that could move the American people to accept the neocons ervative vision of militarized global domination. Then 9/11 happened, lifting Ge orge W. Bush from the shadows of a disputed election to the heights of a "war pr esidency." Bush has taken on unprecedented powers since the events of 9/11. On t hat day, the president issued his "Declaration of Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks" under the authority of the National Emergencies Act. This de claration, which can be rescinded by joint resolution of Congress, has instead b een extended six times. In 2007, the declaration was quietly strengthened with t he issuance of National Security Presidential Directive 51, which gave the presi dent the authority to do whatever he deems necessary in a vaguely defined "catas trophic emergency," including everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Not a single congressional heari ng was held on this directive. Will Congress act decisively to remove the presid ent's emergency powers, challenge the directive and defend the Constitution?

Capitol Chaos 2008-06-08, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/06/INFS114789.DTL [California] Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi had no intention of voting for AB2818, a bill that the Castro Valley Democrat feared could undermine its stated goal of protecting affordable housing. But on May 28, she nearly approved it - without h er knowledge, and without her presence on the Assembly floor. As the roll call b egan, Hayashi was engaged in a budget subcommittee meeting on the Capitol's four th floor. Suddenly, two floors below, the light next to her name on the big elec tronic voting board in the Assembly chamber turned green, a "yes" vote. Seconds later, it turned red. Then green. Red. Green. Finally, after 22 seconds of alter nating colors, the space next to Hayashi's name went blank. While there are conf licting accounts of exactly what caused this dizzying sequence, this much is cle ar: Two people had their hands on Hayashi's voting switches during the roll call on AB2818 - and one was acting against her will. "Ghost voting" was not the onl y disturbing episode as the Assembly took up 316 bills in the three days leading up to the deadline for measures to pass their house of origin. In the frenzied treadmill, there was little or no debate on most matters, important bills died w hen legislators failed to vote, and votes were being cast for members without th eir express consent. In the Hayashi case, eyewitnesses said her initial "yes" vo te was cast by Assemblyman Kevin de Len, D-Los Angeles, an assistant majority flo or leader who colleagues said had taken the liberty of voting for other missing members as bills were being rushed to beat the deadline. "I don't recall it, but I don't deny it either," de Len said. Note: For lots more on problems with voting systems, click here.

State Vote Machines Lose Test To Hackers 2007-07-28, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper), Front Page http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/28/MNGP6R8TJO1.DTL State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the securi

ty of virtually every model of California's voting machines and change results o r take control of some of the systems' electronic functions, according to a Univ ersity of California study. The researchers "were able to bypass physical and so ftware security in every machine they tested,'' said Secretary of State Debra Bo wen, who authorized the "top to bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state. Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly ho w vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers. The review included v oting equipment from every company approved for use in the state. Bowen said ... that the report is only one piece of information she will use to decide which v oting systems are secure enough to use in February's presidential primary electi on. Note: For more reliable, verifiable information on the problems with new electro nic voting machines, click here.

Experts Concerned as Ballot Problems Persist 2006-11-26, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/us/politics/26vote.html?ex=1322197200&en=0d... After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washing ton on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation s voting system, this month s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensu re that every vote counts. Tens of thousands of voters, scattered across more th an 25 states, encountered serious problems at the polls. The difficulties led to shortages of substitute paper ballots and long lines that caused many voters to leave without casting ballots. Voting experts say it is impossible to say how m any votes were not counted that should have been. In Florida alone, the discrepa ncies ... amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 peopl e gave up trying to vote ... as new online systems for verifying voter registrat ions crashed repeatedly. In Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three tim es in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000. Election experts say that with electronic voting machines, the potential consequences of misdeeds or errors are of a [great] magnitude. A single softwar e error can affect thousands of votes, especially with machines that keep no pap er record. In Ohio, thousands of voters were turned away or forced to file provi sional ballots by poll workers puzzled by voter-identification rules. In Pennsyl vania, the machines crashed or refused to start, producing many reports of voteflipping [where] voters press the button for one candidate but a different candi date s name appears on the screen. In Ohio, even a congressman, Steve Chabot, a Re publican, was turned away from his polling place because the address listed on h is driver s license was different than his home address.

When Votes Disappear 2006-11-24, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/opinion/24krugman.html There were many problems with voting in this election. In at least one Congressi onal race, the evidence strongly suggests that paperless voting machines failed to count thousands of votes, and that the disappearance of these votes delivered the race to the wrong candidate. [In] Florida s 13th Congressional District .. ac cording to the official vote count, the Republicans [won] narrowly. The problem is that the official vote count isn t credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen vot ing machines ... almost 18,000 voters nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballot s using the machines supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2

.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties. The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota ... in terviewed hundreds of voters. About a third of those interviewed by the paper re ported that they couldn t even find the Congressional race on the screen. Moreover , more than 60 percent of those interviewed ... reported that they did cast a vo te in the Congressional race but that this vote didn t show up on the ballot summa ry page. An Orlando Sentinel examination of other votes cast by those who suppos edly failed to cast a vote ... shows that they strongly favored Democrats, and M r. Buchanan won the official count by only 369 votes. For the nation as a whole, the important thing isn t who gets seated to represent Florida s 13th District. It s whether the voting disaster there leads to legislation requiring voter verificat ion and a paper trail. I ve been shocked at how little national attention the mess in Sarasota has received.

Counting the Vote, Badly 2006-11-16, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/opinion/16thur1.html?ex=1321333200&en=73e0e... Last week s elections provided a lot of disturbing news about the reliability of e lectronic voting. In a Congressional race...Sarasota County [Florida] reported t hat more than 18,000 people, or one in eight, did not choose either candidate. T hat undervote of nearly 13 percent is hard to believe, given that only about 2.5 p ercent of absentee voters did not vote. Ms. Jennings trails Mr. Buchanan by abou t 400 votes. The serious questions about the Buchanan - Jennings race only add t o the high level of mistrust that many people already feel about electronic voti ng. Congress has resisted all appeals to pass a law that would ensure that elect ronic voting is honest and accurate across the nation. Partisan secretaries of s tate continue to skew the rules to favor their parties and political allies. Sta tes are adopting harsh standards for voter registration drives to make it harder for people to register. Some states have adopted an indefensible rule that prov isional ballots cast at the wrong table of the correct polling place must be thr own out. Congress has failed to address these and other important flaws with the mechanics of the election system. But this...may be about to change. Senator Fe instein is saying that providing fair access to the ballot will be among her com mittee s top priorities in the coming year. Election reform has tended to be a par tisan issue, with Democrats arguing for reform and Republicans resisting it. It shouldn t be. Congressional Democrats should make fixing this country s broken syste m of elections a top priority, and Republicans should join them.

Secretive testing firms certify nation's vote count machines 2004-08-23, MSNBC News/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5762054/from/RL.4 The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in sec recy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the machines to be used by nearly one in th ree voters in November. Federal regulators have virtually no oversight over test ing of the technology. The certification process, in part because the voting mac hine companies pay for it, is described as obsolete by those charged with overse eing it. Despite concerns over whether the so-called touchscreen machines can be trusted, the testing companies won't say publicly if they have encountered shod dy workmanship. They say they are committed to secrecy in their contracts with t he voting machines' makers even though tax money ultimately buys or leases the m achines. Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and electronic vot ing expert, told lawmakers in Washington, D.C. "I find it grotesque that an orga nization charged with such a heavy responsibility feels no obligation to explain to anyone what it is doing." The system for "testing and certifying voting equi pment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent," Shamos

added. More than a decade ago, the Federal Election Commission authorized the Na tional Association of State Election Directors to choose the independent testers . On its Web site, the association says the three testing outfits "have neither the staff nor the time to explain the process to the public, the news media or j urisdictions."

Diebold Exits US Voting-Machine Business 2009-09-03, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090903-714997.html Diebold Inc. has sold its money-losing U.S. election-systems business, just seve n years after acquiring it amid hopes of rising demand for voting technology upg rades in the wake of the 2000 presidential election fiasco. Diebold [said] it so ld the voting-machine unit to privately held Election Systems & Software Inc. fo r $5 million, about one-fifth of what it paid in 2002. "There were assumptions w e made in that space that didn't materialize," Diebold spokesman Mike Jacobsen s aid. Diebold, which was the industry's biggest maker of electronic voting machin es heading into the 2004 presidential election, was in the spotlight as concerns increased about the reliability and security of the electronic systems. Diebold also suffered from a perception problem when the company's then-Chief Executive Walden O'Dell very publicly supported and fundraised for President George W. Bu sh in his re-election campaign. Note: This article fails to mention that the merger of Diebold and ES&S creates a major monopoly on US voting machines in the hands of companies owned by staunc h conservatives. For more vital information on this and the suspicious death of the principal witness related to Karl Rove in an key Ohio elections case, click here.

Sorry, I Can t Find Your Name 2008-10-23, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/opinion/23thu1.htm Voting rolls, which are maintained by local election officials, are one of the w eakest links in American democracy and problems are growing. Republicans have be en pressing for sweeping voter purges in many states. They have also fought to m ake it harder to enroll new voters. Voting experts say there could be serious pr oblems at the polls on Nov. 4. A number of states including the battleground sta te of Florida have adopted no match, no vote rules. Voters can be removed from t he rolls if their names do not match a second list, such as a Social Security or driver s license database. But (like the U.S. mail) lists of this kind are notori ously mistake-filled, and one typo can cause a no match. In Ohio, Republicans re cently sued the secretary of state, demanding that she provide local officials w ith a dubious match list. As many as 200,000 new voters could have been blocked from casting ballots. The Supreme Court rejected the suit, but Republicans are s till looking for ways to use the list on Election Day. For this election, voters need to be prepared to fight for their right to cast a ballot. They should try to confirm before Nov. 4 that they are on the rolls something that in many state s can be done on a secretary of state or board of elections Web site. If their s tate permits it, they should vote early. If voters find on Election Day that the ir names are not on the rolls, they should contact a voters rights group like Ele ction Protection, at 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Note: A recent report in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast details many of these tactics to eliminate voters from the rolls. To watch a rel ated video by Greg Palast click here. For many disturbing reports from major med

ia sources on threats to free and fair elections in the US, click here. And for a powerful, five-minute video showing both the ways your vote can disappear and what you can do about it, click here.

Audit Finds Many Faults in Cleveland s 06 Voting 2007-04-20, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/20ohio.html An audit of last November s general election in the Cleveland area has found that hundreds of votes were lost, that others were recorded twice and that software u sed to count the ballots was vulnerable to data problems. In a state that was pi votal to President Bush s election and re-election, Cuyahoga County, which include s Cleveland, has seen more than its share of recent election troubles. Lines at polls there were hours long in the 2004 general election. And in the primaries l ast May, the county s first experience with electronic voting, poll workers were a bsent or poorly trained, computer cards on which votes had been recorded were lo st, and one polling place opened hours late. The audit found that some batches o f ballots registered in optical scan machines had been scanned twice, producing a double count of those ballots. Other ballots were deleted because of flawed da ta and, owing to human error, were not rescanned, the committee found. The optic al scan and touch-screen machines used in the county were made by Diebold Electi on Systems Inc. The audit committee said Microsoft s JET file-sharing database sys tem, which Diebold used, was known to have previously had problems that could re sult in corruption of the database. The audit committee was allowed only a limit ed review of the data collected by Diebold. The panel tried to gain access to th e raw data, but Diebold claimed that the information was proprietary. Barbara Si mons, a ... past president of the Association for Computing Machinery, said: Ther e is no excuse for Diebold s having used such an insecure and unreliable database. There were far more reliable databases available over 20 years ago. The committe e called for extensive changes to ensure the integrity of future elections, amon g them streamlining the process by eliminating either optical scanner or touch-s creen machines. Note: For major media stories revealing the critical state of the US electoral s ystem, click here.

Prosecutor: Ohio County Rigged Recount 2007-01-18, ABC News/Associated Press http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2806718 Three county elections workers conspired to avoid a more thorough recount of bal lots in the 2004 presidential election, a prosecutor told jurors during opening statements of their trial Thursday. Witnesses testified that, two days before a planned recount, selected ballots were counted so the result would be determined . "The evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless," Prosecutor Kevin Baxter said. "They did this s o they could spend a day rather than weeks or months" on the recount, he said. D efense attorneys said in their opening statements that the workers in Cuyahoga C ounty didn't do anything out of the ordinary. "They just were doing it the way t hey were always doing it," said defense attorney Roger Synenberg, representing K athleen Dreamer, a ballot manager. Charged with various counts each of election misconduct or interference are Jacqueline Maiden, the Cuyahoga County Board of E lections' coordinator, who was the board's third-highest ranking employee when s he was indicted last March; Rosie Grier, assistant manager of the board's ballot department; and Dreamer. Baxter said testimony in the case will show that inste ad of conducting a random count, the workers chose sample precincts for the Dec.

16, 2004, recount that did not have questionable results to ensure that no disc repancies would emerge. "This was a very hush operation," Baxter said. There wer e allegations in several counties of similar presorting of ballots for the recou nts that state law says are to be random. Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on elections manipulations, click here.

Sweeping Changes Expected in Voting by 2008 Election 2006-12-08, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/washington/08voting.html?ex=1323234000&en=3... By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see s weeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted . New federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass i n Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machine s obsolete. Motivated in part by voting problems during the midterm elections la st month, the changes are a result of a growing skepticism among local and state election officials, federal legislators and the scientific community about the reliability and security of the paperless touch-screen machines used by about 30 percent of American voters. Various forms of vote-counting software used around the country ... will for the first time be inspected by federal authorities, an d the code could be made public. Last year, New Mexico spent $14 million to repl ace its touch screens. Other states are spending millions more to retrofit the m achines to add paper trails. Because some printers malfunctioned last month, ele ction commissioners in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, said las t week that they were considering scrapping their new $17 million system of touc h-screen machines. Under changes approved by the Election Assistance Commission yesterday, voting machine manufacturers would have to make their crucial softwar e code available to federal inspectors. The code is now checked mainly by privat e testing laboratories paid by the manufacturers. Note: How is it possible that the government allowed voting machine companies to keep their software secret even from the government? We may never know how many votes were manipulated. For more, click here.

On the Voting Machine Makers' Tab 2004-09-12, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/opinion/12sun2.html?ex=1252728000&en=dda931... Some of electronic voting's loudest defenders have been state and local election officials. Many of those same officials have financial ties to voting machine c ompanies. Former secretaries of state from Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election Systems and Software and Diebold Election Systems. When Bill Jones left office as California's secretary of state in 2003, he quickly be came a consultant to Sequoia Voting Systems. His assistant secretary of state to ok a full-time job there. The list goes on. Even while in office, many election officials are happy to accept voting machine companies' largess. Forty-three per cent of the budget of the National Association of Secretaries of State comes fro m voting machine companies and other vendors. State governments in a growing num ber of states...have pushed through much-needed laws that require electronic vot ing machines to produce paper records. But these groups have faced intense oppos ition from election officials [who] argued that voter-verifiable paper trails... are impractical. While they may sincerely think that electronic voting machines are so trustworthy that there is no need for a paper record of votes, their view s have to be regarded with suspicion until their conflicts are addressed.

George Bush aide dies in plane crash 2008-12-21, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3885913/George-Bus... Mystery surrounds the death of a Republican pollster, recently compelled to give evidence about alleged election fraud in the 2004 election in Ohio, after he wa s killed in a plane crash. Top internet strategist Michael Connell, 45, was the only person in his single-engine private plane that crashed three miles short of the Akron-Canton airport on Friday night as he prepared to land. He had worked on Mr Bush's two presidential campaigns, advised John McCain this year and was a lso linked to allegedly missing White House emails in the 2006 controversy over a string of firings of US attorneys. The death of the married father of four imm ediately triggered conspiracy theories amid speculation that he had been about t o reveal embarrassing details of the complicity of senior members of the Bush ad ministration in fixing an election and destroying incriminating emails. In a blo g posting entitled "One of my sources died in a plane crash last night...", Lari sa Alexandrovna of The Raw Story revealed that Mr Connell had been talking to he r about the Ohio case alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. "Mike was getting ready to talk. H e was frightened... I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to thi s being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully." Important Note: This death becomes even stranger considering that attorneys had sought protection for Connell against threats from Karl Rove in late July (click here). He also was apparently warned not to fly.

Warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure 2008-08-24, McClatchy Newspapers http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/50485.html Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot totals for enti re precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing syste m failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting e quipment sold nationwide since 2003. Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions [fo rmerly Diebold Inc.] last week alerted at least 1,750 jurisdictions across the c ountry that special precautions are needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19 of its models dating back a decade. Voting experts rea cted skeptically to the company's assertion that election workers' routine cross checks of ballot totals would have spotted any instances where its servers faile d to register some precinct vote totals when receiving data from multiple memory cards. Like nearly all of the nation's modern voting equipment, Premier's produ cts were declared "qualified" under a voluntary testing process overseen from th e mid 1990s until 2005 by the National Association of State Election Directors. Computer scientists, some state officials and election watchdog groups allege th at the NASED-sponsored testing system was a recipe for disaster, shrouded in sec recy, and allowing equipment makers to help design the tests. As a result, charg ed Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for watchdog group Voter Action, the systems on which Americans will decide the race between Barack Obama and John McCain in November are "scandalously flawed"' and "the integrity of this election is in qu estion." Note: Why isn't this important news being picked up by other major media?

Voter Caging and Housing 2007-07-27, PBS http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/330/index.html Was there a White House plot to illegally suppress votes in 2004? Is there a sim ilar plan for the upcoming elections? This week NOW examines documents and evide nce that points to a Republican Party plan designed to keep Democrats from votin g, allegedly by targeting people based on their race and ethnicity with key batt leground states like Ohio and Florida of particular interest. "It was a partisan , discriminatory attempt to challenge voters of color," Eddie Hailes, a senior a ttorney for The Advancement Project, a civil rights group, told NOW. Was the Whi te House involved? David Iglesias, one of the fired U.S. Attorneys, thinks so: " It's reprehensible. It's unethical, it's unlawful. It may very well be criminal. " Iglesias told NOW he was repeatedly urged by his superiors at the Justice Depa rtment to investigate allegations of false voter registrations. After his invest igations came up short, Iglesias said Republican officials got angry and complai ned to White House aide Karl Rove. Soon after Iglesias lost his job. As a result of allegations by Iglesias and others, Congress is investigating whether the Wh ite House acted unlawfully. While Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused to a nswer many questions about the controversy as he testified before the Senate thi s week, Iglesias told NOW he believes the White House is keeping documents from Congress to protect the Bush Administration. "That's why there has been such a c ircling of the wagons around Karl Rove and Harriet Miers and Sarah Taylor. I bel ieve there to be incriminating, possibly criminally incriminating evidence conta ined in those e-mails and other memoranda," he said. Note: To read further reports from the major media on the many serious problems in the US electoral process, click here.

Princeton prof hacks e-vote machine 2006-09-13, MSNBC/Associated Press http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14825465/ A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel Wednesday to cl aims that electronic voting machines used across much of the country are vulnera ble to hacking that could alter vote totals or disable machines. In a paper post ed on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students describ ed how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways t o quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines. About 80 percent of American voters are e xpected to use some form of electronic voting in the upcoming election. The Accu Vote-TS is commonly used across the country, along with a newer model, the AccuV ote-TSx. The machine Felten tested, obtained in May from an undisclosed source, was the same type used across Maryland in its primary election Tuesday, accordin g to Ross Goldstein, a deputy administrator with the state's Board of Elections. Felten and graduate students Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman...say they design ed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by th e voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothin g wrong. The programs were able to modify vote totals or cause machines to break down, something that could alter the course of an election if machines were loc ated in crucial polling stations. Note: To see the full paper on Princeton's website along with an excellent video demonstrating how election results can easily be corrupted: http://itpolicy.pri nceton.edu/voting. These machines have been used in several previous elections. As there was no paper trail for most of the electronic machines, we have no way

of knowing if votes were manipulated. For more on this topic vital to our democr acy, see our Elections Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.info/election sinformation.

Will Your Vote Count in 2006? 2006-05-29, Newsweek http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek A a report by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machi nes for an organization called Black Box Voting. Hursti found unheralded vulnera bilities in the machines. Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machi ne flaws ever documented. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that, if it contai ned malicious code, could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. The machine could go dead on Election Day or throw votes to the wrong candidate . Worse, it's even possible for such ballot-tampering software to trick authoriz ed technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you co uldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems. If it so happens that someone not s upposed to use the machine or an election official who wants to put his or her thu mb on the scale of democracy takes advantage of this fast track to fraud, that's n ot Diebold's problem. "When you're using a paperless voting system, there is no security," says David Dill, a Stanford professor who founded the election-reform organization Verified Voting.

New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems 2006-05-12, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/12vote.html?ex=1305086400&en=5b3554a76aa... With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsy lvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, wh ile other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem. "It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system ," said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon Un iversity. "This is the barn door being wide open," said Douglas W. Jones, a prof essor of computer science at the University of Iowa. The new concerns about Dieb old's equipment were discovered by Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer expert who w as working at the request of Black Box Voting. As word of Mr. Hursti's findings spread, Diebold issued a warning to recipients of thousands of its machines, say ing that it had found a "theoretical security vulnerability" that "could potenti ally allow unauthorized software to be loaded onto the system." Aviel Rubin, a p rofessor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, did the first in-depth analysis of the security flaws in the source code for Diebold touch-screen mach ines in 2003. After studying the latest problem, he said: "I almost had a heart attack. The implications of this are pretty astounding." Note: For a recent Wall Street Journal article with more serious concerns, click here. No mention is made that these same problems existed in all recent electio ns using these machines. For key articles from other major media showing a major problem with electronic machines, click here.

The Business of Voting 2005-12-18, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/opinion/18sun2.html?ex=1292562000&en=a0314a...

Diebold, the controversial electronic voting machine manufacturer, is coming off a tumultuous week. Its chief executive, Walden O'Dell, resigned. It was hit wit h a pair of class-action lawsuits charging insider trading and misrepresentation , and a county in Florida concluded that Diebold's voting machines could be hack ed. The counting of votes is a public trust. Diebold, whose machines count many votes, has never acted as if it understood this. Mr. O'Dell made national headli nes when he wrote a fund-raising letter before the 2004 election expressing his commitment to help deliver the electoral votes of Ohio - where Diebold is based, and where its machines are used - to President Bush. Under pressure, Diebold ba rred its top officials from contributing to campaigns. But this month, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland reported that three executives not covered by the ban conti nued to make contributions. Diebold's voting machines have a troubled history. T he company was accused of installing improperly certified software, which is ill egal, in a 2002 governor's race in Georgia. Across the country, it reached a mul timillion-dollar settlement with the California attorney general last year of a lawsuit alleging that it made false claims about the security of its machines. Note: Kevin Shelley, the California attorney general mentioned here, was eventua lly forced out of office by an aggressive media campaign accusing him of things we know are done by almost all politicians. For reliable information on this, se e http://www.wanttoknow.info/050207kevinshelleysresignation.

New tests fuel doubts about vote machines 2005-12-15, Miami Herald http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/13410061.htm A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any electio n on Diebold-made voting machines -- and possibly other new voting systems in Fl orida -- according to the state capital's election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests. "That's kind of scary. If there's no paper t rail, you have to rely solely on electronic results. And now we know that they c an be manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even leaving a fi ngerprint," said Sancho, who once headed the state's elections supervisors assoc iation. Sancho said Diebold isn't the only one to blame for hacker-prone equipme nt. The Florida secretary of state's office should have caught these problems ea rly on, he said. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office said any faul ts Sancho found were between him and Diebold. A nonprofit election-monitoring gr oup called BlackBoxVoting.org...hired Herbert Thompson, a computer-science profe ssor and strategist at Security Innovation, which tests software for companies s uch as Google and Microsoft. Thompson told The Herald he was "shocked" at how ea sy it was to get in, make the loser the winner and leave without a trace. He typ ed five lines of computer code -- and switched 5,000 votes from one candidate to another."I am positive an eighth grader could do this," Thompson said.

How did pollsters blow it in Clinton-Obama race? 2008-01-10, Seattle Times (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2004116840_poll10.html For days, poll after poll showed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama opening a big lead h eading into the New Hampshire Democratic primary. But when the votes were counte d, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won. Even she seemed surprised. Were the polls all wrong? Did the pollsters misjudge how many women would vote? Did vote rs lie when pollsters called? Regardless of the answers, many analysts urged a p ost-mortem to figure out what the heck happened in New Hampshire. "It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong," said Gary Langer, the po

lling director for ABC News, in a memo posted at his Web site. "We need to know why." Pollsters accurately predicted John McCain's comeback win in the GOP race. They nailed John Edwards' third-place finish among Democrats. But at least a do zen polls had the senator from Illinois defeating Clinton, almost all showing Ob ama gaining and opening a lead on Clinton. One survey for C-SPAN and Reuters sho wed Obama up 42-29 percent over Clinton. Six public polls for news media and uni versities showed him with an average lead of 8.3 percentage points. None showed Clinton close, let alone ahead. Yet she beat Obama by 39-36 percent. So what hap pened? A number of bloggers Wednesday cited the "wildly inaccurate" polls as evi dence that the vote was rigged. "Other folks that I've spoken to ... share my co ncern at this hour," wrote blogger Brad Friedman, a Los Angeles-based election-f raud watchdog, on bradblog.com. Bloggers across the nation keyed into the fact t hat 81 percent of New Hampshire votes were being counted on machines that an HBO documentary alleged are easily hacked. Note: The Los Angeles Times exit poll showed Obama with 44% and Clinton with 35% . Many experts claim that polls can not be off that much. A Washington Post blog mentions the interesting fact "Vote tallies from the New Hampshire Secretary of State show that she won by 4.23 percentage points in the counties using Diebold optical scanners, but lost by 5.81 points in those where paper ballots are coun ted by hand." For lots more on voting manipulation, click here. The HBO document ary available here is also highly revealing.

California suing Nebraska voting machine maker for $15 million 2007-11-20, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/20/BA5QTFFQF.DTL California Secretary of State Debra Bowen sued a Nebraska voting machine company on Monday, seeking fines and reimbursements of nearly $15 million from the firm for allegedly selling nearly 1,000 uncertified machines to San Francisco and .. . Solano, Marin, Merced and Colusa counties. Bowen learned of the possible viola tion last July and ordered an investigation. "ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught," Bowen said in a statement after filing suit against the company. "I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voti ng system vendor come into the state, ignore the laws and make millions of dolla rs from California's taxpayers in the process." Bowen's decision could be a wind fall for the affected counties. In the suit, the secretary of state is seeking a $10,000 penalty for each of the uncertified machines sold in the state, with ha lf that fine intended to go to the counties that bought them. ES&S also would ha ve to reimburse the counties for the full cost of the machines, but the counties would be able to keep the AutoMARKs, which are now slated to receive full state certification in early December. The reimbursement rule was added to the state election code in 2004 in an effort to boost the penalties against companies that ignore the state's certification rules. "I was surprised to see this happen," B owen said in a telephone conference call Monday afternoon. "I hope this will be the last time I have to use (the new penalties)." Bowen said there is no ambigui ty in the law. "Changes ... must be submitted to the secretary of state before a voting machine can be sold or used in California," she said. "California law do esn't ask the manufacturer to decide whether the changes are small or large or m edium-size." California only learned about the changes when an ES&S representati ve inadvertently mentioned the new version of the AutoMARK in a telephone confer ence call with state election officials. The company never even mentioned to the state or the five counties that changes had been made to the machines that were shipped, Bowen said. Note: For many revealing articles on the serious problems with the new electroni c voting machines, click here.

2 felons' roles in county elections questioned 2004-02-11, Seattle Times (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/displa... Two convicted felons' roles in running elections in King County have raised new questions about the adequacy of safeguards to protect the integrity of elections . County election officials were unaware of convicted embezzler Jeffrey W. Dean' s criminal background when he was named in 1999 to lead an outside team that wou ld design a computer system for managing elections. Dean, who used his computer savvy to cover up his embezzlement of $465,341 from a Seattle law firm in the 19 80s, was given keys to the election offices on the fifth floor of the King Count y Administration Building. And he had unrestricted access to the elections offic e's high-security computer room where votes are tallied. Dean, 60, has not been involved in King County elections since 2002, but John L. Elder, 48, a convicted drug dealer who was imprisoned with Dean at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center and worked with Dean on county contracts, supervises the printing of ballots and the sorting and mailing of absentee ballots. Dean...put his computer expertise and his election savvy to work when Global Election Systems asked him for help. Dean, whose family business, Spectrum Print and Mail Services had been doing pri nting and mailing for King County elections for several years, was familiar with the county's voter-registration data. In 1988 [a] law firm confronted Dean over accounting discrepancies. According to Barry Wolf, a partner in the now-defunct Culp firm...Dean disguised his thefts by altering computer records. Dean was [l ater] appointed to the Global board of directors and named senior vice president with an annual salary of $144,000. When Diebold completed its purchase of Globa l in January 2002, Diebold reviewed employees' backgrounds and learned of Dean's and Elder's convictions. Dean lost his job but stayed on as a consultant on the Voter View project. Diebold Election Systems marketing director Mark Radke said Dean left the company because he wasn't needed. Radke declined to say whether D ean's criminal past played a role in his departure.

How to Hack an Election 2004-01-31, New York Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/040131nytimes Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, t hese paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. Computer-security experts [who tried] to fo il the safeguards and interfere with an election...were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by v oters and vote multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting t erminal and change its vote count. And...they were able to change votes from a r emote location. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is need ed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making dup licates...although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in "approximately 10 seconds." Diebold, the machines' manufacturer, rushed to i ssue a self-congratulatory press release with the headline "Maryland Security St udy Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment." The study's authors were shoc ked to see their findings spun so positively. In Boone County, Ind., last fall.. .an electronic system initially recorded more than 144,000 votes in an election with fewer than 19,000 registered voters. Given the growing body of evidence, it is clear that electronic voting machines cannot be trusted until more safeguard

s are in place. Note: How is Diebold able to brag about its success when the tests clearly fairl ed.Why didn't this news make front page headlines?

Machine Politics In the Digital Age 2003-11-09, New York Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/031109nytimes In mid-August 2003, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold, wrote a le tter inviting 100 wealthy friends to a fund-raiser at his home in a suburb of Co lumbus, Ohio. He wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral vo tes to the president next year." A longtime Republican, he is a member of Presid ent Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers," an elite group of loyalists who have raised a t least $100,000 each for the 2004 race. Through Diebold Election Systems, Mr. O 'Dell's company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-scr een voting machines. Note: This Nov. 2003 article became pay for view only shortly after the 2004 ele ctions. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on various aspects of the elections cover-up, see our Elections Information Center at http://www.WantToKn ow.info/electionsinformation.

Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say 2003-07-24, New York Times http://www.wanttoknow.info/030724nytimes The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws tha t would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballot s without being detected, computer security researchers said. "We found some stu nning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Informati on Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team. Diebold Elect ion Systems...has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States. T he systems...could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, s aid Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of the paper. "Practically anyone in the coun try -- from a teenager on up -- could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like." The list of flaws in the Diebold s oftware is long, according to the paper, which is online at avirubin.com/vote.pd f. Ballots could be altered by anyone with access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an opponent. Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, said he was shocked to discover flaws cited in Mr. Rubi n's paper that he had mentioned to the system's developers about five years ago. "That such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade is awful." Peter G. N eumann, an expert in computer security at SRI International, said the Diebold co de was "just the tip of the iceberg" of problems with electronic voting. Note: Why wasn't this front page headlines in all media?

What really happened in Florida? 2001-02-16, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1174115.stm We are coming into Tallahassee. A very expensive contract between Governor Jeb [

Bush]'s division of elections and a private company named DBT...accidentally wip ed off the voter rolls thousands of Democratic voters. [We're on the] 18th floor division of elections. We have come to ask Mr Clayton Roberts, the director, a few questions. "It says here in the contract that the verification is supposed t o be done by DBT. That you paid them $4 million. It could look to others don't y ou think that you paid $4 million to purchase this election for the Republican p arty. 95% wrong on the felon list. Mr Roberts, could you answer the question reg arding the contract?" Instead, Mr Roberts called out State troopers. The difficu lt questions are: Did Governor Jeb Bush, his Secretary of State Katherine Harris , and her Director of Elections, Clayton Roberts, know they had wrongly barred 2 2,000 black, Democrat voters before the elections? After the elections did they use their powers to prevent the count of 20,000 votes for the Democrats? CAMPAIG NER: "Were people taken out of polls and stopped from voting? Yes, I think that was not right." Altogether, it looks like this cost the Democrats about 22,000 v otes in Florida, which George Bush won by only 537 votes. In all, Palm Beach vot ing machines misread 27,000 ballots. Jeb Bush's Secretary of State, Katharine Ha rris, stopped them counting these votes by hand. Note: You can watch a video of this and much more fascinating information at the BBC link above. To read a brief summary of BBC reporter Greg Palast's coverage of the 2000 election results in Floriday, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/massmed ia#palast. And why wasn't this incredibly vital information reported in any of t he American media?

Opinion: Let's impeach e-voting 2008-09-08, Computerworld http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyN... Were software patches that didn't fix problems but instead changed results appli ed to electronic voting machines in two Georgia counties? Were the patches appli ed at the instruction of a top Diebold executive, without informing local electi on officials? This charge has been leveled several times since a rather surprisi ng election in which two Democratic candidates had comfortable leads in polls ju st before Election Day yet lost by substantial margins. Of course, there's a str ong correlation between your degree of suspicion of those results and which part y you support. But we should all be frightened if there's no way to prove that t ampering didn't occur. And when voting machines are electronic, paperless and pr oprietary, it's all but impossible to do a recount or check for errors in a way that can uncover a malicious hack. Election consultant Chris Hood told Rolling S tone magazine that he was working for Diebold in Georgia in 2002 when the head o f the company's election division arrived to distribute a patch to workers. That code was applied to only about 5,000 machines in two counties. Hood says it was an unauthorized patch that was kept hidden from state officials. The Georgia al legations are disturbing but, sadly, not unique. An attorney and IT security con sultant last month cited that incident to renew challenges to 2004 Ohio election s, which had a similar mix of paperless Diebold machines and statistically curio us results. Note: For many more reports of the risks associated with electronic voting syste ms, click here.

West 'embraces sham democracies' 2008-01-31, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/7219708.stm The US, EU and other democracies are accepting flawed and unfair elections out o

f political expediency, Human Rights Watch says in its annual report. Allowing a utocrats to pose as democrats without demanding they uphold civil and political rights risked undermining human rights worldwide, it warned. HRW said Pakistan, Thailand, Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Kenya and Russia had been falsely claiming t o be democratic. In the report, HRW said established democracies such as the US and members of the European Union were increasingly tolerating autocrats "claimi ng the mantle of democracy". "In 2007 too many governments ... acted as if simpl y holding a vote is enough to prove a nation 'democratic', and Washington, Bruss els and European capitals played along. The Bush administration has spoken of it s commitment to democracy abroad but often kept silent about the need for all go vernments to respect human rights." HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said it had become too easy for autocrats to get away with mounting a sham democracy "be cause too many Western governments insist on elections and leave it at that. The y don't press governments on the key human rights issues that make democracy fun ction - a free press, peaceful assembly, and a functioning civil society that ca n really challenge power. It seems Washington and European governments will acce pt even the most dubious election so long as the 'victor' is a strategic or comm ercial ally," Mr Roth said.

Voting rights restored for thousands in state on probation 2006-12-28, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/28/BAGL8N8G031.DTL A state appeals court has restored voting rights to as many as 100,000 Californi ans who are in county jails on probation from felony convictions, and who were d isenfranchised by the state a year ago, based on a new legal interpretation. Tha t interpretation abruptly reversed the state's reading of the law for the previo us 30 years, the court noted in last week's ruling. The state's top election off icial said he will not appeal. Most of those affected by the decision are young men, typically racial or ethnic minorities, who have committed nonviolent crimes , said Maya Harris, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and a lawyer in the case. "It sure is nice to have a win for democracy," she said after last week's ruling. In the 3-0 ruling, Justice Willi am Stein also said the state constitutional provision at issue was passed by the voters in 1974 to lift some previous restrictions on the right to vote, and sho uld be interpreted in favor of participation in elections.

Security of electronic voting is condemned 2006-12-01, MSNBC News/Washington Post http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15976613 Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout ... much of the country "ca nnot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a f ederal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The assessme nt by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government' s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting sys tems by a federal agency. NIST said that voting systems should allow election of ficials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The r ecommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary o f each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts. NI ST says in its report that the lack of a paper trail for each vote "is one of th e main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and dimin ished public confidence in elections." The report repeats the contention of the computer security community that "a single programmer could 'rig' a major electi on." NIST says that voting systems should not rely on a machine's software to pr

ovide a record of the votes cast. Some electronic voting system manufacturers ha ve introduced models that include printers to produce a separate record of each vote -- and that can be verified by a voter before leaving the machine -- but su ch paper trails have had their own problems. Printers have jammed or otherwise f ailed, causing some election directors to question whether a paper trail is an i mprovement. Note: Another federal advisory panel amazingly rejects requiring a paper trail d ays after the above report is released. To read the CBS News/AP article on this, click here.

Public interest in news topics beyond control of mainstream media 2006-06-09, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/273283_bunting09.html The blogosphere has been abuzz. But in the days since Rolling Stone magazine pub lished a long piece that accused Republicans of widespread and intentional cheat ing that affected the outcome of the last presidential election, the silence in America's establishment media has been deafening. In terms of bad news judgment, this could turn out to be the 2006 equivalent of the infamous "Downing Street m emo," the London Times story that was initially greeted by the U.S. media with a collective yawn. Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone mega-essay is titled "Was t he 2004 Election Stolen?" While Kennedy's article perhaps gives far too much wei ght to suspicious discrepancies between exit polls and the final election outcom e, it meticulously asserts and documents questionable methods of purging voter r olls, intentionally created long lines at Democratic polling places, court-defyi ng practices regarding registrations and provisional ballots, a phony terrorist alert on Election Day and final tallies in some counties and precincts that...si mply don't make sense. Three Cleveland-area election officials have been indicte d for illegally rigging the recount. Kennedy's 11,000-word article was Rolling S tone's cover story. But for the most part, national and regional newspapers, the major networks and news services have behaved as if the article was never publi shed. But Kennedy's article is not just old news rehashed. Its 11,000 words, not counting the 208 footnotes, most of which contain Web addresses for links to so urce information. Note: To read Kennedy's detailed allegations on the Rolling Stone website: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

Diebold sued by investors 2005-12-16, Boston Globe/Associated Press http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2005/12/16/diebold_sued... Two law firms representing investors are suing Diebold Inc., claiming the Ohio c ompany made misleading comments about its electronic voting machine business tha t led to artificially high share prices. The lawsuits filed this week in U.S. Di strict Court in Cleveland claim Diebold was "unable to assure the quality and wo rking order of its voting machine products." The plaintiff claims the company tr ied to conceal the problems from investors. Both lawsuits seek class-action stat us. Both firms allege that Diebold violated federal securities laws by making mi sleading statements about the health of its voting machine business, causing Die bold stock to artificially rise. The resignation came after several years of con troversy surrounding the security and reliability of Diebold's touch-screen voti ng machines and O'Dell's ties to President Bush. Besides concerns about security and reliability of the touch-screens, O'Dell was criticized in 2003 when he inv ited people to a fundraiser for Bush with a letter stating he planned to help "O

hio deliver its electoral votes to the president." Ohio turned out to be the sta te that clinched Bush's re-election in 2004.

County says electronic voting machines can be hacked 2005-12-15, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-15-opticalvoting_x.htm Tests on an optical-scan voting system used around the country showed it is vuln erable to hacking that can change the outcome of races without leaving evidence of fraud, a county election supervisor said. The voting system maker, Diebold In c., sent a letter in response that questioned the test results and said the test was "a very foolish and irresponsible act" that may [have] violated licensing a greements. Diebold's letter was...sent to the state of Florida, Leon County and the county election supervisor, Ion Sancho. In one of the tests conducted for Sa ncho and the non-profit election-monitoring group BlackBoxVoting.org, the resear chers were able to get into the system easily, make the loser the winner and lea ve without a trace. In the other test, the researcher who had hacked into the vo ting machine's memory card was able to hide votes, make losers out of winners an d leave no trace of the changes, said BlackBox founder Bev Harris.

Fallout from Dean's scream on news networks 2004-02-09, ABC News/Associated Press http://www.abcactionnews.com/entertainment/stories/0402/040209cnn.shtml It probably means little now to Howard Dean, but CNN's top executive believes hi s network overplayed the infamous clip of Dean's "scream" after the Iowa caucuse s. "It was a big story, but the challenge in a 24-hour news network is that you try to keep all of your different viewers throughout the day informed without ov erdoing it," said Princell Hair, CNN's general manager. The media explosion turn ed the former Democratic presidential front-runner into a punch line and arguabl y hastened his campaign's free fall. It's also an instructive look at how televi sion news and entertainment works today. "It was totally unfair," said Joe Tripp i, who lost his job as Dean's campaign manager in the fallout. Trippi accepts th at the footage was newsworthy, but he figured it was a one-day story. Instead, C NN cable and broadcast news networks aired Dean's Iowa exclamation 633 times and that doesn't include local news or talk shows in the four days after it was mad e. "It shouldn't be an anvil that you keep hammering to destroy his candidacy," Trippi said. The cable news networks ran and reran the video. They analyzed it. They ran footage of the late-night comedians joking about it. They played the in stant Internet songs that sampled Dean's shout. Virtually overnight, the "I Have a Scream" speech became legend. It took on such a life, said Paul Slavin, senio r vice president of ABC News, that "the amount of attention it was receiving nec essitated more attention." Neither Slavin nor Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News executi ve producer in charge of political coverage, believe the coverage was overdone. Roger Ailes, Fox News chairman, told ABC News it was "overplayed a bit." Note: If the above link fails, click here for the full article and more.

Voter turnout limits said to be White House goal 2007-04-19, Miami Herald (Miami's leading newspaper) http://www.miamiherald.com/416/story/79393.html For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political ap pointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in ke

y battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates, accord ing to former department lawyers and public records and documents. Facing nation wide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and f ederal voter identification laws. The administration ... has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and o ther steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare. Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcrof t ... launched a ''Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative'' in 2001, Justi ce Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute vot er fraud cases, and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll ba ck policies to protect minority voting rights. Several of [the eight fired U.S. attorneys] were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases im portant to Republican politicians. Virtually every significant decision affectin g election balloting since 2001 ... has come down on the side of Republicans, no tably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington ... where recent election s have been decided by narrow margins. In the last six years, the number of vote rs registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to one million. Note: Doublespeak, like the "Ballot Access" initiative, is often used to disguis e the fact that the effect of the initiative is the opposite of what the title s uggests. Think about the results of the "War on Terror" and "War on Drugs." The amount of terror and drug use has expanded dramatically since these were initiat ed. Could this be a purposeful maneuver? For more, click here.

Who decides who'll be allowed on TV debates? 2008-01-24, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/24/MNJDUJ0TP.DTL The Nevada Supreme Court's ruling allowing a cable network to exclude Rep. Denni s Kucinich from a Democratic presidential debate was barely a blip on the media radar screen. But in the long term, the court decision might prove to be [very] significant. It constituted the strongest judicial statement yet of news organiz ations' near-absolute power to control participation in pre-election forums. Kuc inich, the Ohio congressman who polls in the low single digits but has a fervent following among his party's anti-war base, [charged] that the cable channel had promised to let him in when he met its standards, then abruptly changed those s tandards to keep him out. MSNBC said initially that the debate was open to Democ rats who placed in the top four in a national poll. It invited Kucinich on Jan. 9 after a Gallup Poll a few days earlier ranked him fourth. But two days later, after New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson dropped out of the race, the channel narro wed its criteria to the top three candidates and withdrew Kucinich's invitation. The day before the debate, a Nevada judge ordered MSNBC to let Kucinich partici pate, saying the cable operator had entered into a binding contract that it coul dn't rescind once the candidate accepted. The state's high court quickly granted review and, an hour before the debate, ruled 7-0 in the cable channel's favor. The bottom line: Debates, the public's sole opportunity to see competing candida tes in a neutral setting, are the prerogative of the sponsoring organizations typically, these days, the news media - which set the criteria and have free rei n to alter them. Note: For a summary of reliable reports on major problems with the electoral pro cess, click here.

Sources: Bhutto was to give U.S. lawmakers vote-rigging report

2008-01-01, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/01/01/pakistan.voterigging/ On the day she died, Benazir Bhutto planned to hand over to visiting U.S. lawmak ers a report accusing Pakistan's intelligence services of a plot to rig parliame ntary elections, sources close to the slain former Pakistani prime minister told CNN Tuesday. Bhutto was assassinated Thursday, hours before a scheduled meeting with Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-Rhode Island, and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvan ia. "Where an opposing candidate is strong in an area, they [supporters of Presi dent Pervez Musharraf] have planned to create a conflict at the polling station, even killing people if necessary, to stop polls at least three to four hours," the document says. The report also accused the government of planning to tamper with ballots and voter lists, intimidate opposition candidates and misuse U.S.-m ade equipment to monitor communications of opponents. One Bhutto source said the document was compiled at her request and said the information came from sources inside the police and intelligence services. Sen. Latif Khosa ... accused the p owerful Inter-Services Intelligence of operating a rigging cell from a safe hous e in the capital, Islamabad. The goal, he said, is to change voting results elec tronically on election day. "The ISI has set up a mega-computer system where the y can hack any computer in Pakistan and connect with the Election Commission," h e said. Media outlets in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh have run reports allegin g that retired Brig. Gen. Ejaz Shah -- formerly an Inter-Services Intelligence o fficer and now head of the civilian Intelligence Bureau -- is involved in the vo te rigging plans. Shah's name also turned up in a letter Bhutto wrote to Musharr af after the first attempt on her life on October 18, when she returned to Pakis tan after eight years in exile. In the letter, the media reported, Shah was one of four Pakistani officials Bhutto named as people who wanted her dead. Note: It is an extremely odd "coincidence" that Benazir Bhutto was planning to m eet Senator Arlen Specter later in the day on which she was assassinated in Rawa lpindi, headquarters of the Pakistani military dictatorship. Specter was the inv entor of the official "magic bullet" theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination , which purported to explain the physical evidence of several bullets from diffe rent directions in the bodies of Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally as hav ing been caused by just one bullet from the rifle of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Student describes how she became a Clinton plant 2007-11-13, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/13/clinton.planted/index.html The college student who was told what question to ask at one of New York Sen. Hi llary Clinton's campaign events said "voters have the right to know what happene d" and she wasn't the only one who was planted. In an exclusive on-camera interv iew with CNN, Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, a 19-year-old sophomore at Grinnell Colleg e in Grinnell, Iowa, said giving anyone specific questions to ask is "dishonest, " and the whole incident has given her a negative outlook on politics. Gallo-Cha sanoff ... said what happened was simple: She said a senior Clinton staffer aske d if she'd like to ask the senator a question after an energy speech the Democra tic presidential hopeful gave in Newton, Iowa, on November 6. "I sort of thought about it, and I said 'Yeah, can I ask how her energy plan compares to the other candidates' energy plans?'" Gallo-Chasanoff said Monday night. According to Gal lo-Chasanoff, the staffer said, " 'I don't think that's a good idea, because I d on't know how familiar she is with their plans.' " He then opened a binder to a page that, according to Gallo-Chasanoff, had about eight questions on it. "The t op one was planned specifically for a college student," she added. "It said 'col lege student' in brackets and then the question." Topping that sheet of paper wa s the following: "As a young person, I'm worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?" And while she said sh

e would have rather used her own question, Gallo-Chasanoff said she didn't have a problem asking the campaign's because she "likes to be agreeable," adding that since she told the staffer she'd ask their pre-typed question she "didn't want to go back on my word." Clinton campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee said ... Clinton had "no idea who she was calling on." Gallo-Chasanoff wasn't so sure. "It seeme d like she knew to call on me because there were so many people, and ... I was t he only college student in that area," she said. Gallo-Chasanoff said she wasn't the only person given a question. Note: Click on the link above to watch videos of the student asking the planted question and of the full interview with CNN.

Analysis finds e-voting machines vulnerable 2006-06-26, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-06-26-e-voting_x.htm Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 pr esidential election "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections," a report out Tuesday concludes. There are more than 120 securi ty threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the s tudy by the Brennan Center for Justice says. For what it calls the most comprehe nsive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank conven ed a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities. Together, the three systems account for 80% o f the voting machines that will be used in this November's election. Lawsuits ha ve been filed in at least six states to block the purchase or use of computerize d machines. Election officials in California and Pennsylvania recently issued ur gent warnings to local polling supervisors about potential software problems in touch-screen voting machines. Among the findings: Using corrupt software to swit ch votes from one candidate to another is the easiest way to attack all three sy stems; the most vulnerable voting machines use wireless components open to attac k by "virtually any member of the public with some knowledge and a personal digi tal assistant;" even electronic systems that use voter-verified paper records ar e subject to attack unless they are regularly audited; most states have not impl emented election procedures or countermeasures to detect software attacks. Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on elections manipula tions: http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

N.C. Judge Declines Protection for Diebold 2005-10-28, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1354023 One of the nation's leading suppliers of electronic voting machines may decide a gainst selling new equipment in North Carolina after a judge declined Monday to protect it from criminal prosecution should it fail to disclose software code as required by state law. Diebold...is worried it could be charged with a felony i f officials determine the company failed to make all of its code some of which i s owned by third-party software firms, including Microsoft Corp. available for e xamination by election officials in case of a voting mishap. The requirement is part of the minimum voting equipment standards approved by state lawmakers earli er this year following the loss of more than 4,400 electronic ballots in Cartere t County during the November 2004 election. The lost votes threw at least one cl ose statewide race into uncertainty for more than two months. Diebold machines w ere blamed for voting disruptions in a California primary election last year. Ca

lifornia has refused to certify some machines because of their malfunction rate.

Critics: Convicted Felons Worked for Electronic Voting Companies 2003-12-16, Associated Press http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent backg round checks for people responsible for voting machine software. Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold Inc., one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions, and a programmer jailed for f alsifying computer records. The programmer, Jeffrey Dean, wrote and maintained p roprietary code used to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior vice pres ident of Global Election Systems Inc. Diebold purchased GES in January 2002. Acc ording to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean served tim e in a Washington correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with co mputer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and plan ning." The former GES is Diebold's wholly owned subsidiary, Global Election Mana gement Systems, which produces the operating system that touch-screen voting ter minals use. Computer programmers say software bugs, hackers or electrical outage s could cause more than 50,000 touch-screen machines used in precincts nationwid e to delete or alter votes. Note: Why was this not reported in the top media in front page headlines?

Kucinich Seeks NH Dem Vote Recount 2008-01-11, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22608231 Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who won less than 2 percent of the vote in the New Ham pshire primary, said Thursday he wants a recount to ensure that all ballots in h is party's contest were counted. The Ohio congressman cited "serious and credibl e reports, allegations and rumors" about the integrity of Tuesday results. In a letter dated Thursday, Kucinich said he does not expect significant changes in h is vote total, but wants assurance that "100 percent of the voters had 100 perce nt of their votes counted." Kucinich alluded to online reports alleging disparit ies around the state between hand-counted ballots, which tended to favor Sen. Ba rack Obama, and machine-counted ones that tended to favor Sen. Hillary Rodham Cl inton. He also noted the difference between pre-election polls, which indicated Obama would win, and Clinton's triumph by a 39 percent to 37 percent margin. [De puty Secretary of State David] Scanlon said his office had received several phon e calls since Tuesday, mostly from outside the state, questioning the results. N ew Hampshire's voting machines are not linked in any way, which Scanlon says red uces the likelihood of tampering with results on a statewide level. Also, the re sults can be checked against paper ballots. "I think people from out of state do n't completely understand how our process works and they compare it to the syste m that might exist in Florida or Ohio, where they have had serious problems," he said. "Perhaps the best thing that could happen for us is to have a recount to show the people that ... the votes that were cast on election day were accuratel y reflected in the results." Note: Except for this sparsely reported AP story, why didn't any media articles raise the question of voting machine manipulation? The SF Chronicle pointed out, "Pollster Mervin Field, a dean of American polling who has been measuring publi c opinion for more than six decades, notes that seven public and two private pol

ls all reported on ... the day before the election that Obama was ahead of Clint on anywhere from 9 to 11 points." MSNBC's Chris Matthews stated: "Even our own e xit polls, taken as people came out of voting, showed [Obama] ahead. So what's g oing on here?" For lots more on voting manipulation, click here.

Voting decision creates turmoil 2007-08-05, Sacramento Bee (Leading newspaper of California's capital city) http://www.sacbee.com/749/story/309719.html Across California, bleary-eyed voting watchdogs, registrars and public officials spent the day trying to digest [Secretary of State Debra] Bowen's late Friday d ecision to limit electronic balloting and install various new safeguards. The fo rmer Democratic state senator, an electronic voting skeptic who fought in the Le gislature to require a paper trail for digital ballots, [took action] after Univ ersity of California researchers found security flaws in three electronic system s. Barring a legal challenge, Bowen's actions will force 21 counties to shutter most of their touch-screen machines. Those counties, who use machines made by Di ebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems, will instead ask most voters to fill bubbles on paper ballots to make their selections, a method known as "op tical scan." Dan Ashby, [an] electronic voting critic who heads the California E lection Protection Network, praised Bowen for her actions. "Election officials a re probably going to fight tooth and nail against the decertification order, but we think truth and logic are on our side," Ashby said. "The best use for the ma chines would be to melt them down for scrap. But before we can do that, we have to do a withdrawal in stages." Bowen estimated that more than two-thirds of Cali fornia voters already cast paper ballots, a number she believes will continue to rise as more people vote absentee. Note: The Sacramento Bee, within two days of its publication, restricted access to this story, requiring registration to read it. Secretary of State Bowen is un der attack throughout the state for having proven the hackability of electronic voting machines. Many Registrars of Voters are threatening to ignore the new reg ulations, and they are getting a lot of press coverage as they attempt to revers e Bowen's decision. You can show support for Debra Bowen through contacting the media, writing letters to editors, or by signing this petition. For more reliabl e, verifiable information about the serious problems with new electronic voting machines, click here.

Pull the Plug on Electronic Voting 2006-09-04, Forbes http://www.forbes.com/columnists/forbes/2006/0904/040.html You don't like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives. I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p. So why am I advocating the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century? The 2000 debacle in Florida spurred a rush to co mputerize voting. While computers are very proficient...we should not rely on co mputers alone to count votes in public elections. The people who program them ma ke mistakes. They are more vulnerable to manipulation than most people realize. Even an event as common as a power glitch could cause a hard disk to fail or a m agnetic card that holds votes to permanently lose its data. In a 2003 election i n Boone County, Ind., DREs recorded 144,000 votes in one precinct populated with fewer than 6,000 registered voters. Consider one simple mode of attack...called overwriting the boot loader. In overwriting it an attacker can, for example, ma ke the machine count every fifth Republican vote as a Democratic vote, swap the vote outcome at the end of the election or produce a completely fabricated resul

t. To stage this attack, a night janitor at the polling place would need only a few seconds' worth of access to the computer's memory card slot. DREs have a tra nsparency problem: You can't easily discover if they've been tinkered with. It's one thing to suspect that officials have miscounted hanging chads, but somethin g else entirely for people to wonder whether a corrupt programmer working behind the scenes has rigged a computer to help his side.

As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security 2006-01-22, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/21/AR20060121010... As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure vot ing is free of fraud. Four times over the past year Sancho told computer special ists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, chang ing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated ha cking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equi pment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country. "While electronic votin g systems hold promise for improving the election process," the Government Accou ntability Office said in a report to Congress last year, there are still pressin g concerns about "security and reliability . . . design flaws" and other issues. Election officials have repeatedly clashed with voting-machine manufacturers. A new wave of concern over today's voting technologies, started in 2003, when a S eattle-based activist named Bev Harris released thousands of Diebold documents s he said she found on an unsecured portion of the company's Web site. Some comput er scientists said the documents showed Diebold's systems were vulnerable to att ack. Today, more than 800 jurisdictions use their technology, Harris said. Note: Integrity in elections is not a partisan issue. For lots more reliable, ve rifiable information raising serious questions about fair elections, see http:// www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

One-click voting: Will your vote count? 2004-01-19, PBS http://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/voices/200401/0119voting.html Diebold, Inc. is one of the largest distributors of electronic voting machines. There are no proven cases of fraud or miscounting with Diebold machines as yet. However...these systems provide no "barometer for judging accuracy," says comput er science professor Edward Felten. He contends that since all tallying takes pl ace inside the system, voters have no way of knowing if their vote was truly reg istered. "A programmer could put malicious code in the software, or there could be a bug." On July 30, Diebold agreed. The company posted on their homepage that "a combination of malevolent insiders and unscrupulous voters could tamper with [election] results." But company spokespeople say any machines would be suscept ible to that level of fraud. Therefore, they say, their technology can not be ex pected to guard against it. Diebold has used copyright laws to quash internal me mos and e-mails admitting to security flaws and refuses to make their voting mac hine software code available for independent inspection. Ina Fairfax, Va. school board election. Some voters noticed "when they pushed the button for a given ca ndidate an X would appear over the candidate's name and then later disappear," F elten said. After testing, it was found that about 10 percent of votes were bein g invisibly dropped. And, according to an Associated Press story published in De cember, Diebold's staff might include characters willing to engage in malicious actions. Jeffrey Dean, a chief programmer for the company, has spent time in a W ashington, D.C., jail for embezzlement and tampering with computer files.

LA actor regrets copying election memos 2006-11-22, BusinessWeek http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8LIF2DG0.htm During the past two years, [Actor Stephen] Heller tapped the family savings and lost two jobs while fighting charges that he took copies of documents from a law firm where he worked. Prosecutors said he copied more than 500 pages of documen ts, including memos suggesting Diebold may have broken state law by providing Al ameda County with electronic voting machines that hadn't been certified by state officials. Soon after, Heller gave the documents to Bev Harris, founder of Blac k Box Voting, which was involved in a lawsuit claiming Diebold used uncertified software in 17 counties. Harris then turned them over to the secretary of state and the Oakland Tribune. Heller was sentenced Monday to three years probation an d ordered to pay his former law firm $10,000 in restitution. The records detaile d potential problems with electronic voting machines made by Diebold. Heller was hailed by digital rights and political activists as a whistle-blower who tried to do the right thing. Some observers believe prosecuting Heller could prevent o ther people from revealing potential flaws with electronic voting systems. Some of Diebold's machines failed to work properly in the March 2004 primary election . Two months later, then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified 14,000 Die bold electronic voting machines. [Shelley's] lawsuit was eventually joined by th e state attorney general's office. Diebold settled for $2.6 million last year. H eller hopes his case will bring about changes and prevent corporations from keep ing details of election equipment and software secret. "The only thing that shou ld be secret is our ballots," Heller said. Note: So a whistleblower who exposes major corruption later proven to be true is fined and penalized. What kind of system is this? For lots more, click here.

Hack The Vote 2004 2004-11-00, Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1303046.html?page=3&c=y A team of former National Security Agency (NSA) computer experts conducted a wee klong exercise with six Diebold machines and a server. According to team leader Michael Wertheimer, the group uncovered "considerable security risks." They foun d that the smart cards used to provide supervisors with access to the machines c ould be easily hacked; the removable media containing voting information was pro tected by flimsy locks that the team picked in under a minute using bent paper c lips. The paper clips weren't even necessary, since all 32,000 keys supplied by Diebold for the machines are identical, allowing any key to open all of the mach ines. On the software side, the most glaring weakness was in election headquarte rs servers: Dell PCs ran the Windows 2000 operating system without Microsoft's s ecurity upgrade patches, which left servers susceptible to viruses and worms, en abling a remote attacker to tamper with election systems by phone.

Congress eyes voting machines in disputed race 2007-06-15, Miami Herald (Miami's leading newspaper) http://www.miamiherald.com/569/story/140319.html A congressional task force called Thursday for a speedy resolution to a southwes t Florida election dispute that questions the accuracy of ATM-style voting machi nes. Democrat Christine Jennings claims that touch-screen voting machines in Sar

asota County failed to register up to 18,000 votes. Republican Vern Buchanan was declared the winner by 369 votes after two recounts and a state audit found no problems. GAO investigators will gather information on Sarasota County's voting systems, analyze the 18,000 so-called ''undervotes,'' review tests and audits do ne after the election and determine if more tests are needed. Jennings said Thur sday the she was pleased even though the approach brings her no closer to gainin g access to hardware and software that the machines' maker, Omaha, Neb.-based El ection Systems & Software Inc., says is a trade secret. Note: The software in electronic voting machines is considered proprietary infor mation, kept secret from Congress, the courts and even the President. Yet any co mputer programmer will tell you that this software can be manipulated. To join i n demanding transparency in our elections process, contact your political repres entatives by clicking here. For more reliable information on this issue vital to democracy, click here.

Sorry, You're Vote Has Been: Lost, Hacked, Miscast, Recorded Twice 2004-11-00, Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/generaltechnology/ec959aa138b84010vgn... In South Carolina, officials bought machines too late for adequate testing. And on many of their onscreen ballots, the presidential contest included names of ca ndidates from local elections. Several Texas counties are thousands of votes sho rt because a bug in the software failed to record Spanish-language ballots. For hundreds of thousands of votes, there will be no paper record at all. In Colorad o, a group of hackers is boasting that they stole a box of electronic smartcards used to activate e-voting machines and reprogrammed them to allow multiple vote s, just for fun. In virtually every state, officials failed to invite outside te chnical experts to participate in the process of e-voting machine selection. Bec ause none of the major vendors of e-voting machines release their code for secur ity testing, states and counties are forced to trust vendors' own assessments of their machines' reliability.

E-Vote Problems 'Troubling but Anecdotal' 2004-11-03, Fox News/Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137489,00.html Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines o n Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates. There were also several dozen voters in six states...who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen. In many cases, voters said they in tended to select John Kerry...but when the computer asked them to verify the cho ice it showed them instead opting for President Bush. The reports did highlight computer scientists' concerns about touch screens, which they say are prone to t ampering and unreliable unless they produce paper records for recounts. Roberta Harvey, 57, of Clearwater, Fla., said she had tried at least a half dozen times to select Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church. After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident s aid she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harv ey said it took about 10 attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen co nfirmed her intended selection. The Election Protection Coalition received a tot al of 32 reports of touch-screen voters who selected one candidate only to have another show up on the summary screen, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electro nic Frontier Foundation, a coalition member.

South Carolina Primary Vulnerable to Fraud 2008-01-16, CNN Lou Dobbs Tonight http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0801/16/ldt.01.html Well, new questions tonight about the electronic voting machines that will be us ed in the upcoming South Carolina primary. Those voting machines do not have a p aper trail, and as Kitty Pilgrim now reports, that could leave this election vul nerable to fraud and a possibility of recounting. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) KITTY PILGRI M, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Election activists warn the 11,400 ES&S voting machines us ed in the [South Carolina] primaries could malfunction. And without a paper trai l, will not be able to be accurately recounted. This as New Hampshire begins rec ounting its results today. New Hampshire's recount [is] made possible by their p aper trail. South Carolina's state attorney general defends its paperless system saying in the event of a botched election, "Our grand jury would investigate an d we would prosecute any election fraud that goes on." But fraud isn't the only concern. HOLLY JACOBSON, VOTERACTION.ORG: It's not just that these systems can b e tampered with, but also that the systems have been seemingly designed poorly, and they fail on Election Day. Fraud or intent for fraud aside, these systems ju st don't seem to work well. And that, we know. PILGRIM: In Sarasota County, Flor ida, in 2006, the congressional race tallied an alarmingly high number of missin g votes, 18,000. In 2007, security concerns led Ohio to decommission a similar m odel to those that will be used in South Carolina. The South Carolina League of Women's Voters released a report this week, "This system has not been designed w ith security as a basic requirement and it should not be used for voting in Sout h Carolina."(END VIDEOTAPE) Note: For a summary of reliable reports on major problems with the new electroni c voting machines, click here.

No buyer for voting machine unit 2007-08-16, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6950024.stm US cash dispenser and security company Diebold has admitted that it has failed t o find a buyer for its troubled electronic voting machine business. Diebold and other manufacturers of such voting machines have been hit by criticism that they are unreliable and vulnerable to tampering. Growing unease about the machines i n the US has led to a number of delayed orders from states. Diebold said that as a result, its 2007 revenues would fall $120m (61m). It added that it would now a llow the unit to operate more independently, with a separate board of directors and, possibly, a new management structure. Diebold said it had not ruled out ano ther attempt at a full or partial sale. Some 50 million Americans, about 30% of registered voters, used electronic machines to cast their vote in the 2004 presi dential election. The machines were introduced in the aftermath of the problems caused by antiquated punch-card systems in the 2000 presidential election. Howev er, there has since been growing concern that electronic machines may be equally as unreliable. Note: For more reliable information on the serious problems with the new electro nic voting machines, click here.

A call to investigate the 2004 election 2006-06-26, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/06/26/a...

Nov. 2, 2004...the exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exi t poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly fro m the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. N ationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror ima ge of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. The discrepancy [was] beyond the statistical margin of error. The media largely ignored this exit poll discrepancy. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio co-chairman of the 2004 Bush/Chen ey Campaign...used the power of his office to affect turnout and thwart voters i n heavily Democratic areas. Vote suppression and electoral irregularities in Ohi o have been documented. In the words of DNC Chairman Howard Dean: "More than a q uarter of all Ohio voters reported problems with their voting experience." 64 pe rcent of Americans voted on direct recorded electronic voting machines or optica l-scan systems. According to a September 2005 General Accountability Office inve stigation, such systems contained flaws that "could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to...the in tegrity of the voting process." The report also indicated that for rural and sma ll-town precincts...the difference between the exit poll results and the officia l count is three times greater in precincts where voters used machines than in p recincts using paper ballots alone.

Block the Vote 2006-05-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/opinion/30tue1.html?ex=1306641600&en=4eafe1... In a country that spends so much time extolling the glories of democracy, it's a mazing how many elected officials go out of their way to discourage voting. Stat es are adopting rules that make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartis an groups to register new voters. Florida recently reached a new low when it act ually bullied the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter registration ef forts in the state. The Legislature did this by adopting a law that seems intend ed to scare away anyone who wants to run a voter registration drive. Since regis tration drives are particularly important for bringing poor people, minority gro ups and less educated voters into the process, the law appears to be designed to keep such people from voting. In Washington, a new law prevents people from vot ing if the secretary of state fails to match the information on their registrati on form with government databases. There are many reasons that names, Social Sec urity numbers and other data may not match, including typing mistakes. The state is supposed to contact people whose data does not match, but the process is too tilted against voters. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties on voluntee rs who slip up in registration drives. Protecting the integrity of voting is imp ortant, but many of these rules seem motivated by a partisan desire to suppress the vote, and particular kinds of voters, rather than to make sure that those wh o are entitled to vote [can] do so.

Election Whistle-Blower Stymied by Vendors 2006-03-26, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR20060325008... Among those who worry that hackers might sabotage election tallies, Ion Sancho i s something of a hero. The maverick elections supervisor in Leon County, Fla., l ast year helped show that electronic voting machines from one of the major manuf acturers are vulnerable...and would allow election workers to alter vote counts without detection. Now, however, Sancho may be paying an unexpected price for hi s whistle-blowing: None of the state-approved companies here will sell him the v

oting machines the county needs. "I believe I'm being singled out for punishment by the vendors," he said. The trouble began last year when Sancho allowed a Fin nish computer scientist to test Leon County's Diebold voting machines, a common type that uses an optical scanner to count votes from ballots that voters have m arked. Some tests...showed that elections workers could alter the vote tallies b y manipulating the removable memory cards in the voting machines, and do so with out detection. Last month, California elections officials arranged for experts t o perform a similar analysis of the Diebold machines and also found them vulnera ble -- noting a wider variety of flaws than Sancho's experts had. A spokesman sa id Diebold will not sell to Sancho without assurances that he will not permit mo re such tests, which the company considers a reckless use of the machines.

Voting Machines Touch and Go 2005-07-30, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-me-machine30jul30,1,616478.story California election officials have rejected an electronic voting machine by Dieb old after tests revealed unacceptable levels of screen freezes and paper jams. T hree counties already have purchased the TSX voting machine, which was found to have a failure rate of 10%. Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said that was too much of a risk and notified company officials in a letter sent Wednesday. In a mock election held last week to test the 96 touch-screen machines, McPherson not ed in the letter that his staff encountered "problems with paper jamming on the printer module." The state withdrew certification for some of Diebold's e-voting equipment in April 2004 after then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley found those systems unreliable because they lacked a paper trail. Note: Kevin Shelley was eventually forced to resign in a scandal that was freque nt front page headlines in California, yet the accusations against him could hav e been used against almost any politician.

Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio 2004-11-05, MSNBC News/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6418513 An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial res ults had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a prec inct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mis takenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more d ata than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor. In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On o ne of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recordi ng process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred. Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web s ite called to point out the discrepancy. The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

E-Voting: Is The Fix In? 2004-08-08, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml

This fall, 30 percent of us will cast our votes by touching a screen on a comput erized voting machines. The good news is, these machines don't have any of the p roblems of paper ballots. The bad news is, they may have much worse problems all their own. [California] Secretary of State Kevin Shelley: "There was a wholesal e breakdown in the election last March in...San Diego. Untold thousands of indiv iduals were turned away and denied their right to vote because the voting equipm ent couldn't start." So many of the machines malfunctioned or ran unapproved sof tware that Shelley took the extraordinary step of decertifying them. Then there' s the software worry. Avi Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins U niversity, spent two weeks analyzing the software from the world's biggest votin g-machine company, Diebold Election Systems, which has over 50 percent of the ma rket. "We found all kinds of problems in the code," he said. "Upon looking at th e source code for Diebold, it was pretty clear that this was a real amateur job. The concern I have is that those machines will be programmed from the start to favor one candidate over another," says Rubin. A Diebold plot to rig the electio ns? Where did that idea come from? The rumors began with this letter from Diebol d's CEO, Wally Odell, who was moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser. In his in vitation to a benefit for Bush last August, he wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." But Rubin says he is not ac cusing Diebold of rigging elections. "I'm just saying that they could do it and that we shouldn't allow our elections to be under control of vendors when there are ways of designing voting machines such that the vendors don't have the contr ol of them."

Two Strange Deaths Which Changed History 2004-10-19, PBS, CBS, Fox compilation http://www.WantToKnow.info/wellstonecarnahan Two strange deaths dramatically changed the balance of power in U.S. government for two recent years. Democratic Senate candidate Mel Carnahan died in a private plane crash on Oct. 16, 2000, just three weeks before the 2000 elections. Mr. C arnahan went on to win the race as a dead man against his rival John Ashcroft. C arnahan's wife was appointed to fill his position, but as she was appointed rath er than elected, her Senate term was limited to two years rather than the normal six. She lost her 2002 race to her Republican opponent. On Oct. 24, 2002, just two weeks before the 2002 elections, Democratic Senate candidate Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash. His wife died with him. Wellstone had been projecte d to win the election. There are many suspicious circumstances surrounding Wells tone's death. Isn't it quite a coincidence that these two Democratic candidates both died in plane crashes only two years apart, both just weeks before the elec tions? It's even more of a coincidence that both were very progressive Democrats . Wellstone was often labeled the most progressive member of Senate.

Electronic voting switch threatens mass confusion 2006-05-01, Financial Times http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a1b985a4-d960-11da-8b06-0000779e2340.html The last three election cycles in the US have been marked by controversy...about the fairness and accuracy of the voting process. The coming cycle promises more of the same. In California, the League of Women Voters has protested against a new, computerised statewide election registry that the group says is improperly rejecting registered voters, while county clerks in several Indiana jurisdiction s complained that the electronic ballots programmed by the vendors of their elec tronic voting machines had been delivered late, were incorrect and poorly proofr ead. The clerk for Marion County the state s most populous said that, so far, nine rounds of fixes had been required; she was unsure whether the primary vote today

could be held without problems, according to The Indianapolis Star. In Florida.. .the election supervisor for Leon County allowed anti-electronic voting activist s to try breaching security in the county s optical scan voting system, prompting the big three electronic voting systems companies Diebold, Election Systems & Se rvices, and Sequoia to refuse to sell the county new machines. The US Government Accountability Office issued a report with a litany of potential flaws in the r eliability and security of electronic voting and warned that steps needed to ens ure voter confidence in the integrity of the vote were unlikely to be in place i n time for the 2006 election. Note: For more on problems with electronic voting machines: click here.

State wants more tests of voting machines 2005-12-21, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/21/BAGG1GB3QE22.DTL A controversial electronic voting system must undergo federal security testing b efore it can be approved for use in California, Secretary of State Bruce McPhers on said Tuesday. Diebold Election System's optical scan and touch-screen voting systems...will have their state certification delayed for the second time, McPhe rson said. "We have determined that there is sufficient cause for additional fed eral evaluation," he said in a statement. "Unresolved significant security conce rns exist with respect to the memory card" because the federal government never reviewed the software that programs the card, said Caren Daniels-Meade, head of the secretary of state's election division, in a letter to Diebold. "We strongly believe it is the duty and responsibility of the secretary of state and you to make sure that the ultimate users of your products -- the voters of California - have a voting system that has been thoroughly and rigorously evaluated." Diebo ld officials declined to comment directly on McPherson's concerns. The secretary of state first refused to certify the Diebold systems in July, after 20 percent of the new, printer-equipped electronic voting machines malfunctioned during a test in San Joaquin County.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Elections Irregularities 2004-11-07, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6368819 Note: The best reporting by far in the mainstream media of the 2004 election was by MSNBC's news anchor Keith Olbermann. Both on TV and on his blog, Mr. Olberma nn asked the tough questions. He even asked why other major media weren't report ing many of these crucial stories. His most excellent blog gave continual update s of developments in the elections scandals. Here are a few key quotes from thre e of the entries there: Nov. 7, 6:55 p.m: Officials in Warren County, Ohio, "locked down" its administra tion building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there....Emergenc y Services Director Frank Young explained that he had been advised by the federa l government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security. The ma jority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio or huge margins f or Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered R epublicans 2-1. Nov. 9, 12:55 a.m: ...the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters. I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93, 000 more votes than voters. [more on this below]

November 10, 12:43 p.m: The computerized balloting in North Carolina is so thoro ughly messed up that all state-wide voting may be thrown out and a second electi on day scheduled. Dec. 2, 8:13 p.m.: We are not only busting our humps on the voting irregularitie s beat, but we remain the only mainstream news organization to continue to cover this vital story. Note: Click below to watch 16 minutes of the excellent MSNBC news program broadc ast nationally on November 11th covering this topic. Note that it may take sever al minutes to download. You must have installed either QuickTime (QT) or Windows Media. For dial-up connections, use the 56K option. http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/5.countdown_300 k.mov (QT high speed) http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/5.countdown_56k .mov (QT 56K) http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/5.countdown_300k.wmv (Windows Med ia high speed) http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/5.countdown_56k.wmv (Windows Medi a 56K)

E-voting irregularities raise eyebrows, blood pressure 2004-11-03, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-11-03-evote-trouble_x.htm Concern over electronic voting technology was not assuaged Tuesday as glitches, confusion and human error raised a welter of problems across the country. Nearly one in three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have crit icized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning. In Volusia County, Fla., a memory card in an optical-scan voting machine failed Mo nday at an early voting site and didn't count 13,000 ballots. Most of the ATM-st yle machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount. The Electronic Frontier Foundatio n's VerifiedVoting.org, which has been monitoring the implementation of e-voting machines in the U.S., warned on Monday that over 20 percent of the machines tes ted by observers around the country failed to record votes properly. "A request filed in King County, Washington...uncovered an internal audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; 'trouble slips' revealing suspicious mode m activity; and profound problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office perso nnel, and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists."

Sierra Club ads may dim Ford party 2003-06-04, WantToKnow.info/Detroit News http://www.WantToKnow.info/030604fordmodelt25mpg The Washington, D.C.-based Sierra Club is the latest environmental group to use Ford Motor Co.'s high-profile centennial party next week to pressure the automak er to boost the fuel economy of its cars and trucks. Once a fan of Ford Chairman and CEO Bill Ford Jr., the Sierra Club said Tuesday it will place ads in the Ne w York Times and BusinessWeek magazine slamming the company's environmental reco rd. The ads -- being published to coincide with Ford's 100th anniversary June 16 -- say Ford has failed to improve the fuel efficiency of its vehicles. After de

picting technological advances in other industries, the ad says that Ford's Mode l T, which went 25 miles on a gallon of gasoline, was more fuel efficient than t he current Ford Explorer sport-utility vehicle -- which manages just 16 miles pe r gallon. Note: To understand why all of this isn't being reported in headline news around the country, click here.

Secrets and Shams of Political Polls 2008-09-18, Newswise.com http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/544442/ In the 13 years David Moore worked for the Gallup Poll, he learned that media po lls are not used to uncover the will or thoughts of the public, but rather to manu facture a public opinion that grabs the attention of journalists and can be used t o fill media news holes. [Moore] draws on first-hand experience as well as the h istory of modern media polling practices focusing particularly on the four most influential polls: New York Times/CBS News, Washington Post/ABC News, Pew Resear ch, and USA Today/Gallup to reveal the inner-workings of pollsters and the cycle of bias that tends to promote the powerful and suppress dissent in his new book The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls. Analyzing po llsters problematic methodology ... Moore reveals how polls distort voters electio n preferences as well as the public s support for or opposition to government poli cies. The net result, he says, is that polls give false readings of which candid ates voters prefer and what the public wants, which ultimately determines the de mocratic process. In his new book, Moore shows how polls create a legitimacy spin cycle. Those in power frame an issue to favor their position, while the press li mits its coverage of sources that might disagree with the administration. Pollst ers, in turn, develop surveys to dovetail with the news stories and the people m any of whom have little idea of what is happening beyond the limited information presented to them by the news media are pressured into answering questions that reinforce the original position of those in power. Note: For lots more on the many threats to free and fair elections in the United States, click here.

Voting machine gets LinuxWorld tryout 2008-08-02, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/01/BUFD1224UC.DTL Like many people, Alan Dechert was outraged when the 2000 presidential election was thrown to the Supreme Court because nobody could figure out how Florida's vo ters had voted. An engineer who has designed and tested software for a living, h e thinks the outcomes of elections should never be in doubt. So Dechert and a co uple of colleagues founded the Open Voting Consortium, a nonprofit group dedicat ed to delivering "trustable and open voting systems." In addition to lobbying ag ainst proprietary voting machines, they have spent the last several years workin g with scientists and engineers around the world to design and build a voting ma chine of their own. On Tuesday their machine will be put to the test at LinuxWor ld in San Francisco, where the 10,000 people who are expected to attend the conf erence will get to vote in a mock presidential election pitting Barack Obama aga inst John McCain. "The voting system in the U.S. is still not sufficiently accur ate to determine the winner in a very close election," said Dechert, who has wor ked at Borland International and Intel developing and testing software. "By the time we're done (with the mock election), nobody will have any doubt." The code that runs this voting machine is based on the work of a former [U.C.] Berkeley s

tudent, Ka-Ping Yee, who now works at Google. At a price of about $400, the new voting machine is a tenth of the cost of proprietary machines ... because it's s imply designed and based on free software. Its workings are transparent, he said , unlike some of the electronic voting machines that California decertified for security problems. Note: How could the U.S. government allow private companies to develop machines with secret codes the government can't access in the first place? For a summary of the many problems with proprietary electronic voting machines, click here.

Inside the Shocking HBO Film That Rocks the Voting Process 2006-11-02, TV Guide http://www.tvguide.com/News-Views/Interviews-Features/Article/default.aspx?po... HBO's Hacking Democracy...tells the story of Bev Harris, a grandmother and write r who started investigating the subject of electronic voting in 2002 after quest ioning her county's switch to electronic touch-screen voting machines. Unsatisfi ed with their explanation, Harris set out to learn about electronic voting syste ms on her own, and in doing so stumbled upon shocking revelations about the vuln erability of the software and hardware. Harris, who went on to form the watchdog group BlackBoxVoting.org, recently spoke with TVGuide. TVGuide: [Diebold is] ta king issue with...the hacking demonstration which shows how central tabulators c an be tampered with by modifying a single memory card. Harris: It's interesting they would bring that up because the State of California commissioned its own in dependent study. Diebold was ordered to cooperate with the study. All of the sci entists said, "The hack is real, and it is dangerous." And they found 16 additio nal vulnerabilities. TVGuide: Watching this unsettling documentary, you come awa y feeling like paper-chad ballots are our best bet. Harris: Actually, those are counted by a computer, as well. This election, 45 percent of the jurisdictions i n New Hampshire will be counting by hand. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has introduce d a bill into the U.S. Congress to have the entire presidential race counted by hand in 2008. Canada counts their federal elections by hand, and they have the r esults generally in about four hours, and with little controversy. The missing i ngredient has been the citizens. Any system that we end up with has to be one th at citizens can oversee. Important Note: Don't miss this powerful, highly revealing documentary now avail able for free viewing on the Internet at http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsvid eodocumentary.

Diebold demands HBO cancel film on voting machines 2006-11-01, Seattle Times/Bloomberg http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003335983_webdiebold01.html Diebold Inc. demanded that cable network HBO cancel a documentary that questions the integrity of its voting machines, calling the program inaccurate and unfair . The program, "Hacking Democracy," is scheduled to debut on Nov. 2, five days b efore the 2006 U.S. midterm elections. The film claims Diebold voting machines a ren't tamper-proof and can be manipulated to change voting results. "Hacking Dem ocracy" is "replete with material examples of inaccurate reporting," Diebold Ele ction System President David Byrd said in a letter to HBO President and Chief Ex ecutive Officer Chris Albrecht. "We stand by the film," HBO spokesman Jeff Cusso n said in an interview. "We have no intention of withdrawing it from our schedul e." This is Diebold's second defense of its system since last month. On Sept. 26 , Byrd wrote to Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, saying a sto ry written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., "Will the Next Election Be Hacked?" was "er

ror- riddled" and that readers "deserve a better researched and reported article ." The documentary is based on the work of Bev Harris of Renton, founder of Blac kBoxVoting.org, which monitors election accuracy. Harris says on the HBO Web sit e that she found "secret program files" used by Diebold for its electronic votin g machines. Harris copied them and distributed the programs to others as a way t o show the vulnerability of a system designed to safeguard voting, according to the Web site. Note: For the revealing story in Rolling Stone, click here.

Chicago Voter Database Hacked 2006-10-23, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2601085&page=1 A non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter dat abase for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago. Bob Wilson, an officia l with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project which bills itself as a not-for-pro fit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficienci es tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which con tains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, includ ing their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth. "It was a serious identit y theft problem, but also a problem that could potentially create problems with the election," Wilson said. A nefarious hacker could have changed every voter's status from active to inactive, which would have prevented them from voting, he said. "Or we could've changed the information on what precinct you were in or wh at polling place you were supposed to go to," he said. "There were ways that we could potentially change the entire online data base and disenfranchise voters t hroughout the entire city of Chicago. If we'd wanted to, we could've wiped the e ntire database out."

Voting troubles raise stakes in Cuyahoga County 2006-10-06, Akron Beacon Journal/Associated Press http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/15696778.htm Election results were held up for six days in Cuyahoga County last May, testing the patience of voters and damaging their confidence. Ohio's most populous count y will hold its second election in November using touch-screen voting machines m ade by North Canton-based Diebold Inc. The first attempt at electronic voting du ring the May primary was marred by problems, including poll workers who were not prepared to operate the machines and memory cards that were misplaced or lost. Vote counts were delayed six days when roughly 18,000 improperly printed absente e ballots had to be hand-counted because they couldn't be scanned by Diebold's o ptical scan machines. The county...isn't alone nationally. In Cook County, Ill., results were delayed a week because of mechanical and human failures connected to new voting machines. At a recent meeting, where a kitchen timer ticks off eac h speaker's allotted five minutes during the public comment period, voter Daniel Kozminski of Solon questioned the integrity of Diebold's machines, citing vario us reports. He also scoffed at the board's refusal to post results from individu al precincts on the Web to help verify vote totals. Diebold has defended its mac hines from several disparaging studies, including one by a Princeton University computer science professor which claims the company's machines are vulnerable to hacking. On the net - Black Box Voting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ Note: Memory cards were lost? That would mean hundreds if not thousands of votes cou ld go uncounted. Why is this not getting more press coverage? For more: http://w ww.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Down for the Count 2006-09-08, PBS http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/236/index.html New election machines, as mandated and funded by federal law, may create a new e lection debacle instead of correcting the old one. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which allocated $3.6 billion for all 50 states to update their voting systems. Some industry analysts suggest that the government implemented the new technology too quickly to the detriment of not only security and performance of the new machines, but the integrity of our democratic proces s. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at John Hopkins University...performe d an analysis of voting machines produced by Diebold. But his recommendation tha t the machines not be used in elections fell on deaf ears. NOW traveled to Oakla nd County, Michigan on Primary Day, where election workers encountered more than a few frustrating snags, even when demonstrating the machines for us. In one in stance, it took five attempts for the machine to accept a ballot. We also checke d in on other states. What we found were alarming scenes of computer and human e rror, poor results validation, nonexistent contingency plans, and extreme vulner ability to tampering. In half of 37 primaries held this year, there were technic al problems associated with the new HAVA-mandated technology. These included an extra 100,000 votes recorded but never cast in Texas, which was blamed on a prog ramming error [and] ballot counting malfunctions in Iowa that declared losing ca ndidates as winners.

33,000 Ballots Lost In Shuffle 2004-11-13, Salt Lake Tribune http://www.WantToKnow.info/041113sltribune Voters in Utah County had more than a one in five chance that their ballots did not get counted in the initial, unofficial tally from Election Day. A programmin g glitch in the punch-card counter dropped 33,000 ballots from the totals - all of them straight-party ballots. That was more than 22 percent of the 145,769 bal lots cast in the Republican stronghold. "The card readers were fine; it was just the way it was programmed initially," Utah County elections coordinator Kristen Swensen said Friday. "It was just off by one letter."

Florida Recount, 2006-Style 2006-11-11, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/11/cbsnews_investigates/main2174376.shtml On Monday Florida will begin its first recount for a federal election since the botched 2000 presidential contest. The disputed race...is one place where the ki nd of machines used by 40% of American voters this week may have malfunctioned s ignificantly enough to alter the outcome of a seat in Congress. An E-mail by a k ey election official [indicates] she may have known well before Election Day the machines weren't working properly. Republican Vern Buchanan beat Democrat Chris tine Jennings by 373 votes with 237,842 counted. That tiny margin less than onehalf of one percent triggered an automatic recount under Florida state law. The Jennings campaign believes thousands of votes in the district's most populous co unty went unrecorded. In Sarasota County...nearly one in every six (16%) Electio n Day voters either skipped or missed the hotly contested House race. The Democr at won 53% of the vote in Sarasota County. Had even half the 17,811 "missing" ma chine votes been recorded...she would have overcome her margin of defeat. Only t

wo-and-half percent of absentee ballots ignored the House race. Would six times as many people from the same place do so on Election Day? They didn't anywhere e lse in the district. Dozens of Sarasota County voters called "election protectio n" hotlines. Some did catch their "undervote." But what will happen in Sarasota. ..is less of a recount than a re-tally of the same results, because Florida is a mong the 15 states that do not allow touch screen machines to produce a paper tr ail. Note: With no paper trail, if the voting machines were manipulated, there is no way to prove what really happened. How could our government have approved machin es without a paper trail?

Defective software 'lost' votes 2004-11-04, Miami Herald http://www.wanttoknow.info/041104miamiheraldvotes Thousands of new votes on some constitutional amendment questions were discovere d early Thursday, potentially forcing a recount on the question of a South Flori da vote on slot machines. As absentee ballot counting wound down after midnight in Broward County's elections warehouse, attorneys scrutinizing the close vote o n Amendment Four noticed that vote totals changed in an unexpected way after 13, 000 final ballots were counted. Election officials quickly determined the proble m was caused by the Unity Software that pulls together votes from five machines tabulating absentee ballots. Because no precinct has more than 32,000 voters, th e software caps the total votes at that number. From there, it begins to count b ackward. The glitch was discovered two years ago, and should have been corrected by software manufacturer ES&S of Omaha, Neb., according to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. "I was so angry last night," Lieberman said. She spoke to repr esentatives from ES&S early Thursday morning, and later was having a spirited te lephone conversation with Secretary of State Glenda Hood.

Clinton, Obama are Wall Street darlings 2008-03-21, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-wallstdems21mar21,1,1953... Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who are running for president as econom ic populists, are benefiting handsomely from Wall Street donations, easily surpa ssing Republican John McCain in campaign contributions from the troubled financi al services sector. It is part of a broader fundraising shift toward Democrats, compared to past campaigns when Republicans were the favorites of Wall Street. T he flow of campaign cash is a measure of how open-fisted banks and other financi al institutions have been to politicians of both parties. Concern is rising that "no matter who the Democratic nominee is and who wins in November, Wall Street will have a friend in the White House," said Massie Ritsch of the nonprofit Cent er for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign donations. "The door will be o pen to these big banks." Sen. Clinton of New York is leading the way, bringing i n at least $6.29 million from the securities and investment industry, compared w ith $6.03 million for Sen. Obama of Illinois and $2.59 million for McCain. Those figures include donations from the investment companies' employees and politica l action committees. The candidates' receipts reflect a broader trend that demon strates how money follows power in Washington. It suggests that the nation's mon ey managers are betting heavily that either Clinton or Obama will capture the Wh ite House and that Democrats will retain control of Congress. "What that Wall St reet money means is that few people in Washington, including the leading preside ntial candidates, say a thing when the government moves to bail out Wall Street before it helps homeowners," said David Sirota, a liberal activist and former co

ngressional aide. Note: For more insight into the relationship between big finance and big governm ent, click here.

Poll Workers Struggle With Vote Machines 2006-11-07, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/07/ap/politics/mainD8L8F4A00.shtml Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frus trated poll workers in hundreds of precincts Tuesday, delaying voters in several states and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead. In Indiana's Marion County, electronic optical-scan machines that read paper ballo ts initially weren't working right in more than 100 precincts. Election official s in Delaware County, Ind., and Lebanon County, Pa., extended polling hours beca use of early machine troubles blamed on bad programming. Republicans in Passaic County, N.J., complained a ballot had been pre-marked on some machines with a vo te for the Democratic Senate candidate. In Colorado, Democratic Party officials said they would ask a state judge to keep Denver polling places open an extra tw o hours Tuesday because of long lines. A national Election Protection coalition logged 9,000 calls by noon on [their elections] hotline. In one case, a poll wor ker unintentionally wiped the electronic ballot activators. Some machines...jamm ed when they were turned on. One location suspended voting for 45 minutes becaus e it received the wrong machine. But voting equipment companies said they hadn't seen anything beyond the norm and blamed most of the problems on human error. N early half of all voters were using optical-scan systems. Thirty-eight percent w ere casting votes on touchscreen machines that have been criticized as susceptib le to hackers. Many states established voter registration databases for the firs t time and found problems matching drivers' license and Social Security data wit h voter rolls, sometimes simply because of a middle initial.

Can This Machine Be Trusted? 2006-11-06, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1552054,00.html The U.S.'s new voting systems are only as good as the people who program and use them. In one week, more than 80 million Americans will go to the polls, and a r ecord number of them 90% will either cast their vote on a computer or have it tabula ted that way. There are going to be problems. Some will be machine malfunctions. Some could come from sabotage by poll workers. But in a venture this large, tro uble is most likely to come from just plain human error. Four years after Congre ss passed a law requiring every state to vote by a method more reliable than the punch-card system that paralyzed Florida and the nation in 2000, the 2006 elect ion is shaping up into a contest not just between Democrats and Republicans but also between people who believe in technology and those who fear machines cannot be trusted to count votes in a closely divided democracy. Princeton computer sc ientist Edward Felten and a couple of graduate students this past summer tested the defenses of a voting machine made by Diebold. They were able to quickly infe ct the device with a standard memory-access card in which they had installed a p reprogrammed chip. Other computer scientists have also breached electronic votin g machines. Congressman Vernon Ehlers, a Michigan Republican who has been holdin g hearings this fall, says manufacturers "have produced machines that are very v ulnerable, not very reliable and I suspect fairly easy to hack." Concerns about fraud are heightened by the fact that with some electronic voting machines, ther e is no such thing as a real recount [i.e. paper trail].

Note: For a highly important 12-minute video of the court witness testimony of a computer expert who was personally involved in the manipulation of votes, see h ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEzY2tnwExs. For more on this, click here. For a t hree-minute Fox News clip showing how easy it is to infect a voting machine with a virus which secretly changes the elections results: http://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=8JESZiLpBLE.

The Sale of Electoral Politics 2005-06-00, Project Censored (University website exposing media cover-ups) http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/6.html ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new, often faulty, technology at voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration along with major defense cont ractors in the United States. Some of the most generous contributors to Republic an campaigns are also some of the largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebol d. Most notable of these are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lo ckheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems.

Election Day leftovers 2004-12-27, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-12-27-edit_x.htm A review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard New s Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidentia l race, almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. When the mistakes were pointed out to local officials, some were chagrined; others said they didn 't want to be bothered correcting mistakes.

Countinghouse Blues: Too many votes 2004-11-04, WOWT/NBC (Nebraska) http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. Sarpy County borrowed the electi on equipment from Omaha-based Election Systems & Software. Its employees operate d the machines that are now double-checking the ballots. No one is sure exactly what went wrong. Note: What the article fails to mention is that with no paper trail, there is no t way to know what happened. How is it possible we let our elections use machine s that could not be audited or verified?

Ohio Is Set to Reckon With Outstanding Ballots 2004-11-09, Los Angeles Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/041109latimes Officials in Franklin County which includes state capital Columbus acknowledged that they may have improperly counted votes for Bush because of a touch-screen v oting system malfunction. A precinct in the county reported that a 4,000-vote ma rgin won by Bush appeared to exceed the number of registered voters.

Note: How many cases like this go unnoticed? How can we trust our elections to u nreliable machines?

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked 2004-11-06, Common Dreams (popular news website) http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm In Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed i nto a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies. In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registe red voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. In Dixi e County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% r egistered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush. The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used.

Computer glitch still baffles county clerk 2004-11-04, Michigan City News-Dispatch http://www.WantToKnow.info/041104newsdispatch In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," accor ding to this report, "it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each preci nct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of v oters for the county would be 22,200, although there are more than 79,000 regist ered voters.

Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio 2005-01-05, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsreform We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousa nd of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be s aid the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner tha t conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standa rds. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct an d illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell , the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. First...the following action s by Mr. Blackwell, the Republican Party and election officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens. The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines. Mr. Blackwell's widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper weight may have resulted in thous ands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004 election. Mr. Black well's decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not rec eive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots likel y disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell's order to be illegal. Second, on election day, there were numerous u nexplained anomalies and irregularities involving hundreds of thousands of votes that have yet to be accounted for. There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no v ote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected.

Major Problems At Polls Feared 2006-09-17, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/16/AR20060916008... An overhaul in how states and localities record votes and administer elections s ince the Florida recount battle six years ago has created conditions that could trigger a repeat...of last week's Election Day debacle. In Maryland last Tuesday , a combination of human blunders and technological glitches caused long lines a nd delays in vote-counting. The problems, which followed ones earlier this year in Ohio, Illinois and several other states, have contributed to doubts among som e experts about whether the new systems are reliable. What is clear is that elec tronic machines have their own imponderables. In Montgomery County, the breakdow n came when election officials failed to provide precinct workers with the acces s cards needed to operate electronic voting machines. In Prince George's County, computers...failed to transmit data to the central election office. At least ni ne other states have had trouble this year with new voting technology. In Ohio, results from the May primary election were delayed for nearly a week in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) when thousands of absentee ballots were incorrectly formatte d. Twenty-seven states require electronic voting machines to produce a paper tra il available for auditing during a recount, but an analysis of Cuyahoga County's paper trail...showed that a tenth of the receipts were uncountable. For several years, prominent computer scientists have taken aim at the electronic voting ma chines. In analyses of the software that runs widely used models of the machines ...scientists have shown how they could manipulate the machine to report a vote total that differed from the actual total cast by voters. In the Nov. 7 election , more than 80 percent of voters will use electronic voting machines. Note: For lots more critical information on elections, see http://www.WantToKnow .info/electionsinformation

Activists Sue to Block Electronic Voting 2006-07-13, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2188430 Computerized voting was supposed to be the cure for ballot fiascos such as the 2 000 presidential election, but activist groups say it has only worsened the prob lem. Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machine s are wide open to computer hackers and prone to temperamental fits of technolog y that have assigned votes to the wrong candidate. About 80 percent of American voters will use some form of electronic voting in the November election. New Yor k University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study last month t hat determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. More than 120 security threats were identif ied, including wireless machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member o f the public with some (computer) knowledge" and a PC card. Diebold spokesman Da vid Bear said his company's technology "has proven to be more accurate" than pun ch cards. The company's former CEO, Wally O'Dell, authored a 2003 Republican fun draising letter that promised, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its elect oral votes to the president next year." Bear said there has been no evidence in any election of hackers breaching electronic security measures. However...Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action...said, "We had dozens of affidavits from v oters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent," he said. In the state's biggest county, home to Albuquerqu e, touch-screens machines purchased from Sequoia lost 13,000 votes.

Note: For lots more on elections problems, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electi onsinformation

A New Election Lawsuit in Florida 2006-05-18, Time http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1195517,00.html The League of Women Voters has been signing up voters ever since women won the r ight to vote in 1920. But now, for the first time in the League's storied histor y, a branch of the organization has shut down its operations to protest a new Fl orida law that the League claims will have a chilling effect on voter registrati on -- in a state that already has one of the nation's most notoriously dysfuncti onal election systems. The League's Florida branch acknowledged that it had rece ntly ceased efforts to register voters because of what it calls the law's dracon ian fines against organizations (other than political parties) for submitting fo rms late. The League of Women Voters of Florida joined several other pubic inter est and labor groups, including the Florida AFL-CIO, in challenging the constitu tionality of the law, which went into effect Jan. 1. They are asking the U.S. Di strict Court to immediately suspend the fines -- which the groups say could bank rupt their voter registration budgets. The challenged law imposes civil fines of $250 for each voter registration application submitted more than 10 days after it is collected, $500 for each application submitted after any voter registratio n deadline, and $5,000 for each application [not] submitted. Plaintiffs are stri ctly liable for these fines, even if their inability to meet the statutory deadl ines results from events beyond their control, such as the destruction of applic ations in a hurricane." Note: For more on serious risk of election fraud, see http://www.WantToKnow.info /electionsinformation and see this week's Newsweek article "Will Your Vote Count in 2006?"

Reversing Course on Electronic Voting 2006-05-12, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114739688261250925-q5rh2ocioxu6mgjmS6b... Some advocates of a 2002 law mandating upgrades of the nation's voting machinery now worry the overhaul is making things worse. Proponents of the Help America V ote Act are filing lawsuits to block some state and election officials' efforts to comply with the act. The Help America Vote Act called for upgrading election equipment to guard against another contested outcome such as the 2000 presidenti al vote. At the time, the electronic voting machines were seen as a reliable con trast to the older technology. The lawsuits nine so far coincide with a stampede by state and county officials to spend $3 billion allocated by Congress to help pay for upgrades. To comply with the Help America Vote Act, a number of states and dozens of counties purchased touch-screen voting machines. The 2004 presidential campaign and some early primary elections this year have provided evidence that the machines don't always work smoothly. And several states, after experiencing problems with touch-screen electronic systems, abandoned them to return to opti cally scanned paper ballots, already commonly used for absentee balloting. Typic ally, paper ballots require a voter to use a pencil to fill in a circle. The sys tem is less costly to buy and maintain, and provides a paper record of ballots t hat can be reviewed in close or disputed elections. In Indiana, an ES&S employee alerted local-election officials that another ES&S worker had installed unautho rized software on the machines before the election. That and other disputes led to a multimillion-dollar settlement.

Note: See our new elections cover-up summary at http://www.WantToKnow.info/elect ionsmanipulations

Computer Glitch Changes Election Result 2004-11-12, Los Angeles Times/Associated Press http://www.WantToKnow.info/041112latimes A hand recount of ballots cast using optical scanning technology gave a Democrat enough extra votes to bump a Republican from victory in a county commissioner's race. The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning syst em recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southea stern Indiana's Franklin County. Note: How many cases like this go unnoticed?

3 Days Late, Bush Is Awarded Iowa 2004-11-06, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29190-2004Nov5.html The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. The most se rious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Elect ion officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a co mputer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct out of 638 votes cast. It was not clear whether Ohio experienced any other problems with electronic ballots. About 30 percent of the voters in the state voted electronically. In one North Carolina county, more tha n 4,500 votes were lost because officials misjudged the amount of data that coul d be stored electronically by a computer.

Election fixing charges fly in Utah county 2006-11-07, CNN News/Associated Press http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/blogs/politicalticker/2006/11/election-fixing-cha... Voting appears to be very popular in Daggett County, Utah. Daggett County has re gistered 947 voters for Tuesday's election. According to the most recent Census figures, that's four more than the county's population in 2005. A spokesman for Attorney General Mark Shurtleff says complaints of vote-stuffing in the county a re being investigated. Democrats suspect County Clerk Vickie McKee is letting ou tsiders swell the Daggett County registration rolls to give Republicans an advan tage. The Democrats also say the father of a Republican deputy running for sheri ff has 14 adults registered at his household. McKee hasn't responded to messages from The Associated Press. Note: In such a small county, it is easy to spot the discrepancies. How often do es this happen in much bigger counties and go unnoticed? For more, click here.

Florida Elections Anomalies Go Unreported 2004-11-12, UPI (United Press International News Service) http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20041112-010916-6128r In Baker County, Fla...there are 12,887 registered voters: 69.3 percent are Demo crats, 24.3 percent are Republicans. Yet 2,180 of county residents voted for Ker

ry while 7,738 voted for Bush -- the opposite of what some election critics say was the typically pattern elsewhere in the United States. In Florida's Dixie Cou nty...77.5 percent of the 4,988 registered voters are Democrats, 15 percent are Republicans. On Election Day, Bush carried the county with 4,433 votes vs. 1,959 for Kerry. Nationally, few outlets have pursued the story of what happened in B aker and Dixie.

Multiple Voting Machine Problems 2006-10-31, CNN News http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/31/ldt.01.html [CNN News anchor Lou] DOBBS: Florida the scene of one of this country's worst el ection breakdowns ever. Already a series of e-voting glitches have plagued early voting in the state of Florida. KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Voter activis ts are warning there have been problems with electronic machines in Florida in e arly voting. Some of the most populous counties...have reported serious problems . In seven percent of precincts, the number of votes didn't match the tally of r egistered voters. PAMELA HAENGEL, VOTING INTEGRITY ALLIANCE: In Pinellas County in the primaries we found over 150 calibration errors from precinct workers' log s. That's when a voter goes to touch the screen and it hops to a candidate that they didn't necessarily vote for. PILGRIM: Today, Governor Jeb Bush gave his ful l vote of confidence to the machine. REGINALD MITCHELL, PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY: Despite all the problems...we have nothing in place for a paper trail in Fl orida. SUSAN PYNCHON, FLORIDA ELECTION COALITION: The voting started at 8:00. At five minutes before 10:00, the power failed. PILGRIM: That power outage kept th e electronic voting machines down for hours and hundreds of voters were turned a way. PILGRIM: Another problem, in some places representatives of the voting mach ines company are in charge of running the software that tabulates the votes. DOB BS: This is one troubling, concerning report on top of another. We are beginning to behave like a Banana Republic. PILGRIM: It's unbelievably shocking this clos e to the election we're dealing with this. DOBBS: Unbelievable. It's just -- it' s incredible.

Touch-Screen Voting Fallible, Ehrlich Says 2006-03-06, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR20060305010... Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) has embraced a legislative proposal to a bandon the state's touch-screen voting machines for the coming election, in whic h he is a candidate, and to lease others that provide a paper record to verify r esults. Ehrlich's endorsement is the latest turn in the debate over Maryland's e lectronic voting machines that were used in nearly every polling place in the 20 04 election. The state has committed $90 million to the system, which critics sa y is vulnerable to tampering. Last month, Ehrlich -- who championed the Diebold machines in 2003 -- express[ed] concern about reliability questions raised in Ca lifornia and Florida about those machines. A review of California's voting syste ms found more than a dozen vulnerabilities that security analysts said could be fixed. More than two dozen states now have some requirement for vote verificatio n. Note: These vulnerabilities were discovered after the machines were used widely in previous elections. Before those elections, voting machine manufacturers and elections officials insisted there were no such vulnerabilities. For lots more c over-ups around elections, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Profile of Wyoming's Voters 2004-11-00, Wyoming Secretary of State Website http://soswy.state.wy.us/election/profile.htm According to the official website of the Secretary of State, the state of Wyomin g produced a strange miracle by turning out 106% of registered voters for the 20 04 elections! The percentage of registered voters who turn out to vote has been rising rapidly over the last 10 years. Could this have anything to do with the i ncrease in electronic voting machines and the accompanying increased ease of ele ctions fraud?

Recount Likely in Harris' House District 2006-11-09, Fox News/Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Nov09/0,4670,FloridaRecount,00.html The touch-screen voting machines Katherine Harris championed as secretary of sta te after the 2000 presidential recount may have botched this year's election to replace her in the U.S. House, and it's likely going to mean another Florida rec ount. More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters who marked other races didn't have a vote register in the House race, a rate much higher than the rest of the dist rict. The county's elections supervisor, Kathy Dent, had requested the team afte r one of the candidates reported complaints about voting machines malfunctioning . Earlier, Dent defended her staff and the machines, arguing that the thousands of voters must have either overlooked the race...or simply decided not to vote f or either candidate in a race marked by mudslinging. But she couldn't explain wh y the undervote rate in her county was so much higher than in the four other cou nties in the district. Republican Vern Buchanan declared victory in the race wit h a 373-vote lead over Democrat Christine Jennings less than 0.2 percent. Florida law requires a machine recount if the difference between the top candidates is l ess than half a percent. If the machine tallies find a margin of less than a qua rter percent, a manual recount is conducted. To do a manual recount for touch-sc reens, officials go back over the images of the electronic ballots where the mac hine didn't register a choice. State rules essentially say that if the machine d oesn't show that a voter chose a candidate, the voter is assumed to have meant t o skip the race. It would be tough to prove otherwise.

Election problems due to a software glitch 2004-11-05, Sun Journal http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.... A North Carolina newspaper reports that "a systems software glitch in Craven Cou nty's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that ... s welled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the tota l number cast.

Electronic Voting Machines Could Skew Elections 2006-10-22, ABC News http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/Technology/story?id=2596705 Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland Democratic legislator, was shocked when she open ed her mail [and] discovered three computer discs. The discs contained the secre t source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast throu gh Maryland's new electronic voting machines. An independent report commissioned

by the state of Maryland...shows myriad other security flaws. Computer experts and government officials have voiced serious concerns that if these machines mal function, no paper record will exist for a recount. Even worse is the fear that an election could be hacked. Princeton University researchers using an Accuvote TS a touch screen version of the Diebold machine showed how easy it would be to deploy a virus that would, in seconds, flip the vote of any election. Cyber-secu rity expert Stephen Spoonamore [says] Diebold's "system is utterly unsecured. Th e entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and se cure our nation's voting." There is also the matter of computer glitches. In pri mary elections...machines malfunctioned in Texas, where 100,000 votes were added . In Maryland, screens froze and memory cards went missing. Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican running for reelection, advised residents to vote by absentee ball ot because he had no confidence in the machines. Electronic voting machines were supposed to be the solution to the paper ballot problems from the 2000 presiden tial election. But to many critics, America's voting system has gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Senators Propose Funds for Paper Ballots to Back Up Electronic Ones 2006-09-26, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/washington/26cnd-ballots.html?ex=1316923200... Three Senate Democrats proposed emergency legislation today to reimburse states for printing paper ballots that can be ready at polling places in case of proble ms with electronic voting machines on Nov. 7. The proposal is a response to gras s-roots pressure and growing concern by local and state officials about touch-sc reen machines. If someone asks for a paper ballot they ought to be able to have i t, said Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Dozens of states are using optical-s can and touch-screen machines to comply with federal laws intended to phase out lever and punch-card machines after the hanging-chads confusion of the 2000 pres idential election. Widespread problems were reported with the new technology and among poll workers using the machines this year in primaries in Arkansas, Illin ois, Maryland, Ohio and elsewhere. Local and state officials have expressed conc ern that the new systems might not be ready to handle increased turnouts. Electi on experts fear that the lack of a paper trail with most touch-screen machines w ill leave no way to verify votes in case of fraud or computer failure. Last week , Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland, a Republican, joined the skeptics, say ing he lacked confidence in his state s new $106 million electronic system and sug gesting that state officials offer all voters paper ballots as an alternative. Note: To sign an online petition supporting the move for paper ballots in case o f problems with electronic ones, click here. For another great effort to clean u p our elections, click here. And for lots more reliable, verifiable information on elections cover-ups: http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Election Exit-Polls to Be 'Quarantined' to Prevent Early Result Calls 2006-11-04, Fox News/New York Post http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,227559,00.html Exit-poll data will be under lock and key Election Day to help networks avoid th e Bush-Gore debacle of 2000 - and prevent bloggers from trumpeting results befor e the polls close. The crucial info - which could provide an early hint if a Dem ocratic wave is in fact under way - will be squirreled away in a windowless New York office room dubbed the "Quarantine Room," the Washington Post first reporte d. A media consortium established to track polling results has set up ironclad r ules to prevent leaks to news-hungry Web sites like the Drudge Report. Only two staffers from each of the TV networks and The Associated Press will be authorize

d to tear through the exit-poll data at the vote vault. Those staffers will have to surrender their cellphones, laptop computers and BlackBerrys - it's the pric e of admission. And they won't be able communicate with their offices until 5 p. m. Note: Could this be a means of preventing "problems" with large discrepancies be tween exit polls and the elections results? How do we know that the two staffers selected from each network won't manipulate the results? Several TV networks ha d difficulties in the 2004 election describing sudden changes in the results of the exit polls during the elections. For lots more, see http://www.WantToKnow.in fo/electionscoverups

Glitches cited in early voting 2006-10-28, Miami Herald http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/politics/elections/15869924.htm After a week of early voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machi nes have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors -- and a caution against the careless casting of ballots. Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that a ppeared on the review screen -- the final voting step. In Broward County, for ex ample, they don't know how widespread the machine problems are because there's n o process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central databas e of machine problems. Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African -American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote we nt smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a D emocrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Cri st. A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to get it right, R eed said. Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly.

Ohio Voting Problems Deemed Severe 2006-08-15, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/15/AR20060815012... Problems with elections in Ohio's most populous county are so severe that it's u nlikely they can be completely fixed by November, or even by the 2008 presidenti al election, a report commissioned by Cuyahoga County and released Tuesday says. A nonprofit group hired to review the county's first election with new electron ic voting machines found several problems with the May 2 primary. "The election system in its entirety exhibits shortcomings with extremely serious consequences , especially in the event of a close election," wrote Steven Hertzberg, director of the study by the San Francisco-based Election Science Institute. The report, part of a $341,000 review ordered by county commissioners, suggests that the co unty revamp poll worker training, develop a plan to ensure all electronic votes are counted in the case of a manual count and consider adding machines to avoid long lines that might scare voters away. Mark Radke, director of marketing for D iebold subsidiary Diebold Election Systems...blamed inadequately trained poll wo rkers, saying the totals didn't always add up because some changed memory cards without also changing the paper receipt rolls. Note: Interesting that the electronic voting machine makers are blaming the poll workers for vote totals that didn't add up.. Interesting also to note that no m ention is made of the serious problems in this county during the 2004 presidenti

al election. For more reliable information: http://www.WantToKnow.info/elections information

Broward machines count backward 2004-11-05, Palm Beach Post http://www.WantToKnow.info/041105palmbeachpost Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long da y of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers ha d gone down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."

U.S. Investigates Voting Machines' Venezuela Ties 2006-10-29, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/washington/29ballot.html?ex=1319774400&en=e... The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading Amer ican manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chvez. The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smart matic Corporation...and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif .. Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology be fore it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country s election s machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chvez as preside nt in August 2004. With a windfall of some $120 million from its first three con tracts with Venezuela, Smartmatic then bought the much larger and more establish ed Sequoia Voting Systems, which now has voting equipment installed in 17 states and the District of Columbia. The concern over Smartmatic s purchase of Sequoia c omes amid rising unease about the security of touch-screen voting machines and o ther electronic elections systems. The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and the Chvez government have been well known to United Stat es foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which Mr. C hvez...won by an official margin of nearly 20 percent. But after a municipal prim ary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia voting machines were blamed for a seri es of delays and irregularities. Smartmatic s new president, Jack A. Blaine, ackno wledged in a public hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venez uela to help with the vote.

Report Warns of Potential Voting Problems in 10 States 2006-10-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/24/AR20061024011... Two weeks before the midterm elections, at least 10 states...remain ripe for vot ing problems, according to a study released yesterday by a nonpartisan clearingh ouse that tracks electoral reforms across the United States. The report by Elect ionline.org says those states, and possibly others, could encounter trouble on E lection Day because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine tech nology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rule s -- and close races. The report cautions that the Nov. 7 elections, which will determine which political party controls the House and Senate, promise "to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections -- a divided b ody politic...and the possibility -- if not certainty -- of problems at polls na tionwide." The report of the clearinghouse, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trus

ts, is the latest of several warnings in recent weeks and months by organization s and scholars who say that electoral problems persist in spite of six years of efforts by the federal government and states to correct voting flaws. The decisi ons by many states to convert to electronic voting machines have yielded new con cerns about whether they are secure and accurate, about paper records as backup proof and...about whether the electronic or paper record Secret Societies News A rticles Excerpts of Key Secret Societies News Articles in Major Media Below are many highly revealing excerpts of important secret societies articles from the mainstream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major medi a websites. If any link should fail to function, click here. These secret societ ies news articles are listed by order of importance. For the same articles by da te posted to this list, click here. For the list by date of news article click h ere. By choosing to educate ourselves on these important issues and to spread th e word, we can and will build a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. Inside the secretive Bilderberg Group 2005-09-29, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4290944.stm How much influence do private networks of the rich and powerful have on governme nt policies and international relations? One group, the Bilderberg, has often at tracted speculation that it forms a shadowy global government. Every year since 1954 [they have brought] together about 120 leading business people and politici ans. At this year's meeting in Germany, the audience included the heads of the W orld Bank and European Central Bank, Chairmen or Chief Executives from Nokia, BP , Unilever, DaimlerChrysler and Pepsi ... editors from five major newspapers, me mbers of parliament, ministers, European commissioners ... and the queen of the Netherlands. The chairman ... is 73-year-old Viscount Etienne Davignon. In an ex tremely rare interview, he played down the importance of Bilderberg. "I don't th ink (we are) a global ruling class because I don't think a global ruling class e xists." Will Hutton ... who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1997, says people t ake part in these networks in order to influence the way the world works, to cre ate what he calls "the international common sense". And that "common sense" is o ne which supports the interests of Bilderberg's main participants. For Bilderber g's critics the fact that there is almost no publicity about the annual meetings is proof that they are up to no good. Bilderberg meetings often feature future political leaders shortly before they become household names. Bill Clinton went in 1991 while still governor of Arkansas, Tony Blair was there two years later w hile still an opposition MP. All the recent presidents of the European Commissio n attended Bilderberg meetings before they were appointed. Informal and private networks like Bilderberg have helped to oil the wheels of global politics and gl obalisation for the past half a century. Note: Why is this meeting of top world leaders kept so secret? Why is there no w ebsite? Why, until a few years ago, was there virtually no reporting on this inf luential group in the major media? (Note that the alternative media has had some good articles and a Google search can be highly informative) For lots more reli able information on powerful, secret groups like this, click here.

Skull And Bones 2004-06-13, CBS News

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/02/60minutes/main576332.shtml As opposite as George Bush and John Kerry may seem to be, they do share a common secret - one they've shared for decades. The secret: details of their membershi p in Skull and Bones, the elite Yale University society whose members include so me of the most powerful men of the 20th century. Bonesmen, as they're called, ar e forbidden to reveal what goes on in their inner sanctum. Bones has included pr esidents, cabinet officers, spies, Supreme Court justices, [and] captains of ind ustry. They'd responded to questions with utter silence until an enterprising Ya le graduate, Alexandra Robbins, managed to penetrate the wall of silence in her book, Secrets of the Tomb. "I spoke with about 100 members of Skull and Bones. T hey were members who were tired of the secrecy, says Robbins. But probably twice t hat number hung up on me, harassed me, or threatened me. Skull and Bones, with al l its ritual and macabre relics, was founded in 1832. Since then, it has chosen or "tapped" only 15 senior students a year who become ... lifetime members of th e ultimate old boys' club. A lot of Bonesmen have gone on to positions of great power. President Bush ... tapped five fellow Bonesmen to join his administration . Bonesmen have [included] William Howard Taft, the 27th President; Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine; and W. Averell Harriman, the diplomat and confidan t of U.S. presidents. Mr. Bush, like his father and grandfather before him, has refused to talk openly about Skull and Bones. But as a Bonesman, he was required to reveal his innermost secrets to his fellow Bones initiates. They're supposed to recount their entire sexual histories in ... a dimly-lit cozy room.

Connections And Then Some 2003-03-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A25... The Carlyle Group [is] an investment house famous as one of the most well-connec ted companies anywhere. Former president George H.W. Bush is a Carlyle adviser. Former British prime minister John Major heads its European arm. Former secretar y of state James Baker is senior counselor, former White House budget chief Rich ard Darman is a partner, former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt is senior adviser -the list goes on. Those associations have brought Carlyle enormous success. The Washington-based merchant bank controls nearly $14 billion in investments, makin g it the largest private equity manager in the world. It buys and sells whole co mpanies the way some firms trade shares of stock. But the connections also have cost Carlyle. It has developed a reputation as the CIA of the business world -omnipresent, powerful, a little sinister. Media outlets from the Village Voice t o BusinessWeek have depicted Carlyle as manipulating the levers of government fr om shadowy back rooms. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) even suggested tha t Carlyle's and Bush's ties to the Middle East made them somehow complicitous in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It didn't help that as the World Trade Center burn ed on Sept. 11, 2001, the news interrupted a Carlyle business conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here attended by a brother of Osama bin Laden. Former preside nt Bush, a fellow investor, had been with him at the conference the previous day . Bush['s] primary function is to give speeches for Carlyle that attract wealthy foreigners in places where the former president is especially revered, such as Asia. The company has rewarded its faithful with a 36 percent average annual rat e of return. Note: If the above link fails, click here. To understand the amazingly powerful role of this low-profile, yet extremely wealthy and influential group, click her e to view free a 48-minute documentary shown on Dutch national TV which clearly depicts the depths of corruption and deceit at the highest levels of government. You will be thankful that you watched this highly educational film.

Write More About Skull And Bones 2004-10-27, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/10/27/notes102704.DTL I get this a lot: Hey Mark ... why don't you quit toeing the typical blas journal ism line ... and instead write about the real truths? Like for example how both Kerry and Bush are members of mega-yuppie Yale secret society/boys' club Skull & Bones. And why, furthermore, don't you talk about the real truths of 9/11? Have n't you seen that amazing [9/11] video on that Web site? And what about Building 7? Why did that 47-story tower adjacent to the WTC collapse when it had no fire and no plane crash? Why isn't the media reporting any of this? Does this make y ou laugh? Scoff? It is, after all, incredibly easy to dismiss conspiracy theorie s. But you know what? It's not that easy. These people ... have a point. They ar e indeed onto something quite large and ominous and it very much has to do with the media toeing the line of "safe" information. There is indeed ample evidence that the U.S. government, long before 9/11, had already discussed the quite plau sible possibilities and strategic benefits of unleashing a "Pearl Harbor"-type e vent on America. There are plenty of strangely unanswered questions about 9/11, about the stunning inaction of NORAD and Bush's stupefying nonreaction upon hear ing of the attack, not to mention his administration's incredible attempts to ha lt any independent 9/11 investigations. Of course, no one in any major media wil l touch this stuff. It is professional suicide to dare suggest an alternate trut h to the one supplied by the Pentagon and regurgitated by the media. And the tru th is, we don't really want such unstable questions answered. We simply cannot t olerate to have our world, our leaders, our foundations so questioned. We prefer stasis to growth, security to true knowledge.

'Bonesmen' for president 2004-03-10, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4500423 Pres. Bush and John Kerry were both members of the secret organization. Skull and Bones dates to 1832. It was in fact a reaction to a secret society, the Masons. Founder William Huntington Russell thought of his little enclave as sort of anti -Masons and as a home for the wealthy and the powerful ... who would do anything for another Bonesman. Each year, 15 young undergraduate seniors are tapped for membership. Members of Skull and Bones gather on High Street in the Yale campus at the tomb. New members, the neophytes, are expected to do things like lie in cof fins, wrestle in mud, kiss a skull, and confess their sexual histories in front of the group to bond themselves together. Once you re in, you re in: Skull and Bones i s for life. There are a lot of [famous] Bonesmen ... Henry Luce, who created TIME magazine; Harold Stanley, founder of Morgan Stanley; William F. Buckley; Averell Harriman, long-time governor of New York. And then there are the presidents: Wi lliam Howard Taft, whose father, Alphonso, had helped found the group; George He rbert Walker Bush, whose father, Prescott, was a Bonesman and a senator; the cur rent President Bush. [And there's] John Kerry, Bonesman class of 66. His wife Ter esa Kerry s first husband, John Heinz ... was Skull and Bones. Both Bush and Kerry r efused to answer Meet the Press host Tim Russert when asked about the organization . Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tombs" [said] "The sole purpose of Skull and Bones is to get members into positions of power and then to have those members hire other members to prominent positions, which is something that Pres ident Bush has done." Note: Many have claimed that secret societies have not had much influence on wor ld politics. This article raises many serious questions about this. For more rel iable information on this and other secret societies, click here.

Skull and Bones members include some of America's most powerful 2009-11-12, CNN http://www.edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0911/12/ec.01.html What really happens behind the padlocked doors of this windowless building, [the home] of Skull and Bones, Yale's oldest secret society? Its members include som e of America's most powerful and privileged elite all sworn to secrecy. [CAMPBEL L] BROWN: Alexandra Robbins broke through the wall of silence to write Secrets o f the Tomb based on clandestine interviews with dozens of bonesmen. Only 15 [Yal e students] get picked each year. The society includes at least three U.S. presi dents, Supreme Court justices, and too many senators and CEOs to name. In 2004, Bush versus Kerry was the first all-bonesmen presidential election. ALEXANDRA RO BBINS: Skull and Bones' only purpose is to get its members into positions of pro minence around the world so that they can elevate other members to similar posit ions. One of the first activities they participate in is called connubial bliss, where ... each member must spend an evening standing in front of the other 14 b onesmen and recount his or her entire sexual and romantic history. BROWN: Accord ing to one ... story, Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather, was part of a group that broke into the Oklahoma burial place of the Apache chief Geronimo an d made off with his skull. Geronimo's grave was disturbed back in 1918, there ar e photos of skulls inside the "Skull and Bones" tomb. They have their own privat e retreat. Deer Island off the coast of New York. And a world of ready investors and political contacts in the highest echelons of American society. What has ke pt the secret society alive for all these years? Good old fashioned networking f or the super elite. Note: To watch the CNN video clip on this Yale secret society, click here. For l ots more powerful information on Skull and Bones and other secret societies repo rted in major media articles, click here.

Political ties to a secretive religious group 2008-04-03, MSNBC News http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/03/857959.aspx For more than 50 years, the National Prayer Breakfast has been a Washington inst itution. Every president has attended the breakfast since Eisenhower. Besides th e presidents ... the one constant presence at the National Prayer Breakfast has been Douglas Coe. Although he s not an ordained minister, the 79-year-old Coe is t he most important religious leader you've never seen or heard. Scores of senator s in both parties ... go to small weekly Senate prayer groups that Coe attends, [including] senators John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Observers wh o have investigated Coe s group, called The Fellowship Foundation, [describe] a se cretive organization. Coe repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus Christ . It s a commitment Coe compares to the blind devotion that Adolph Hitler demanded . "Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler. Think of the immense power these three men had. Coe also quoted Jesus and said: One of the things [Jesus] said is 'If any man com es to me and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, his own life, he can't be a disciple. " Writer Jeff Sharlet ... lived among Coe's followers six ye ars ago, and came out troubled by their secrecy and rhetoric. We were being taugh t the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin and Mao. Hitler s genocide wasn t really a n issue for them. It was the strength that he emulated, said Sharlet, who ... has now written about The Fellowship, also known to insiders as The Family, in [a] book called The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power . Note: Watch an incredible four-minute NBC video clip at the above link showing C

oe praising a communist Red Guard member for cutting the head off his mother. Fo r more on Coe's powerful links to Congress and corruption, see the MSNBC article available here.

Davos: Wealth, power and a sprinkling of stardust 2008-01-22, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/davos-wealth... For a few days an obscene proportion of the world's wealth and clout will be con centrated in one normally obscure Alpine town, [Davos, Switzerland]. Some 27 hea ds of state or government; 113 cabinet ministers; hundreds of chief executives, bankers, sovereign wealth fund managers, economists and the media: about 2,500 p articipants in all. So who's coming and what will they be chattering about? The official co-chairs of the Forum are mostly well-known names: Tony Blair, of JP M organ; James Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan; KV Kamath, MD and CEO of Indi a's ICICI Bank; Henry Kissinger, chairman of Kissinger Associates; Indra K Noovi , chairman and CEO of PepsiCo; David J O'Reilly, chairman and CEO of Chevron Cor poration; and Wang Jianzhou, CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation. The prominent role allotted to Mr Wang, while not entirely novel, is nonetheless si gnificant. In 2008, for the first time, China will contribute more to the growth of the world economy than the United States. Double-digit growth in China shoul d still just be possible this year, and it alone seems to stand between the worl d and a full-blown recession. Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) from China and elsew here have already been busy re-capitalising the West's stricken banks. The recyc ling of trillions of dollars of trade surpluses and petro dollars means that suc h deals will become more prevalent. Davos will provide one more opportunity for distressed American investment bankers to bump into munificent Singaporean or Qa tari or Chinese SWF managers. Note: Yet these meetings are kept largely secret. Why isn't the media giving lot s more coverage to this gathering of some of the most powerful people on the pla net? For other reliable, verifiable reports on secret meetings of the power elit e of the world, click here.

C Street House at Congress Run by Secretive 'The Family' 2009-07-13, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31890176 We ... have more tonight on the secretive religious group, the Family, that appe ars to be the connective tissue of the Senator Ensign sex scandal and the Govern or Mark Sanford of South Carolina sex scandal. Jeff Sharlet, who infiltrated and who wrote on this little understood organization, will be back with us tonight. If you consult this building s financial paper trail, you will find that it s actua lly considered to be a church. That designation makes C Street a convenient taxfree haven for the secretive organization that runs it, an organization known as the Family. It also makes for some awkward tax and income questions for the at least five, probably seven members of Congress who live at the house, in exchang e for what appears to be substantially below market rent. Jeff Sharlet, who secr etly infiltrated the family to write a book [The Family] about them, the C Stree t house is a former convent. It s used as a sort of subsidized, really upscale dor m for members of Congress who are associated with this powerful, poorly understo od religious group. The Family and the house at C Street have ended up reluctant ly in the headlines now because of the two major politicians sex scandals that ar e embroiling the Republican Party this summer and that have taken two of their r eported 2012 presidential hopefuls out of political contention. Embattled Nevada Senator John Ensign lives at the C Street house. The husband of Senator Ensign s

mistress says that prominent members of the Family ... as well as other members of Congress who live at C Street were both aware of Ensign s secret affair and were involved in his efforts to pay off the mistress and her family. South Carolina G overnor Mark Sanford mentioned C Street by name in his long public statement of regret about his affair with a woman in Argentina. Note: To watch this amazing segment at YouTube, click here. And for more on how political sex scandals may be much more commonplace than you might think, click here.

Shadowy Bilderberg group meet in Greece and here s their address 2009-05-14, Times of London (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6283373.ece For the next two days ... the Bilderberg illuminati hold their private conclave in [a] five-star Greek hotel. Every year since 1954 a club of about 130 senior o r up-and-coming politicians gather at the fireside of a secluded hotel with top bankers and a sprinkling of royalty to discuss burning issues. No lists of parti cipants are disclosed, no press conferences are held; spill the beans and you re o ut of the magic circle. This year the club is going to talk about depression. Acc ording to the pre-meeting booklet sent out to attendees, Bilderberg is looking a t two options, says the Bilderberg-watcher Daniel Estulin either a prolonged, agon ising depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and pove rty or an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainabl e economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency. Since Bilderbe rg does not officially exist, it cannot deny anything and is therefore manna fro m heaven for the conspiracy theorist. The meetings were started in the Netherlan ds, in the Hotel de Bilderberg, near Arnhem, by the Polish exile Joseph Retinger . He was worried about growing anti-Americanism and the advance of Communism in Western Europe. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands agreed to sponsor the idea. T he head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Bedell Smith, threw his weigh t behind it and so did the White House. The Bilderberg consensus is that nationa l problems are best solved by an internationally oriented elite ... and that the boundaries are fluid between the monied and the political classes. And so there has been a natural bias towards inviting conservatives and market liberals. The only socialists invited are those who understand money . Note: Although the list of attendees at Bilderberg conferences are closely guard ed secrets, researchers with key inside contacts have managed during the last fe w years to compile accurate lists. For this year's list of attendees at the conf erence in Greece, click here. For other key media articles revealing some of the astonishing secrets of the world's power elite, click here.

What Power Looks Like 2008-04-14, Newsweek magazine http://www.newsweek.com/id/130637 [In] speaking [with New York Federal Reserve Bank president Timothy] Geithner wh ile I was doing the research for my recently published book Superclass, he sketc hed in fascinating detail how the world's power elite rallies when the markets q uake. Recalling an earlier crisis in global securities markets that he helped to manage, Geithner said the Fed brought together the leaders of the world's 14 ma jor financial firms, from five countries, representing 95 percent of all the act ivity in global markets. The Swiss were there, the Germans were there, the Briti sh were there. Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein "jokingly called t hem 'the 14 families,' like in 'The Godfather'," says Geithner. "And we said to

them, 'You guys have got to fix this problem. Tell us how you are going to fix i t and we will work out some basic regime.' You ... need a critical mass of the r ight players. It is a much more concentrated world." Geithner's description of t he financial elite in crisis mode came many months before the recent meltdown of Bear Stearns, yet foreshadowed [it] in an uncanny way. The people ... described by Geithner, plus a few thousand more like them, not only in business and finan ce, but also politics, the arts, the nonprofit world and other realms, are part of a new global elite that has emerged over the past several decades. I call it the "superclass." They have vastly more power than any other group on the planet . Each of the members is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the liv es of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercise s this power, and often amplifies it through the development of relationships wi th other superclass members. Note: For many revealing stories from reliable sources on secret societies of th e world's most powerful people, click here.

1934: The Plot Against America 2007-07-28, Harper's magazine http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651 In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall Street financiers, to to pple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. An alert FDR shut it down but stopped short of retaliatory measures against the plo tters. A key element of the plot involved [Smedley Butler,] a retired prominent general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 men from unemployed vet erans and who blew the whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. T he plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers report ed on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an invest igation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the Nati onal Archives, where they have only recently been made available. The Congressio nal committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no crim inal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was ... deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relat ions throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Ge rmany a year earlier under Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government. The rol e of the most powerful political dynastic family in the nation s history in this w hole affair is shocking. Note: You can listen to the BBC Radio broadcast on Bush/Nazi ties by clicking he re. And to watch a History Channel documentary on the coup plot, click here. U.S . Marine Corps General Smedley Butler was the author of "War is a Racket," summa rized here.

Carlyle Changes Its Stripes 2007-02-12, BusinessWeek http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_07/b4021001.htm In the two decades since private equity firms first stormed the business world, they've been called a lot of things, from raiders to barbarians. But only [the C arlyle Group] has been tagged in the popular imagination with warmongering, trea son, and acting as cold-eyed architects of government conspiracies. Carlyle, fou

nded 20 years ago in the shadow of Washington's power centers, long went about i ts business far from the public eye. Its ranks were larded with the politically connected, including former Presidents, Cabinet members, even former British Pri me Minister John Major. It used its partners' collective relationships to build a lucrative business buying, transforming, and selling companies -- particularly defense companies that did business with governments. Carlyle's radical makeove r has turned the firm into the biggest fund-raising juggernaut the private equit y world has ever seen. By the end of this year it expects to have an unprecedent ed $85 billion in investor commitments under management, up sixfold from 2001 an d more than any other firm. [Founder David] Rubenstein sees the total swelling t o as much as $300 billion by 2012. Make no mistake--Carlyle is already massive. It owns nearly 200 companies that generate a combined $68 billion in revenue and employ 200,000 people. Last year it bought a new company approximately once eve ry three days and sold one almost once a week -- all while dabbling in increasin gly esoteric investments. Since its founding in 1987 it has generated annualized after-fee returns of 26%, compared with the industry average in the mid-teens. Note: With former presidents including George H.W. Bush and many other top world politicians helping to sway huge military contracts, could this be considered a form of insider trading? Those 26% yearly returns are placing our tax monies in the hands of individuals and companies that are already among the wealthiest in the world. For lots more on manipulation of your tax money, click here. And for a Washington Post article showing Osama Bin Laden's brother met with George H.W . Bush at a Carlyle meeting one day before 9/11, click here.

Who pulls the strings? 2001-03-10, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/10/extract1 So this is how it works. A tiny, shoe-string central office in Holland decides e ach year which country will host the next meeting. Each country has two steering committee members. They call up Bilderberg-friendly global corporations, such a s Xerox or Heinz or Fiat or Barclays or Nokia, which donate the hundreds of thou sands of pounds needed. They do not accept unsolicited donations from non-Bilder berg corporations. Nobody can buy their way into a Bilderberg meeting, although many corporations have tried. Then they decide who to invite - who seems to be a "Bilderberg person". The notion of a Bilderberg person hasn't changed since the earliest days, back in 1954. The guests are expressly asked not to give intervi ews to journalists. There are two morning sessions and two afternoon sessions. W hile furiously denying that they secretly ruled the world, my Bilderberg intervi ewees did admit to me that international affairs had, from time to time, been in fluenced by these sessions. This is how Denis Healey described a Bilderberg pers on to me: "To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, bu t not wholly unfair. Bilderberg is a way of bringing together politicians, indus trialists, financiers and journalists. Politics should involve people who aren't politicians." Note: For lots more on the highly secretive Bilderberg meeting from two later BB C News article, click here. For many other revealing articles from major media r eports on secret societies and secret meetings of the most rich and powerful peo ple in our world, click here.

Our man at Bilderberg: Let's salt the slug in 2010 2009-05-19, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/may/19/bilderberg-skelton-greece

Ten years ago, when Jon Ronson dared to report on Bilderberg, he found himself " chased by mysterious men in dark glasses through Portugal". He was scared for hi s safety. "When I phoned the British embassy and asked them to explain to the po werful secret society that had set their goons on me that I was essentially a hu morous journalist out of my depth, I wasn't being funny. I was being genuinely d esperate," he wrote. I know exactly how he feels. Only out of sheer desperation did I try to arrest one of the goons following me and then follow my flimsy lead s up the Greek police ladder, finally catching one of the goons wet-handed in th e lavatory of the department of government security. And only then did I know th e extent of Bilderberg's paranoia: they had set the state police on me. So who i s the paranoid one? Me, hiding in stairwells, watching the pavement behind me in shop windows, staying in the open for safety? Or Bilderberg, with its two F-16s , circling helicopters, machine guns, navy commandos and policy of repeatedly de taining and harassing a handful of journalists? Who's the nutter? Me or Baron Ma ndelson? Me or Paul Volker, the head of Obama's economic advisory board? Me or t he president of Coca-Cola? Publicity is pure salt to the giant slug of Bilderber g. If the mainstream press refuses to give proper coverage to this massive annua l event, then interested citizens will have to: a people's media. Find the bigge st lens you can and join us for Bilderberg 2010. No idea where it's going to be, but there's usually a few days' notice. Email me at bilderberg2010@yahoo.co.uk and we'll start prepping. Meanwhile, petition newspapers to send a correspondent . Note: For the entire revealing series by Guardian reporter Charlie Skelton, who was sent to report on the ultra-secretive Bilderberg meeting, click here. And fo r more on the machinations of the Bilderberg Group and other secret societies wh ich wield powerful, unseen influence on global politics, click here and here.

Getting closer to Uncle Sam 2006-09-20, Toronto Star (One of Canada's top newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... Public kept in dark as business leads talks about North American integration. Aw ay from the spotlight, from Sept. 12 to 14, in Banff Springs, Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day and Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor met with U.S. and Mex ican government officials and business leaders to discuss North American integra tion at the second North American Forum. The guest list included such prominent figures as U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mexican Secretary of Public S ecurity Eduardo Medina Mora and Canadian Forces chief General Rick Hillier. The event was chaired by former U.S. secretary of state George Schultz, former Alber ta premier, Peter Lougheed and former Mexican finance minister Pedro Aspe. Organ izers did not alert the media about the event. Our government ... refuses to rel ease any information about the content of the discussions or the actors involved . The event was organized by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. The media have paid little attention to this far-reaching agreement, so Canadians are una ware that a dozen working groups are currently "harmonizing" Canadian and U.S. r egulations on everything from food to drugs to the environment and even more con tentious issues like foreign policy. This process ... is about priming North Ame rica for better business by weakening the impacts of such perceived obstacles as environmental standards and labour rights. This is why the public has been kept in the dark while the business elite has played a leading role in designing the blueprint for this more integrated North America. Note: If the above link fails, click here. Why has the U.S. media not covered th is key topic? For a second article discussing this secret meeting on a top Canad ian TV website, click here. To learn about other secret meetings of the power el ite: click here

Bilderberg: The ultimate conspiracy theory 2004-06-03, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3773019.stm The Bilderberg group, an elite coterie of Western thinkers and power-brokers, ha s been accused of fixing the fate of the world behind closed doors. As the organ isation marks its 50th anniversary, rumours are more rife than ever. On Thursday the Bilderberg group marks its 50th anniversary with the start of its yearly me eting. For four days some of the West's chief political movers, business leaders , bankers, industrialists and strategic thinkers will hunker down in a five-star hotel in northern Italy to talk about global issues. What sets Bilderberg apart from other high-powered get-togethers, such as the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), is its mystique. Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted. A former journalist, Mr Gosling runs a campaign against the group from his home in Bristol, UK." One of the first plac es I heard about the determination of US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks th at came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting," says Mr Gosling.

The people who control the world 2003-01-30, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/01/30/ronson.them The Middle Ages had the Knights Templar. The 18th century had the Masons and the Illuminati. Our modern age has golf-playing businessmen. [Jon] Ronson, a 35-yea r-old British writer, humorist and documentarian, kept reading and hearing about the "tiny elite [that] rules the world from inside a secret room" -- so he deci ded to go in search of it. He met with extremists of many stripes: Ku Klux Klans men with a PR bent, Muslim rabble-rousers ... and others convinced that a New Wo rld Order meant the end of the world. He sought out the industrialists of groups such as the Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove. He wrote about his experiences in "Them." Ronson's extremists seem rather normal. Some are very much aware of how their views marginalize them. The people of "Them" are people who are all to o human -- even if they would deny others their humanity. As the saying goes, ju st because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not out to get you. Ronson doe sn't deny that many of the extremists in "Them" are, well, extreme. Many have pu t together half-baked theories that blame the troubles of the world on wealthy b usinessmen, usually a code word for Jews. Ronson, who's Jewish himself, sometime s found it awkward to listen to their views. Conspiracy theorists tend to be fea rful, less educated, less tied in to the power structure. Meanwhile, the leaders of corporations and countries do meet as part of conferences sponsored by organ izations such as the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group. While resea rching a Bilderberg Group meeting, [Ronson] was chased through parts of Portugal by shadowy security men. He found out just how thin the membrane between "us" a nd "them" may be. Note: Them is by far the most balanced, entertaining book you are likely to find on conspiracy theorists. It pokes a lot of fun both at the conspiracy theorists and at the powerful secret groups which he finds to be deluded almost as much a s the conspiracy theorists themselves.

The Global Ruling Class: Billion-dollar Babies 2008-04-24, The Economist magazine http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11081878

Who rules the world? The rise of nation states produced national ruling classes. It would be odd if the current integration of the world economy did not produce new global elites business people and financiers who run global companies and g lobal politicians who steer supra-national organisations such as the European Un ion (EU) and the International Monetary Fund. David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that these elites con stitute nothing less than a new global superclass . They have all the clubby charac teristics of the old national ruling classes, but with the vital difference that they operate on the global stage, far from mere national electorates. They atte nd the same universities. They are groomed in a handful of world-spanning instit utions such as Goldman Sachs. They belong to the same clubs the Council on Forei gn Relations in New York is a particular favourite and sit on each other's board s of directors. Many of them shuttle between the public and private sectors. The y meet at global events such as the World Economic Forum at Davos and the Trilat eral Commission or for the crme de la crme the Bilderberg meetings or the Bohemian Grove seminars that take place every July in California. Mr Rothkopf is anythin g but a crank, and he is right when he says that, these days, the most influenti al people around the world are also the most global people. He is also admirably ambivalent about his subject. He worries about surging inequality the richest 1 % of humans own 40% of the planet's wealth and about the rumbling backlash again st so much unaccountable power. Note: For reliable, verifiable information the secret societies of which the glo bal elite are a part, click here. Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the Wor ld They Are Making by David Rothkopf is available here.

Jamie Johnson On ''The One Percent'' 2008-02-20, Forbes magazine http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/02/20/wealth-jamie-johnson-biz-cx_lr_0219... For most of the moneyed class, an inquiry into their wealth elicits silence and cringes. Not so with 28-year-old Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson ph armaceutical fortune. For the Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, wealth is th e focus of his life's work. In Johnson's first documentary, Born Rich, he expose d how 10 children from families like the Trumps and the Newhouses spent their ti me and their fortunes. Now he turns the camera on his own family in The One Percen t. Johnson's documentary, which [premiered] on Cinemax Feb. 21, offers a rarefie d view of the scandalously secretive world of "the one percent," a small segment of the U.S. population that owns roughly 40% of the country's wealth. Through a series of interviews with high-profile figures like Bill Gates Sr., U.S. Secret ary of Labor Robert Reich and economist Milton Friedman, Johnson explores the di sparity of wealth in America. Forbes.com: You got your own father, as well as ot her phenomenally wealthy people, to talk to you. How did you get these folks to open up about such an intensely private topic? Johnson: It wasn't easy. A lot of patience there was a lot of waiting around. Forbes: I imagine you'll have critics who will call this "rich boy's guilt." What do you say to them? Johnson: That b oth liberal and conservative economists agree that there is a growing wealth gap , and that it's a problem. It's important to get wealthy people to think about t his and think about solving this problem. They are the most influential people i n our society and therefore, they should be working on treating this and coming up with a solution. Note: The films of Jamie Johnson give very rare views into the lives of the uppe r crust that are incredibly revealing. For another article at CNN on his excelle nt documentary Born Rich, click here. To see revealing video clips, click here.

Sex Crimes Cover-Up By Vatican? 2003-08-06, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/06/eveningnews/main566978.shtml For decades, priests in this country abused children in parish after parish whil e their superiors covered it all up. Now it turns out the orders for this cover up were written in Rome at the highest levels of the Vatican. [A] confidential V atican document, obtained by CBS News, lays out a church policy that calls for a bsolute secrecy when it comes to sexual abuse by priests anyone who speaks out c ould be thrown out of the church. The policy was written in 1962 by Cardinal Alf redo Ottaviani. The document, once "stored in the secret archives" of the Vatica n, focuses on crimes initiated as part of the confessional relationship. Bishops are instructed to pursue these cases "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone (including the alleged victim) ... is to observe the strictest secret, which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Hol y Office ... under the penalty of excommunication." Larry Drivon, a lawyer who r epresents alleged victims, said, This document is significant because it's a blue print for deception. It's an instruction manual on how to deceive and how to pro tect pedophiles ... and exactly how to avoid the truth coming out." Richard Sipe , a former priest who has written about sex abuse and secrecy in the church, sai d the document sends a chilling message. You keep it secret at all costs, Sipe sai d. It's happened in every diocese in this country. According to church records, th e document was a bedrock of Catholic sex abuse policy until America's bishops me t last summer and drafted new policies to address the crisis in the church.

Weekend break for the global elite 2001-05-25, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/may/25/globalisation.madeleinebunting Global power-brokers have a penchant for siting their get-togethers in inaccessi ble places. Since Seattle 1999, Washington and Prague 2000, the calendar of glob al get-togethers has attracted lively anti-globalisation demonstrations. Davos t his year had unusually tight security to try and keep protestors well away, lead ing to allegations of unnecessary heavy-handedness by the Swiss police. This wee kend, it is the turn of Bilderberg, perhaps the most secretive (or as the organi sers would prefer to claim, discrete) club for the global elite. It holds its we ekend on Stenungsund, an island off the Swedish west coast. The group was create d by Denis (now Lord) Healey, Joseph Retinger, David Rockefeller and Prince Bern hard of the Netherlands (a former SS officer) - the group aimed to [bring] toget her financiers, industrialists, politicians and opinion formers; the press have never been allowed access. There is a growing perception that globalisation is a process which is being managed for the benefit of a small proportion of the pla net's residents and at terrible cost to many more. There is a perception of ille gitimacy about unaccountable corporate power and governments elected on low turn out: sooner or later global power-brokers will have to recognise this crisis of legitimacy, and engage with protestors rather than run away from them. Note: For lots more reliable news on powerful secret societies, click here. And for another balanced article on the powerful Bilderberg Group, click here.

Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation 2009-05-24, Times of London http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece Some of America s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wea

lth could be used to slow the growth of the world s population. Described as the G ood Club by one insider, it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of Amer ica s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Win frey. They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochem ist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires aide s were told they were at security briefings . Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. We only learnt about it afte rwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but th is is different maybe because they don t want to be seen as a global cabal, he said . Some details were emerging this weekend, however. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority. [A] guest said there was nothing as crude as a vote but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in whi ch population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat. This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers, said the guest. They need to be inde pendent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming. Why all the secrecy? They wanted to speak rich to rich without worry ing anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alter native world government, he said. Note: This very secret private meeting of billionaires planning to "solve" the w orld's "overpopulation" problem occurred just a few days before the latest Bilde rberg meeting. For an ABC article on the same, click here. Is this a more positi ve twist on the Bilderberg Group of the worlds' power elite, or more of the same ?

Protesters challenge the powerful at exclusive California retreat 2006-07-22, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/07/22/state/n163157D01.DTL Hundreds of protesters gathered outside an exclusive California retreat for gove rnment and business leaders Saturday to challenge the right of a "ruling elite" to make policy decisions without public scrutiny. The annual Bohemian Grove retr eat has attracted powerful men such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, former Secret ary of State Henry Kissinger, philanthropist David Rockefeller, former West Germ an Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It's also b ecome a magnet for all types of activists who increasingly use the event to netw ork and organize their campaigns. The men who attend the Bohemian Grove retreat spend two weeks performing plays, eating gourmet camp grub, listening to speaker s and power-bonding at the 2,700-acre compound near the Russian River in Sonoma County. The retreat is organized by the exclusive San Francisco-based Bohemian C lub. The club and event are shrouded in mystery, much like Yale University's mos t-famous secret society, Skull and Bones, whose members include President George W. Bush and his presidential rival Sen. John Kerry. Note: For an informative five-minute ABC news clip on the power elite gathering Bohemian Grove reported in 1981, click here. And for reliable information on the most secretive meeting of the world's elite reported by the major media, see ou r Bilderberg Group compilation available here.

Bush Bones connected to Kerry Bones 2004-04-13, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/kerry/articles/2004/04/13/bush_...

Skull and Bones is a shadowy, elite secret society that selects 15 new members e ach year from the senior class at Yale. It is known both for its celebrity membe rship - past "taps'' include William F. Buckley Jr., President William Howard Ta ft, and Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine - and for its bizarre rituals. The rites - said to include a "blood''-drinking initiation and oodles of frank s ex talk by the once all-male undergrads (Bones started admitting women in 1992) - are much discussed but little known. This is, after all, a secret society. In her 2002 book, "Secrets of the Tomb,'' Alexandra Robbins speculated that the 200 4 presidential election might pit Bonesman George W. Bush (Yale, 1968) against B onesman John F. Kerry (Yale, 1966.) Good call! This organization [was] once deem ed to be so secretive that members had to leave the room if the society's name w as ever mentioned in public. Both Bush's father and his grandfather, Senator Pre scott Bush, were Bonesmen. [Bonesman John Kerry's] second wife's first husband, the late senator John Heinz, was Bones, as was his father. GWB: "My senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society, so secret I can't say anything more" (from his 1999 campaign biography). JFK [John Kerry]: "There's not much I can s ay, Tim, because it's a secret" (to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press"). Note: If secret societies produce this many influential leaders, shouldn't the p ublic have a right to know more about them? For lots more, click here.

Bohemian Club tries new tactic to log grove 2008-03-28, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/28/BAC0VQV83.DTL The Bohemian Club's ambitious plan to log its famed Bohemian Grove on the Russia n River [in northern California] hit a snag last year when opponents argued that the ritzy club's redwood holdings were too large to qualify for a streamlined p ermit from the state. In a new move, the all-male San Francisco club has offered to donate 160 acres as a conservation easement to the Rocky Mountain Elk Founda tion of Missoula, Mont., effectively whittling down the size and making it eligi ble for a state exemption to log in perpetuity without extensive environmental r eview. Opponents of the plan, including the Sierra Club and some former Bohemian Club members, say the club's action is nothing more than a thinly veiled end-ru n around state law that offers the special permit to small, noncommercial holdin gs. At the heart of the controversy is the 2,700-acre redwood grove, where the c lub's secret membership, including U.S. presidents, kings of industry and celebr ities, have gathered for spring and summer retreats for more than a century. Note: For a treasure trove of revealing reports on secret societies from reliabl e, verifiable sources, click here.

Taxpayers foot bill for Ed Balls 'junket' 2007-08-14, Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/12/nballs112.xml [U.K.] Cabinet minister Ed Balls spent thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money a ttending a private meeting of one of the world's most powerful and secretive org anisations. Mr Balls, widely regarded as Gordon Brown's closest adviser, travell ed to Canada for the four-day conference of the shadowy Bilderberg Group of busi nessmen and politicians when he was Economic Secretary to the Treasury. The cost of the trip, in air fares, hotel bills and expenses is estimated at up to 5,000. The group's rules insist that "all participants attend in a private and not an official capacity". However, a Treasury spokesman said Mr Balls had attended "in his capacity as a minister" and confirmed that all expenses had been met from p ublic funds. Also at the event with Mr Balls ... were the former American Secret

ary of State Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, the American banker and phil anthropist. Participants at Bilderberg, named after the Dutch hotel where its fi rst conference took place, have been described as the "shadow world government". It was founded ... in 1954. Critics claim that it wields enormous influence in shaping world events. The group meets annually amid strict security. It has no p ermanent secretariat. Instead, an anonymous steering committee of two people fro m the 18 countries taking part sends out invitations to about 120 of Europe's an d North America's leading politicians, economists, industrialists, and royals. J ournalists are not permitted to cover the event, no minutes are published, and a ll those invited must promise not to reveal any of its agenda. Note: To see more revealing articles on the powerful, secret Bilderberg Group, c lick here.

Knights Templar win heresy reprieve after 700 years 2007-10-11, Washington Post/Reuters http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/11/AR20071011021... The Knights Templar, the medieval Christian military order accused of heresy and sexual misconduct, will soon be partly rehabilitated when the Vatican publishes trial documents it had closely guarded for 700 years. A reproduction of the min utes of trials against the Templars, "Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templa rs" is a massive work ... with a 5,900 euros ($8,333) price tag. "This is a mile stone because it is the first time that these documents are being released by th e Vatican," said Professor Barbara Frale, a medievalist at the Vatican's Secret Archives. The parchment, also known as the Chinon Chart, was "misplaced" in the Vatican archives until 2001. The Templars ... were founded in 1119. They amassed enormous wealth and helped finance wars of some European monarchs. Legends of t heir hidden treasures, secret rituals and power have figured over the years in f ilms and bestsellers such as "The Da Vinci Code." The Knights have also been por trayed as guardians of the legendary Holy Grail. The Templars went into decline after Muslims re-conquered the Holy Land at the end of the 13th century and were accused of heresy by King Philip IV of France, their foremost persecutor. Templ ars were burned at the stake for heresy by King Philip's agents after they made confessions that most historians believe were given under duress. Philip was hea vily indebted to the Templars, who had helped him finance his wars, and getting rid of them was a convenient way of cancelling his debts, some historians say. R osi Fontana, who has helped the Vatican coordinate the project, said: "The most incredible thing is that 700 years have passed and people are still fascinated b y all of this." Note: The mass arrest of the Knights Templar occurred on Friday the 13th of 1307 , which some believe was the origin of Friday the 13th being a day of bad luck. This group is suspected of harboring many secrets. The order still exists today (do a Google search) and may still play a role in political manipulations. For h ighly revealing media articles on other powerful secret societies, click here.

Kanata hotel hosts high-level power group 2006-06-09, CBC News (Canada's equivalent of PBS) http://www.cbc.ca/ottawa/story/ot-bilderberg20060609.html A serene setting in Ottawa's west-end Kanata suburb has been transformed into a four-day festival of black suits, black limousines, burly security guards and a bevy of conspiracy theories. The security outside the Brookstreet Hotel is much tighter than it is on Parliament Hill. Inside, the CBC was told, all guests were asked to check out at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday. The hotel appears to be hosting th

e annual meeting of one of the world's most secretive and powerful societies: th e Bilderberg group. But, of course, no one will admit it. People who follow the Bilderberg group say it persuaded Europe to adopt a common currency, and, among other things, persuaded Bill Clinton to support the North American Free Trade Ag reement. "David Rockefeller is going to be here. Henry Kissinger is going to be here. Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank, is going to be here" says Dani el Estulin, who has written a book about the Bilderberg group. Jim Tucker, who h as followed the Bilderberg group for the last 30 years, told CBC News he is trou bled by all the secrecy. "Officials of the United States government [should not] have a private meeting with private citizens about public policy," Tucker says.

Ontario to build reactors 2006-06-12, Toronto Star (one of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... The provincial government will announce tomorrow that Ontario is embracing more nuclear power plants. Premier Dalton McGuinty has privately spoken of his govern ment's plans to confidants for days, insiders say. In an off-the-record speech o n Saturday night in Ottawa to the secretive Bilderberg group, McGuinty discussed the pros and cons of more nuclear plants. The premier privately admitted the pu blic will officially learn of the plans tomorrow. Insiders told the Star he was unequivocal in private conversations about his support for the controversial ele ctricity source. McGuinty's staff deliberately omitted any mention of his speech Saturday to the Bilderberg session...from his public itinerary. The group, name d for the Dutch hotel the organization first met at in 1954, holds its sessions behind closed doors amid tight security. Because participants in Bilderberg sess ions are sworn to secrecy under threat of ex-communication from the group, polit icians tend to lower their guard and speak candidly. It was the kind of power-br oker audience the premier, who sat with Pataki, Reisman and Queen Beatrix, would want to reach when delivering a message about investing in Ontario and massive investment will be required to pay for $40 billion in nuclear plants. Note:If the above link fails, click here. If the Bilderbergers truly support the interests of all of us, why the need for so much secrecy? Why is there no websi te? Why until just a few years ago was there virtually no reporting on the influ ential Bilderberg Group at all in the major media?

Secretive group's departure as low-key as arrival 2006-06-12, Ottawa Citizen (leading newspaper of Canada's capital city) http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=12fd4eaa-1b87-48da-9fe... Four days after they arrived quietly at a Kanata hotel, the world's rich and pow erful left just as mysteriously, in limos and SUVs with blacked-out windows. The Bilderberg Group, a secretive organization of politicians and business leaders from around the world, gave no public statements. With private security guards a nd metal barriers keeping outsiders on the street, the Bilderbergers met private ly and then whisked themselves away in ones and twos, mostly to the airport. Wha t they talked about at the Brookstreet Hotel is still a secret. The group meets annually, and is usually rumoured to discuss international politics and business , from Middle East crises to oil prices. They emerged singly yesterday -- Bilder berg president Etienne Davignon of Belgium, American David Rockefeller, Italian economist Mario Monti, European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes from the N etherlands, and, watchers thought, Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi. Protesters on the sidewalk have their own version of the agenda: world domination, a merger o f Canada with the United States and Mexico, hiding the cure for cancer, suppress ion of cars that get 200 miles per gallon of fuel, [and] an invasion of Iran.

Note: This article lists the names and descriptions of 21 participants of this B ilderberg meeting. If you read through them, you will see that they are clearly among the most powerful and wealthy people in the world.

Secretive society's big names include Kissinger, Rockefeller, a queen 2006-06-09, Toronto Star (one of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... Among prominent attendees at this year's conference of the Bilderberg group, a s ecretive society that includes some of the world's most powerful people: Jacques Aigrain, CEO of Swiss Re. Ahmad Chalabi, former deputy prime minister of Iraq a nd long-time opponent of Saddam Hussein. George A. David, chairman of Coca-Cola. Paul Desmarais, CEO of Power Corporation. Richard Holbrooke, key American negot iator for 1995 Bosnian peace accords. Vernon Jordan, friend and onetime presiden tial aide to Bill Clinton. Henry Kissinger, foreign-policy guru and secretary of state under Richard Nixon. Ed Kronenburg, director of NATO's private office. Be rnardino Leon Gross, Spain's foreign minister. Ronald S. Lloyd, chairman of Cred it Suisse First Boston. Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands. Gordon Nixon, Royal Ba nk of Canada president, CEO. George Pataki, governor of New York state. Richard Perle, senior foreign policy adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush. David Roc kefeller, retired banker, heir to oil fortune. Dennis Ross, former Clinton Midea st negotiator. Giulio Tremonti, VP of Italy's chamber of deputies. James Wolfens ohn, U.S. Mideast envoy, former head of the World Bank. Robert Zoellick, deputy U.S. secretary of state. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For those who know about the pre-war manipulations involving weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the participation o f Ahmed Chalabi speaks volumes. And for a revealing three-minute video clip on C NN about this highly secretive group, click here.

VIPs' arrivals marked by a discreet 'B' 2006-06-09, Ottawa Citizen (leading newspaper of Canada's capital city) (Front p age) http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=6ac7a723-323b-497c-970... Greeted at the airport by limousine drivers holding single-letter "B" signs, glo bal luminaries such as Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of t he Netherlands began quietly slipping into Ottawa yesterday for the annual gathe ring of the ultra-secretive Bilderberg Group. The group's discreet approach was evident as attendees arrived yesterday at the Ottawa Airport. Outside the airpor t, a phalanx of limousines lined up to ferry guests to the Brookstreet. Approach ed by a Citizen reporter upon his arrival, former U.S. defence policy adviser Ri chard Perle shot down criticism about the secrecy of the group's meetings. "It's a private organization," he said. He denied the charge, advanced by Bilderberg critics, that the organization crafts public policy behind closed doors. "It dis cusses public policy," he stressed. Mr. Perle also dismissed suggestions that th e group's heavy representation from the oil industry gives it influence over ene rgy prices. Also seen arriving yesterday were Jorma Ollila, chairman of Royal Du tch Shell [and] World Bank president James Wolfenson. According to an unsigned p ress release sent by fax yesterday, presumably by Bilderberg organizers, attende es will also include New York Governor George Pataki, deputy prime minister of I raq Ahmad Chalabi, the heads of Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, [and] the Royal Bank o f Canada. "The meeting is private to encourage frank and open discussion," said the release. "There will be no press conference."

Note: To see photos of this article on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen: http://www.prisonplanet.com/Pictures/Jun06/110606bbg_media_ottawa_citizen.jpg http://www.prisonplanet.com/Pictures/Jun06/110606bbg_tucker_paper_cover.jpg For a video clip of reporters trying trying to get close, click here and go to t he "Video" section on the right.

VIPs set to arrive for Bilderberg meeting 2006-06-08, Ottawa Citizen (leading newspaper of Canada's capital city) http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=11df53f7-6caf-4385-a6d... Members of the Bilderberg Group will descend on the upscale Brookstreet Hotel fo r the three-day meeting, several police sources confirmed yesterday. When asked about police plans for the event, a police spokeswoman referred the Citizen to A lan Bell of Globe Risk Holdings. Reached by phone, Mr. Bell -- who is listed as president of Globe Risk Holdings in Toronto and a former SAS paratrooper command o -- said he hadn't heard of the Bilderberg Group and denied that his firm has b een hired to guard this week's conference. "Never heard of that conference. What is it?" said Mr. Bell before politely cutting the conservation short. But accor ding to the company's website, Globe Risk Holdings specializes in "strategic pla nning and counter-measures," recruits its consultants primarily from elite milit ary counter-terrorist and special forces units, and has "undertaken consultancy and project work worldwide in areas of high risk". "The consultants at Globe Ris k Holdings have proven backgrounds in military, special forces, law enforcement and government organizations with real life expertise in the areas of internatio nal security...close protection, sabotage prevention, and military/law enforceme nt," reads the company website. Note: Denial and lying seem to be standard protocol for those involved with the Bilderberg group. What does that say about what is being discussed in their secr et meetings?

Secretive power brokers meeting coming to Ottawa? 2006-05-24, Ottawa Citizen (leading newspaper of Canada's capital city) http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=ff614eb8-02cc-41a3-a42d... The meetings of a secretive global think-tank would bring 100 of the world's mos t powerful and influential figures to Ottawa next month [for] deliberations on s uch weighty issues as the direction of global oil markets and potential military action against Iran. Reports circulating on the Internet say this year's Bilder berg Conference will be held June 8-11 at the Brookstreet Hotel - a rumour the h otel would not confirm. Patrice Basille, general manager of the Brookstreet Hote l, said no event associated with the Bilderberg group has been formally booked. "'What is the Bilderberg?" he asked. "This is the first I've heard about it." Jo urnalists aren't allowed to attend the sessions, and staff at the host hotels ar e told not to confirm or deny any event is scheduled. But, if a gathering in Ott awa is anything like past Bilderbergs, invitees will be drawn from the pages of International Who's Who, with a emphasis on political and corporate leadership a nd strong representation of the oil and banking industries. The Bilderberg has b een accused of being everything from a Zionist cabal building a single global go vernment to a secret star-chamber that seeks to fix the price of oil and preside ntial elections. Even some rational critics suspect the Bilderberg's meetings se t the economic and political agenda for much of the industrialized world without any public oversight or accountability. They denounce the Bilderberg as elitist and overly secretive, calling it an anti-democratic gathering of "the high prie sts of globalization."

Dr. Ecstasy 2005-01-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/magazine/30ECSTASY.html?ex=1264914000&en=0b... By [Alexander] Shulgin's own count, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compou nds, among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, ''empathogens,'' [and] co nvulsants. And in 1976, Shulgin fished an obscure chemical called MDMA out of th e depths of the chemical literature and introduced it to the wider world, where it came to be known as Ecstasy. Most of the scientific community considers Shulg in at best a curiosity and at worst a menace. Now, however, near the end of his career, his faith in the potential of psychedelics has at least a chance at vind ication. A little more than a month ago, the [FDA] approved a Harvard Medical Sc hool study looking at whether MDMA can alleviate the fear and anxiety of termina l cancer patients. And next month will mark a year since [the start of a] study of Ecstasy-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. Shulgin's knack for befriending the right people hasn't hurt. A week after I visited him, he was headed to Sonoma County for the annual ''summer encampment'' of the Bohemian Cl ub, an exclusive, secretive San Francisco-based men's club that has counted ever y Republican president since Herbert Hoover among its members. For a long time, though, Shulgin's most helpful relationship was with the D.E.A. itself. The head of the D.E.A.'s Western Laboratory, Bob Sager, was one of his closest friends. In his office, Shulgin has several plaques awarded to him by the agency for his service. Shulgin has been credited with jump-starting today's therapeutic resear ch. Note: The sentence about the Bohemian Club is a very rare revelation in the majo r media on the influence of this secret society. For lots more reliable, verifia ble information on secret societies, click here.

Bilderberg-bound filmmaker held at airport 2006-06-08, Ottawa Citizen (leading newspaper of Canada's capital city) http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=f67cbe75-4eed-4daf-877... Canadian authorities detained an American activist filmmaker at the Ottawa airpo rt late Wednesday night, confiscating his passport, camera equipment and most of his belongings. Citizenship and Immigration Canada agents stopped Alex Jones, w hose films include Martial Law 9/11: The Rise of the Police State, and questione d him for nearly four hours before letting him go with only one change of clothe s and telling him to return Thursday morning. It s really chilling, like a police s tate, said Mr. Jones of his detention. Mr. Jones and his crew...travelled to Cana da to film a documentary about the Bilderberg group, a secretive group of former politicians and business leaders who are meeting in Ottawa this week. A Citizen ship and Immigration representative said that her department was unable to comme nt on Mr. Jones detention.

The 30 greatest conspiracy theories 2008-11-19, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3483477/The-30-greate... From the assassination of John F Kennedy to the death of Diana, Princess of Wale s. From Roswell, New Mexico, to Nasa's moon landings. From the bloodline of Chri st to the death of Elvis Presley. From the Moscow appartment bombings to the Ind ian Ocean tsunami. From Pearl Harbour to Peak Oil, the Philadelphia experiment a nd Pan Am flight 103. Every major event of the last 2,000 years has prompted a c

onspiracy theory and here we examine those with the biggest followings and the m ost longevity. 1. September 11, 2001. Thanks to the power of the web and live br oadcasts on television, the ... theories surrounding the events of 9/11 ... have surpassed those of Roswell and JFK in traction. The [alternative] theories cont inue to grow in strength. At the milder end of the spectrum are the theorists wh o believe that the US government had prior warning of the attacks but did not do enough to stop them. Others believe that the Bush administration deliberately t urned a blind eye to those warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch wars i n the Middle East to usher in another century of American hegemony. A large grou p of people - collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement - cite evidence that a n airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not ha ve been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. Many w itnesses - including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time - claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves. Note: For a concise two-page summary of many unanswered questions about what rea lly happened on 9/11, click here.

They Rule the World 2008-05-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR20080522033... David Rothkopf's Superclass [can be viewed] as a map of how the world really wor ks. Rothkopf, a former managing director of Kissinger Associates and an internat ional trade official in the Clinton Administration, has identified roughly 6,000 individuals who have "the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide" ... with a growing allegiance ... to each other rather than to any particular nation. Rothkopf [cites] the Pareto pri nciple of distribution, or the "80/20 rule," whereby 20 percent of the causes of anything are responsible for 80 percent of the consequences. That means 20 perc ent of the money-makers make 80 percent of the money and 20 percent of the polit icians make 80 percent of the important decisions. That 20 percent belongs to th e superclass. Superclass ... is as much about who is not part of the superclass as who is. As I read Rothkopf's chronicles of elite gatherings -- Davos, Bilderb erg, the Bohemian Grove (all male), Fathers and Sons (all male) -- I was repeate dly struck by the near absence of women. When Rothkopf summarizes "how to become a member of the superclass," his first rule is "be born a man." Only 6 percent of the superclass is female. Superclass is written in part as a consciousness-ra ising exercise for members of the superclass themselves. Rothkopf worries that " the world they are making" is deeply unequal and ultimately unstable. But it's l ikely to take more than exhortation. In the words of former Navy Secretary John Lehman, "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." Why would the supercla ss want to give it up? Note: The website www.theyrule.net allows visitors to trace the connections betw een individuals who serve on the boards of top corporations, universities, think thanks, foundations and other elite institutions. For lots more on secret socie ties, click here.

Nationwide Child Abuse Ring In Free Discovery Channel Documentary 2006-05-01, Discovery Channel/WantToKnow.info http://www.WantToKnow.info/060501conspiracyofsilence "Conspiracy of Silence" is a powerful, disturbing documentary revealing a nation wide child abuse and pedophilia ring that leads to the highest levels of governm

ent. Featuring intrepid investigator John DeCamp, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and 16-year Nebraska state senator, "Conspiracy of Silence" reveals how rogue elements at all levels of government have been involved in systematic chi ld abuse and pedophilia to feed the base desires of key politicians. Based on De Camp's riveting book, The Franklin Cover-up, "Conspiracy of Silence" begins with the shut-down of Nebraska's Franklin Community Federal Credit Union after a rai d by federal agencies in November 1988 revealed that $40 million was missing. Wh en the Nebraska legislature launched a probe into the affair, what initially loo ked like a financial swindle soon exploded into a startling tale of drugs, money laundering, and a nationwide child abuse ring. Nineteen months later, the legis lative committee's chief investigator died suddenly and violently, like more tha n a dozen other people linked to the Franklin case.

Defending the party of Davos 2006-03-13, CNN http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/10/news/international/pluggedin_2_fortune/ I went to hear Jeff Faux talk recently about his new book "The Global Class War, " an account of how the corporate elite has been selling out American workers. I don't entirely buy his argument. Faux is founder of the Economic Policy Institu te, a Washington think tank...which I think is best described as "gloomy." There is no economic news that the EPI can't find a way to spin negatively. That said , the work the group does is always meticulous and usually thought-provoking. Th e same can be said of Faux's book. His main point is that there now exists a glo bal "party of Davos" (the Swiss ski resort where politicians, businesspeople, jo urnalists, and scholars gather every January for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum), whose members have more in common with each other than with th e peoples of their home countries. I can testify that there is truth to this. I am a member of the junior auxiliary of the party of Davos. Faux's point is not t hat people like me are sinister and evil -- there's no Trilateral Commission/Cou ncil on Foreign Relations/Bilderberg Group conspiracy nonsense in his book -- ju st that the interests of corporate America aren't necessarily the same as Americ a's interests. My chief solace is that Faux doesn't seem to have an obviously be tter alternative. Or maybe that shouldn't be a solace -- because Faux is right t hat a global economic system designed entirely by corporations, without any demo cratic input to speak of, isn't what anybody really wants. Note: This is a heartening article from one who rubs elbows with the power elite . If you don't know about the secret gatherings of the global elite, the BBC and other articles available here are essential reading.

Secretive, powerful Bilderberg group meets near Ottawa 2006-06-08, Globe and Mail (Canada's leading newspaper) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060608.wbilder0608/BNSto... Ottawa. On the outskirts of the nation's capital, a tony high-rise hotel beside a golf course is hosting the annual meeting for one of the world's most secretiv e and powerful societies. They're called the Bilderberg group. Those who follow the Bilderberg group say it got Europe to adopt a common currency, got Bill Clin ton elected after he agreed to support NAFTA, and is spending this week deciding what to do about high oil prices and that pesky fundamentalist president of Ira n. The Bilderberg group is a half-century-old organization comprising about 130 of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people. They don't have a website. B ilderberg says the privacy of its meetings helps encourage freewheeling discussi on. An unsigned press release...confirmed this year's meeting would deal with en ergy issues, Iran, the Middle East, terrorism, immigration, Russia, European-Ame

rican relations and Asia. The 2006 group includes David Rockefeller, Henry Kissi nger, Queen Beatrix of Holland, New York Gov. George Pataki, the heads of Coca-C ola, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Canada, cabinet ministers from Spain, Gree ce and a number of media moguls. The group also includes a pair of prominent fig ures involved in planning the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- Richard Perle and Ahmad C halabi. Fellow White House power-players Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, now head of the World Bank, have spoken to the group in the past. The prime ministe rs of Britain and Canada -- Tony Blair and Stephen Harper -- have addressed the group before. Note: For two excellent articles from BBC describing this incredibly powerful, h ighly secretive group of elites: http://www.WantToKnow.info/051115secretsocietiesbilderberg

Odd gift ideas for your stalkings 2006-12-17, Toronto Star (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you ... somet hing fun for Christmas. Conspiracy Culture, at 1696 Queen St. W., offers unique "niche" shopping. "Anything conspiratorial is what's hot. People are just kind o f trying to get in touch with alternative opinions and theories," said co-owner Patrick Whyte. The hot ticket for Yuletide is Terrorstorm on DVD, ($17.99) "a hi story of government-sponsored terrorism" that focuses on Britain and the U.S., W hyte said, adding the film's director, Alex Jones, was stopped by Canada Customs when he came to investigate a Bilderberg meeting last June. The Bilderberg Grou p is a shadowy elite organization (and even the non-paranoid concede this much) that holds annual invitation-only meetings of business and political leaders. Pr ime Minister Stephen Harper was purportedly photographed leaving one event a few years ago and likely attended last June's Ottawa meeting, although nobody is sa ying anything which makes Bilderberg so conspiracy-worthy. Note: For lots more on the highly secretive, elite Bilderberg Group, click here. To watch the Terrorstorm video free online at Google Video, click here. The fir st hour of Terrorstorm is absolutely awesome! It's one of the best compilations we've seen. Sadly, after the first hour it goes fairly rapidly downhill, but don 't miss the first hour of it!

Health News Articles Excerpts of Key Health News Articles in Major Media Below are many highly revealing excerpts of important health articles from the m ainstream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major media websites . If any link should fail to function, click here. These health news articles ar e listed by order of importance. For the same articles by date posted to this li st, click here. For the list by date of news article click here. By choosing to educate ourselves on these important issues and to spread the word, we can and w ill build a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. A New Way to Fight Cancer? 2007-01-23, Newsweek http://www.newsweek.com/id/70212 There are no magic bullets in the fight against cancer: that's the first thing e very responsible scientist mentions when discussing a possible new treatment, no matter how promising. If there were a magic bullet, though, it might be somethi ng like dichloroacetate, or DCA, a drug that kills cancer cells by exploiting a fundamental weakness found in a wide range of solid tumors. So far, though, it k ills them just in test tubes and in rats infected with human cancer cells; it ha s never been tested against cancer in living human beings. DCA ... is an existin g drug whose side effects are well-studied and relatively tolerable. Also, it's a small molecule that might be able to cross the blood-brain barrier to reach ot herwise intractable brain tumors. Within days after a technical paper on DCA app eared in the journal Cancer Cell last week, the lead author, Dr. Evangelos Miche lakis of the University of Alberta, was deluged with calls and e-mails from pros pective patients to whom he can say only, Hang in there. DCA is a remarkably simple molecule. It acts in the body to promote the activity of the mitochondria. Resea rchers have assumed that the mitochondria in cancer cells were irreparably damag ed. But Michelakis wondered if that was really true. With his colleagues he used DCA to turn back on the mitochondria in cancer cells which promptly died. One of the great things about DCA is that it's a simple compound, in the public domain, and could be produced for pennies a dose. But that's also a problem, because bi g drug companies are unlikely to spend a billion dollars or so on large-scale cl inical trials for a compound they can't patent. (Anyone interested in helping ca n click here.) Note: Thank you Newsweek for publishing this important article. Why haven't any other U.S. media reported this major story? Why aren't many millions of dollars being poured into research of this amazing potential cancer cure? Notice how eve n Newsweek acknowledges that the drug companies are not interested in finding a cure for cancer if they can't make a profit from it. Some suspect that the pharm aceutical industry has even suppressed cancer cures found in the past. For one a mazing example of this, click here.

The Lowdown on Sweet? 2006-02-12, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/business/yourmoney/12sweet.html?ex=12974004...

When Dr. Morando Soffritti...saw the results of his team's seven-year study on a spartame, he knew he was about to be injected into a bitter controversy over thi s sweetener. Aspartame is sold under the brand names Nutra-Sweet and Equal and i s found in such popular products as Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Snapple and Suga r Free Kool-Aid. Hundreds of millions of people consume it worldwide. Dr. Soffri tti...oversees 180 scientists and researchers in 30 countries. Dr. Soffritti's s tudy concluded...that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers. The study ...involved 1,900 laboratory r ats and cost $1 million. Soffritti said he was inspired to look at aspartame bec ause of what he calls "inadequacies" in the cancer studies done by Searle in the 1970's. Others have also challenged Searle's studies. Years before the F.D.A. a pproved aspartame, the agency had serious concerns about the accuracy and credib ility of Searle's aspartame studies. From 1977 to 1985 -- during much of the app roval process -- Searle was headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is now the secreta ry of defense. Searle was acquired by Monsanto in 1985. Dr. Soffritti said...mor e research and open debate were needed on whether aspartame was a carcinogen. "I t is very important to have scientists who are independent and not funded by ind ustry looking at this." Note: If you want to understand the influence of big money on your health, this article is well worth reading. Our Health Information Center Health Information Center has lots more. And for an incredibly eye-opening documentary on this that could very well improve the health of you and your friends, click here.

A dangerous dose 2004-09-05, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/09/05/a_dangerous_dose Marcia Angell [is] a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School [and one of th e] former editors of The New England Journal of Medicine. Her new book, "The Tru th About the Drug Companies," is a sober, clear-eyed attack on the excesses of d rug company power. How does the drug industry deceive us? It plies attending phy sicians with expense-paid junkets to St. Croix and Key West, Fla., where they ar e given honoraria and consulting fees to listen to promotional presentations. It promotes new or little-known diseases such as "social anxiety disorder" and "pr emenstrual dysphoric disorder" as a way of selling the drugs that treat them. It sets up phony front groups disguised as "patient advocacy organizations." It hi res ghostwriters to produce misleading scientific articles and then pays academi c physicians to sign on as authors. It sends paid lackeys and shills out onto th e academic lecture circuit to ''educate" doctors about a drug's unapproved uses. It hires multinational PR firms to trumpet dubious studies as scientific breakt hroughs while burying the studies that are likely to harm sales. It buys up the results of publicly funded research. It maintains a political chokehold on the A merican public by donating more money to political campaigns than any other indu stry in the country. For many years the drug industry has reaped the highest pro fit margins of any industry in America. In 2002, the top 10 American drug compan ies had profit margins of 17 percent; Pfizer, the largest, had profit margins of 26 percent. So staggeringly profitable is the drug industry that in 2002 the co mbined profits for the top 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 were greater tha n those of all the other 490 companies combined. Note: For an excellent 10-page summary of this revealing book written by the est eemed author, click here. For additional reliable information on the health cove r-up, click here.

Researcher sets saltwater on fire 2007-11-14, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/11/14/saltwater.fire/ Last winter, inventor John Kanzius was already attempting one seemingly impossib le feat -- building a machine to cure cancer with radio waves -- when his device inadvertently succeeded in another: He made saltwater catch fire. TV footage of his bizarre discovery has been burning up the blogosphere ever since, drawing c rackpots and Ph.D.s alike into a raging debate. Can water burn? And if so, what good can come of it? Some people gush over the invention's potential for desalin ization or cheap energy. Briny seawater, after all, sloshes over most of the pla net's surface, and harnessing its heat energy could power all sorts of things. S keptics say Kanzius's radio generator is sucking up far more energy than it's cr eating, making it a carnival trick at best. For now, Kanzius is tuning out the h ubbub. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2002, he began building his radio-wave blaster the next year, soon after a relapse. If he could seed a person's cancerous cell s with nanoscopic metal particles and blast them with radio waves, perhaps he co uld kill off the cancer while sparing healthy tissue. The saltwater phenomenon h appened by accident when an assistant was bombarding a saline-filled test tube w ith radio waves and bumped the tube, causing a small flash. Curious, Kanzius str uck a match. "The water lit like a propane flame," he recalls. "People said, 'It 's a crock. Look for hidden electrodes in the water,' " says Penn State Universi ty materials scientist Rustum Roy, who visited [Kanzius] in his lab in August af ter seeing the feat on Google Video. A demo made Roy a believer. "This is discov ery science in the best tradition," he says. Meanwhile, researchers at MD Anders on Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have made progress using Kanzius's technology to fight cancer in animals. They publi shed their findings last month in the journal Cancer. Note: For other compelling articles on this fascinating invention, see recent ar ticles in the Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and especially Medical News Today.

Donald Rumsfeld makes $5m killing on bird flu drug 2006-03-12, Independent (one of the UK's leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article350787.ece The US Defence Secretary has made more than $5m (2.9m) in capital gains from sell ing shares in the biotechnology firm that discovered and developed Tamiflu, the drug being bought in massive amounts by Governments to treat a possible human pa ndemic of the disease. More than 60 countries have so far ordered large stocks o f the antiviral medication - the only oral medicine believed to be effective aga inst the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease - to try to protect their people. The United Nations estimates that a pandemic could kill 150 million people worldwid e. The drug was developed by a Californian biotech company, Gilead Sciences. Mr Rumsfeld was on the board of Gilead from 1988 to 2001, and was its chairman from 1997. He then left to join the Bush administration, but retained a huge shareho lding. The 2005 report showed that, in all, he owned shares worth up to $95.9m, from which he got an income of up to $13m. The firm made a loss in 2003, the yea r before concern about bird flu started. Then revenues from Tamiflu almost quadr upled, to $44.6m, helping put the company well into the black. Sales almost quad rupled again, to $161.6m last year. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For many more strange coincidences an d facts around the avian flu scare, take a look at our summary of eye-opening ne ws articles available here.

Brainwash victims win cash claims 2004-10-17, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2090-1313808,00.html Hundreds of mentally ill patients who were subjected to barbaric CIA-funded brai nwashing experiments ... could be entitled to compensation following a landmark court ruling. Doctor Ewan Cameron, who became one of the world s leading psychiatr ists, developed techniques used by Nazi scientists to wipe out the existing pers onalities of people in his care. Cameron ... was recruited by the CIA during the cold war while working at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He carried out mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD on hundreds of patients, but o nly 77 of them were awarded compensation. Now a landmark ruling by a Federal Cou rt judge in Montreal will allow more than 250 former patients, whose claims were rejected, to seek compensation. Last week, Alan Stein, of Montreal law firm Ste in and Stein ... confirmed he was in the process of contacting former clients wh o could now renew their appeal. There are about 200 people still due compensation , he said. Using techniques similar to those portrayed in the celebrated novel th e Manchurian Candidate, it was believed that people could be brainwashed and rep rogrammed to carry out specific acts. Cameron developed a range of depatterning t reatments . Patients were woken from drug-induced stupors two or three times a day for multiple electric shocks. In a specially designed sleep room made famous by A nne Collins s book of the same name, Cameron placed a speaker under the patient s pi llow and relayed negative messages for 16 hours a day. Cameron ... rose to becom e the first president of the World Psychiatric Association. Note: If the above link does not work, click here. This article clearly shows th at the Manchurian candidate (programmed assassin) is not just fiction. For a pow erful two-page summary of 18,000 pages of declassified CIA documents on this dis turbing mind control program, click here. Links to view the original top secret documents are included.

Indicting the Drug Industry's Practices 2004-09-06, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/06/books/06masl.html?ex=1252209600&en=1accf3fe... Dr. Marcia Angell is a former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medi cine and spent two decades on the staff of that publication. Her new book is a s corching indictment of drug companies and their research and business practices. "Despite all its excesses, this is an important industry that should be saved mainly from itself," she writes. Dr. Angell's case is tough, persuasive and tro ubling. "The Truth About the Drug Companies" ... is devoted to assertions of sha dy, misleading corporate behavior. In the past, drug discoveries made through go vernment research remained in the public domain. Beginning in 1980 those breakth roughs could be patented, even if their research was sponsored by the National I nstitutes of Health. As a consequence, Dr. Angell says, patent shenanigans have reshaped the drug business, as have the recent government regulations that exped ite direct-to-consumer drug advertising. "Once upon a time, drug companies promo ted drugs to treat diseases," Dr. Angell writes. "Now it is often the opposite. They promote diseases to fit their drugs." Why all the advertising? "If prescrip tion drugs are so good, why do they need to be pushed so hard?" she asks. Dr. An gell is now a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Note: For an excellent 10-page summary of this revealing book written by the est eemed author, click here. For more reliable information on the health cover-up, click here.

Swine Flu Cases Overestimated 2009-10-21, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/21/cbsnews_investigates/main5404829.shtml If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in re cent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn t have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn t have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation. Why the unce rtainty about who has and who hasn't had H1N1 flu? In late July, the CDC abruptl y advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual c ases. CBS News learned that the decision to stop counting H1N1 flu cases was mad e so hastily that states weren't given the opportunity to provide input. When CD C did not provide us [CBS News] with the material, we filed a Freedom of Informa tion request with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). More than t wo months later, the request has not been fulfilled. We also asked CDC for state -by-state test results prior to halting of testing and tracking, but CDC was aga in, initially, unresponsive. We asked all 50 states for their statistics on stat e lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in Jul y. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, de spite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico. With most cases diagnosed solely on symptoms and risk factors, the H 1N1 flu epidemic may seem worse than it is. Note: Some states found that less than 2% of cases claimed to be swine flu turne d out to be the real thing. The numbers have been greatly exaggerated. For more reliable information on this, click here.

Drugmakers, Doctors Rake in Billions Battling H1N1 Flu 2009-10-14, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Business/big-business-swine-flu/story?id=8820642 Americans are still debating whether to roll up their sleeves for a swine flu sh ot, but companies have already figured it out: vaccines are good for business. D rug companies have sold $1.5 billion worth of swine flu shots, in addition to th e $1 billion for seasonal flu they booked earlier this year. These inoculations are part of a much wider and rapidly growing $20 billion global vaccine market. "The vaccine market is booming," says Bruce Carlson, spokesperson at market rese arch firm Kalorama, which publishes an annual survey of the vaccine industry. "I t's an enormous growth area for pharmaceuticals at a time when other areas are n ot doing so well," he says. As always with pandemic flus, taxpayers are footing the $1.5 billion check for the 250 million swine flu vaccines that the governmen t has ordered so far and will be distributing free to doctors, pharmacies and sc hools. In addition, Congress has set aside more than $10 billion this year to re search flu viruses, monitor H1N1's progress and educate the public about prevent ion. Drugmakers pocket most of the revenues from flu sales. But some say it's no t just drugmakers who stand to benefit. Doctors collect copayments for special o ffice visits to inject shots, and there have been assertions that these doctors actually profit handsomely from these vaccinations. Pharmacies also charge co-pa yments or full price of about $25 to those without insurance. Note: For a revealing article questioning the efficacy of vaccines, click here. And for a powerful CBS '60 Minutes' news clip clearly showing how the profit mot ive in vaccines endangers public health, click here.

Study prompts provinces to rethink flu plan

2009-09-30, Globe and Mail (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/study-prompts-province... A perplexing Canadian study linking H1N1 to seasonal flu shots is throwing nationa l influenza plans into disarray and testing public faith in the government agenc ies responsible for protecting the nation's health. Distributed for peer review last week, the study confounded infectious-disease experts in suggesting that pe ople vaccinated against seasonal flu are twice as likely to catch swine flu. The paper has since convinced several provincial health agencies to announce hasty suspensions of seasonal flu vaccinations, long-held fixtures of public-health pl anning. It has confused things very badly, said Dr. Ethan Rubinstein, head of adul t infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba. And it has certainly cost us credibility from the public because of conflicting recommendations. Until last week, there had always been much encouragement to get the seasonal flu vaccine. O n Sunday Quebec joined Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Nova Scotia in suspend ing seasonal flu shots for anyone under 65 years of age. Quebec's Health Ministr y announced it would postpone vaccinations until January. B.C. is expected to an nounce a similar suspension during a press conference Monday morning. Other prov inces, including Manitoba, are still pondering a response to the research. Dr. R ubinstein, who has read the study, said it appears sound. There are a large numbe r of authors, all of them excellent and credible researchers, he said. And the sam ple size is very large 12 or 13 million people taken from the central reporting systems in three provinces. The research is solid. Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the dangers of vaccines, click here .

Legislators for sale 2009-08-03, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32276889/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann A special comment on health care reform in this country. The insurance industry owns the Republican Party. Not exclusively. Pharma owns part of it, too. Hospita ls and HMO's, another part. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota ... has thus far rec eived from the Health Sector, campaign contributions ... amounting to $1,206,176 . How about Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite? Are you truly worth every dollar of the $369 ,000,255 ... you have received over the years from the Health Sector? [And Democ rat] Bart Gordon of Tennessee ... $1,173,000 in donations from the Health Sector . [Democratic Senator] Max Baucus of Montana, ... you're supposed to be negotiat ing all this out with the Republicans and hesitant Democrats? Your price has bee n ... $414,000 in donations from hospitals, about $667,000 from the insurance co mpanies and just over $1,000,000 from Big Pharma. Mr. Baucus, you are not the Se nator from Schering-Plough Global Health Care, even if they have already given y ou $76,000 towards your re-election. We could bring up Senator Hagan ... who, at $628,000, appears to represent the insurance industry and not North Dakota. I c ould bring up Sen. Carper, and Sen. Blanche Lincoln. I could bring up all the ot her Democrats doing their masters' bidding in the House or the Senate. Every pol l, every analysis, every vote, every region of this country supports health care reform, and the essential great leveling agent of a government-funded alternati ve to ... profiteering private insurance corporations. Note: For an excellent analysis of the huge influence of the pharmaceutical indu stry over our government by the former editor-in-chief of the esteemed New Engla nd Journal of Medicine, click here. It's time to get the money influence out of politics and shift from our current one dollar equals one vote to one person equ als one vote.

Affordable Health Care on the Critical List 2009-07-10, PBS Bill Moyers Journal http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch3.html Quality, affordable health care is on the critical list in America. And so is th e newspaper business. So maybe it's not surprising that one of the most powerful papers in the country attempted an unholy alliance, trying to turn a profit fro m its newsroom's coverage of the fight for health care reform. You may have miss ed the story because it broke on the eve of the July 4th weekend. The publisher of The Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth one of the most powerful people in th e nation's capital invited top officials from the White House, the Cabinet and C ongress to her home for an intimate, off-the-record dinner to discuss health car e reform with some of her reporters and editors covering the story. But she then invited CEOs and lobbyists from the health care industry to come, too providing they fork over $25,000 a head, or a quarter of a million if they want to sponso r a whole series of these cozy little get-togethers. And what is the inducement she offers them? Nothing less than and I'm quoting the invitation verbatim "An e xclusive opportunity to participate in the health care reform debate among the s elect few who will actually get it done." The invitation promises this private, intimate, and off-the-record dinner is an extension "of The Washington Post bran d of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard." Let that sink in. The "stakeholders" in health care refo rm in this case do not include the rabble the folks across the country who actua lly need quality health care but can't afford it. If any of them showed up at th e kitchen door on the night of this little soiree, a bouncer would drop kick the m beyond the beltway. Note: To read the complete text, click on the link above and scroll below the vi deo box at the top of the page. For an excellent article on the Washington Post' s ties to the CIA and manipulative politics, click here.

Tamiflu Developer: Swine Flu Could Have Come From Bio-Experiment Lab 2009-05-14, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/SwineFlu/story?id=7584420 An Australian researcher claims the swine flu, which has killed at least 64 peop le so far, might not be a mutation that occurred naturally but a man-made produc t of genetic experiments accidently leaked from a laboratory -- a theory the Wor ld Health Organization is taking very seriously. Adrian Gibbs, a scientist on th e team that was behind the development of Tamiflu, says in a report he is submit ting today that swine flu might have been created using eggs to grow viruses and make new vaccines, and could have been accidently leaked to the general public. "It might be some sort of simple error that's not being recognized," Gibbs said on ABC's "Good Morning America." In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Gib bs admitted there are other ways to explain swine flu's origin. "One of the simp lest explanations if that it's a laboratory escape, but there are lots of others ," he said. Regardless of the validity of Gibb's claims, he and several experts say that just bringing the idea of laboratory security to the public's attention is important. "There are lives at risk," Gibbs said. "The sooner this idea gets out, the better." Note: What would cause one of the developers of Tamiflu to make such a statement ? If you read between the lines, there is much more here than meets the eye. For lots more on this intriguing development, click here.

American Academy of Environmental Medicine Calls for Moratorium on Genetically M odified Foods 2009-05-08, American Academy of Environmental Medicine http://www.aaemonline.org/gmopost.html There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effe cts. There is causation [as] confirmed in several animal studies. Specificity of the association of GM foods and specific disease processes is also supported. I n spite of this risk, the biotechnology industry claims that GM foods can feed t he world through production of higher crop yields. However, a recent report by t he Union of Concerned Scientists reviewed 12 academic studies and indicates othe rwise: "The several thousand field trials over the last 20 years ... indicate a significant undertaking. Yet none of these field trials have resulted in increas ed yield ... with the exception of Bt corn." Therefore, because GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, rep roductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health and are without benefit, ... because GM foods have not been properly tested for human consumptio n, and because there is ample evidence of probable harm, the AAEM asks: [1] Phys icians to educate their patients, the medical community, and the public to avoid GM foods when possible and provide educational materials concerning GM foods an d health risks. [2] Physicians to consider the possible role of GM foods in the disease process. [3] Our members, the medical community, and the independent sci entific community to gather case studies potentially related to GM food consumpt ion and health effects. [4] For a moratorium on GM food, implementation of immed iate long term independent safety testing, and labeling of GM foods, which is ne cessary for the health and safety of consumers. Note: Why was this not reported in the mainstream media? A top Academy of physic ians states our health is being endangered by GM foods, yet no one is reporting this. For how our media is bought off in matters like this, click here. This sta tement was reviewed and approved by the Executive Committee of AAEM on May 8, 20 09. Many footnotes are available in the original at the link above. For lots mor e this vital topic, click here.

Some see media flu coverage as overblown 2009-05-03, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/05/03/MN3B17CKP7.DTL After a few days of breathless H1N1 flu coverage - some of it on his own network - CNN commentator Jack Cafferty noted that 13,000 people have died from the "re gular ol' flu" this year in the United States, compared with just one confirmed H1N1 flu death. Cafferty then asked his audience to respond to his online poll a sking "if swine flu coverage was overblown." He waited a moment, then said, "Hin t: Yes." For a week, the flu story has whet cable TV's bloodlust with what the 2 4-hour cable news vacuum craves: mystery, death and great visuals that inspire f ear. "Frankly, I've been a little horrified by how sensationalist and scare-mong ering it is," said Vivian Schiller, chief executive officer of National Public R adio. No detail about the flu - often delivered without context - has been too t iny to go unreported, which means that cable TV viewers are getting coverage tha t is moment-to-moment but often not terribly useful. Conservative talk radio hos ts have used fear about the flu to segue to anti-immigrant remarks and calls to close the U.S.-Mexico border.Just when the coverage appeared to be calming a bit Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden helped rekindle fears by saying on the "Toda y'" show that he "would tell members of my family - and I have - I wouldn't go a nywhere in confined places now." Health stories always attract huge audiences, s aid Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. But viewers shouldn't ex pect as much breathless coverage when Congress begins debating an overhaul of th e U.S. health care system over the next few months.

Note: For an excellent article showing how media fear-mongering of this and past flu emergencies have brought unprecedented profits to the pharmaceutical compan ies, click here.

UCSF study questions drug trial results 2007-06-05, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/05/DRUGS.TMP Money talks -- and very loudly -- when a drug company is funding a clinical tria l involving one of its products. UCSF researchers looked at nearly 200 head-to-h ead studies of widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering medications, or statins, a nd found that results were 20 times more likely to favor the drug made by the co mpany that sponsored the trial. "We have to be really, really skeptical of these drug-company-sponsored studies," said Lisa Bero, the study's author and profess or of clinical pharmacy and health policy studies. The trials typically involved comparing the effectiveness of a drug to one or two other statins. UCSF researc hers also found that a study's conclusions -- not the actual research results bu t the trial investigators' impressions -- are more than 35 times more likely to favor the test drug when that trial is sponsored by the drug's maker. Bero said drug companies fund up to 90 percent of drug-to-drug clinical trials for certain classes of medication. The researchers found other factors that could affect tr ial results. For example, pharmaceutical companies could choose not to publish r esults of studies that fail to favor their drugs, or they could be designed in w ays to skew results. The study found the most important weakness of trials was l ack of true clinical outcome measures. In the case of statins, some trials focus ed on less-direct results such as lipid levels but failed to connect the results with key outcomes such as heart attacks or mortality. "None of us really care w hat our cholesterol level is. We care about having a heart attack," Gibson said. "For the drug to be worthwhile taking, it has to be directly related to prevent a heart attack." Note: For lots more reliable information about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.

Doctors Reap Millions for Anemia Drugs 2007-05-09, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/business/09anemia.html?ex=1336363200&en=b68... Two of the world s largest drug companies are paying hundreds of millions of dolla rs to doctors every year in return for giving their patients anemia medicines, w hich regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses. The payments are l egal, but very few people outside of the doctors who receive them are aware of t heir size. The payments give physicians an incentive to prescribe the medicines at levels that might increase patients risks of heart attacks or strokes. At just one practice in the Pacific Northwest, a group of six cancer doctors received $ 2.7 million from Amgen for prescribing $9 million worth of its drugs last year. [A] report prepared by F.D.A. staff scientists said no evidence indicated that t he medicines either improved quality of life in patients or extended their survi val. Several studies suggested that the drugs can shorten patients lives when use d at high doses. The medicines ... are among the world s top-selling drugs. They r epresent the single biggest drug expense for Medicare. Since 1991 ... the averag e dose given to dialysis patients in this country has nearly tripled. About 50 p ercent of dialysis patients now receive enough of the drugs to raise their red b lood cell counts above the level considered risky by the F.D.A. Unlike most drug s, the anemia medicines do not come in fixed doses. Therefore, doctors have grea

t flexibility to increase dosing and profits. The companies have [failed] to tes t whether lower doses of the medicines might work better than higher doses. Ther e is little evidence that the drugs make much difference for patients with moder ate anemia, and federal statistics show that the increased use of the drugs has not improved survival in dialysis patients. Note: For lots more on major corruption in health care, click here.

Inside Medicine: Is your doctor giving you this important number? 2007-05-05, Sacramento Bee (Leading newspaper of California's capital city) http://www.sacbee.com/107/story/166505.html By Dr. Michael Wilkes. I recently wrote a column about cholesterol-lowering medi cations. I stated that if 67 healthy men with elevated cholesterol took a choles terol-lowering drug ... for five years, only one would benefit. The other 66 wou ld not benefit, and it would cost about $5,500 over the five-year period. I rece ived a ton of e-mail from readers. Many readers wrote that after knowing this nu mber, they did not feel taking the drug was worth the effort or expense. Others took the opposite view. Both interpretations are valid, depending on the person' s values. This number -- the 1 in 67 -- is a term doctors call "the number neede d to treat," or NNT. It is a relatively new concept [that] is grossly underused in sharing information with the public. Doctors and pharmacists do a poor job ta lking with patients about their medications. Many people will derive little or n o benefit from their medicines, but they are never told this. The key is for doc tors and patients to understand the NNT. Here are some estimates of NNT: 1 in 2, 550: The number of breast cancer deaths prevented in women between the ages of 5 0 and 59 screened annually for five years with mammograms. 1 in 2,000: The numbe r of women ages 60-64 without risk factors who would prevent a hip fracture by t aking medicine for osteoporosis for five years. 1 in 700: The number of people w ith mild high blood pressure who would prevent a stroke or heart attack by takin g blood pressure medicine for one year. 1 in 16: The number of infections preven ted by treating a victim of a dog bite with a week of antibiotics. 1 in 7: The n umber of children (otherwise healthy children) who benefit from treatment with a n antibiotic for an ordinary ear infection. Note: Many doctors and scientists have made valid claims that drug companies are hyping disease in order to make profits on their drugs. For a top MD's discussi on of this vital topic, click here.

Under The Influence 2007-04-02, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/29/60minutes/main2625305.shtml If you have ever wondered why the cost of prescription drugs in the United State s are the highest in the world or why it's illegal to import cheaper drugs from Canada or Mexico, you need look no further than the pharmaceutical lobby and its influence in Washington, D.C. Congressmen are outnumbered two to one by lobbyis ts for an industry that spends roughly a $100 million a year in campaign contrib utions and lobbying expenses to protect its profits. One reason [drug company] p rofits have exceeded Wall Street expectations is the Medicare prescription drug bill ... passed three-and-a-half years ago. The unorthodox roll call on one of t he most expensive bills ever placed before the House of Representatives began in the middle of the night. The only witnesses were congressional staffers, hundre ds of lobbyists, and U.S. Representatives like Dan Burton, R-Ind., and Walter Jo nes, R-N.C. "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill," says Jones. Why did t he vote finally take place at 3 a.m.? "They didn't want on national television i

n primetime," according to Burton. "I've been in politics for 22 years," says Jo nes, "and it was the ugliest night I have ever seen." Jones says the arm-twistin g was horrible. It certainly wasn't ugly for the drug lobby which ... has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave of fice. In all, at least 15 congressional staffers, congressmen and federal offici als left to go to work for the pharmaceutical industry, whose profits were incre ased by several billion dollars. "They have unlimited resources," Burton says. " And when they push real hard to get something accomplished in the Congress of th e United States, they can get it done." Note: This article also states that the Medicare prescription bill "was the larg est entitlement program in more than 40 years, and the debate broke down along p arty lines." Usually Republicans are against entitlement programs while Democrat s support them. Why was it the opposite in this case? Could it be that big indus try made huge profits from the passage of this bill? For lots more, click here.

Doctor says bird flu drug is useless 2005-12-04, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-1903144,00.html A Vietnamese doctor who has treated dozens of victims of avian flu claims the dr ug being stockpiled around the world to combat a pandemic is 'useless' against t he virus. Dr Nguyen Tuong Van runs the intensive care unit at the Centre for Tro pical Diseases in Hanoi and has treated 41 victims of H5N1. Van followed World H ealth Organisation (WHO) guidelines and gave her patients Tamiflu, but concluded it had no effect. 'We place no importance on using this drug on our patients,' she said. 'Tamiflu is really only meant for treating ordinary type A flu. It was not designed to combat H5N1 . . . (Tamiflu) is useless.' Roche, the company tha t makes Tamiflu, has sold stockpiles of the drug to 40 countries and insists the re is clear evidence it will protect against a future flu virus. However, it str esses the drug must be given within 48 hours to be effective. The WHO admitted T amiflu had not been widely successful in humans. 'However, we believe in many As ian countries it hasn't been used until late in the illness,' a spokesman said. Note: Yet hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to stockpile this drug . It's quite interesting that the former chairman of the board of directors of t he company that made Tamiflu is current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Mr . Rumsfeld has had over $5 million in stock gains from the sales of this drug. T o read about this and lots more: http://www.WantToKnow.info/avianflu

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Vaccine Autism Coverup 2005-06-22, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8316237 JOE SCARBOROUGH, Host: Six out of every 1,000 kids get it, and nobody knows exac tly why. But my next guest says ... part of the blame ... needs to fall on gover nment. And it has to do with a drug called thimerosal. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense [Council]. Let's talk tonigh t about thimerosal. There are a lot of people out there ... very concerned about the impact of this drug, which is found in vaccines, and how it causes autism. Talk about that. KENNEDY: That's right. Thimerosal is a preservative that was pu t in vaccines back in the 1930s. Almost immediately after it was put in, autism cases began to appear. Autism had never been known before. It was unknown to sci ence. Then the vaccines were increased in 1989 by the CDC and by a couple of oth er government agencies. What happened was the vaccine schedule was increased. We went up from receiving about 10 vaccines in our generation to these kids receiv

e 24 vaccines. And they all had this thimerosal in them, this mercury. And nobod y bothered to do an analysis of what the cumulative impact of all that mercury w as doing to kids. As it turns out, we are injecting our children with 400 times the amount of mercury that FDA or EPA considers safe. A child on his first day t hat he is born is injected with a hepatitis B shot. Under EPA guidelines, he wou ld have to be 275 pounds to safely absorb that shot. What happened was that, in 1988, one in every 2,500 American children had autism. Today, one in every 166 c hildren have autism. Note: For an excellent article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. revealing the severe ma nipulations around vaccines, click here. For a seven-minute video clip of the ab ove interview, click here. For lots more on autism and vaccines from reliable, v erifiable sources, click here

Deadly Immunity - by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 2005-06-16, Common Dreams/Boston Globe http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0616-31.htm In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center...to ensure complet e secrecy. The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to d iscuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. A mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be re sponsible for a dramatic increase in autism. But instead of taking immediate ste ps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials a nd executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to c over up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom o f Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging rev elations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. The C DC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions f rom the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers fro m liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured chi ldren. More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism. The disease was unkn own until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in t he months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931. Internal do cuments reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the s tart that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both animals an d humans. Note: A good, though somewhat watered down version of the above article was publ ished in the Boston Globe on July 1, 2005. To see this article on the Globe webs ite, click here.

A change of heart changes everything 2005-06-00, Ode Magazine, June 2005 Issue http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/24/a_change_of_heart_changes_everything A California institute demonstrates how people can actually make their heart bea t in a healthier way. HeartMath s research shows that emotions work much faster, a nd are more powerful, than thoughts. And that when it comes to the human body the he art is much more important than the brain to overall health and well-being. Brie fly re-experiencing a cherished memory creates synchronization in your heart rhy thm in mere seconds. Using a simple prescription that consists of a number of ex

ercises that anyone can do anywhere in a few minutes ... HeartMath is successful ly battling the greatest threat to health, happiness and peace in this world: st ress. A successful anti-stress strategy provides results precisely at the moment the stress is experienced. This is what HeartMath does, which is why its client list now includes such leading companies as Hewlett Packard, Shell, Unilever, C isco Systems, and Boeing. HeartMath ... has published a large body of scientific research in established and respected publications such as the Harvard Business Review and the American Journal of Cardiology. You can learn the techniques in five minutes and get positive results if you do them a few times a day for 30 se conds. Feelings of compassion, love, care and appreciation produce a smoothly ro lling ... heart rhythm, while feelings of anger, frustration, fear and danger em it a jagged ... image. When people experience love, they not only feel happy and joyful, but they also produce ... the hormone that prevents aging and gives us feelings of youthful vitality. HeartMath s slogan a change of heart changes everyt hing pretty much sums it up. We can change the world, starting with ourselves. Note: To visit the inspiring website of the Institute of HeartMath, see http://w ww.heartmath.org.

Big Pharma snared by net 2004-09-26, The Observer (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1312765,00.html No one foresaw ... the shocking extent to which the internet would change the te rms of trade between corporations and society. One of the world's largest drug c ompanies [was] the first victim. Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second-l argest pharma, denied any wrongdoing, but agreed to pay $2.5m ... for concealing evidence of its antidepressant Seroxat's potential for harming children, while doing them no measurable good. Infinitely more frightening ... this pharma had t he backing of institutions that we, the public, rely on to protect us from poiso ning by prescription. The Royal College of Psychiatrists had insisted only a yea r earlier that 'there is no evidence that antidepressant drugs can cause depende nce syndromes'. It was really the internet that allowed public health activists to do an end run around GSK's and the medical authorities' denials of the drug's risks. An explosion of websites dedicated to vivid accounts of antidepressant r eactions told these campaigners about hundreds of thousands affected by a proble m that officially did not exist. Health activists in Britain and America have un covered the core of pharma might. In both countries, clinical drug tests are pai d for by the pharmas, who tweak the trials' design for the best possible results . Until recently, only the most favourable findings got published in the 20,000odd biomedical journals, many of them dependent on pharmas for funding. The drug s are approved for marketing by regulators, whose salaries are mostly financed b y the subjects of their evaluations. The medicines are then prescribed by doctor s routinely courted with pharma gifts ... meant to persuade them to change their prescribing habits. Note: For a two-page summary with lots more reliable information on major health cover-ups by a doctor who was editor-in-chief of one of the most pretigious med ical journals in the world, click here.

Steve Wilson Exposes Huge Prescription Drug Price Markups 2004-02-05, WXYZ-TV (Detroit ABC affiliate) http://web.archive.org/web/20050316092358/http://www.wxyz.com/wxyz/ys_investi... Generic drugs are just as safe and effective as their brand-name counterparts bu t they cost only a fraction as much. That is because companies that produce the

generic versions simply copy the formula developed by the drug s inventor years be fore. While your drugstore charges you less for a generic drug than a brand name version, that price difference is nothing compared to the markup most druggists place on the generics. Your pharmacy most likely paid a wholesale price of only pennies for that generic medicine. They then charge you a markup of 3,000%, 4,0 00%, even 5,000% or more, pocketing most of your savings. Who s paying sky-high pr ices? People who can least afford to get ripped off the elderly, the unemployed, a nd everybody who has to pay for their prescription medicine out of their own poc ket. At CVS the cost of generic Prozac is marked up at least 56 times what the d rug cost wholesale. It is a 5,594% markup. And in our survey of more than a doze n popular generic drugs, CVS leads the pack with average markups of 1,436% Walgr een s is not far behind at 1,341% and Rite Aid markups on generics average 1,183%. [WXYZ reporter] Steve Wilson took the issue to Kurt Proctor, Vice President of the Association of Chain Drug Stores. "Explain to me why it s necessary to take an 82 cent product and mark it up to $46.69? You have to mark it up 5,500% to meet your costs to make a profit? This is really about greed, isn t it?" asked Wilson. "It s not about greed," responded Proctor. "That s not accurate at all. That s a misl eading statement. What I hope you will focus on is making sure people use their medications correctly." Note: This important exposure of price-gouging by pharmacies is still available at Web Archive (click on the link above for the complete article, which is well worth reading in its entirety), but for some reason has been taken down at WXYZ' s website. Could it be someone doesn't want us to know about this?

'Matador' With a Radio Stops Wired Bull 1965-05-17, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20817F9395812738DDDAE0994DD4... The brave bull bore down on the unarmed "matador" a scientist who had never face d a fighting bull. But the charging animal's horns never reached the man behind the heavy red cape. Moments before that could happen, Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado, th e scientist, pressed a button on a small radio transmitter in his hand, and the bull braked to a halt. Then, he pressed another button on the transmitter and th e bull obediently turned to the right and trotted away. The bull was obeying com mands from his brain that had been called forth by electrical stimulation by the r adio signals of certain regions in which fine wire electrodes had been painlessly implanted the day before. [Experiments] have shown, he explained, that "function s traditionally related to the psyche, such as friendliness, pleasure or verbal expression, can be induced, modified and inhibited by direct electrical stimulat ion of the brain." For example, he has been able to "play" monkeys and cats 'lik e little electronic toys" that yawn, hide, fight, play, mate and go to sleep on command. With humans under treatment for epilepsy, he has increased word output sixfold in one person, has produced severe anxiety in another, and in several ot hers has induced feelings of profound friendliness all by electrical stimulation o f various specific regions of their brains. "I do not know why more work of this sort isn't done," he remarked recently, "because it is so economical and easy." Monkeys will learn to press a button that sends a stimulus to the brain of an e nraged member of the colony and calms it down, indicating that animals can be ta ught to control one another's behavior. Note: If the above link fails, click here. This article shows mind control was b eing developed over 40 years ago. Though this technology can be used for good pu rposes, it also can and secretly has been used to manipulate and control for man y years. For lots of information based on released CIA documents on how mind con trol has been secretly used for decades to affect both individual behavior and g lobal politics, click here and here.

In Germany, a Better Vaccine for Politicians? 2009-10-27, Time magazine http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1932366,00.html As Germany launched its mass-vaccination program against the H1N1 flu virus on M onday, the government found itself fending off accusations of favoritism because it was offering one vaccine believed to have fewer side effects to civil servan ts, politicians and soldiers, and another, potentially riskier vaccine to everyo ne else. The German government prepared for its mass-vaccination campaign earlie r this year by ordering 50 million doses of the Pandemrix vaccine. The vaccine, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, contains an immunity-enhancing chemical compoun d, known as an adjuvant, whose side effects are not yet entirely known. The Inte rior Ministry confirmed that it had ordered a different vaccine, Celvapan, for g overnment officials and the military. Celvapan, which is made by U.S. pharmaceut ical giant Baxter, does not contain an adjuvant and is believed to have fewer si de effects. Note: For a revealing article exposing more on this critical issue, click here. Other thoroughly researched articles suggesting a major cover-up around the swin e flu vaccine are available here.

Medical Editors Push for Ghostwriting Crackdown 2009-09-18, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/business/18ghost.html The scientific integrity of medical research has been clouded in recent years by articles that were drafted by drug company-sponsored ghostwriters and then pass ed off as the work of independent academic authors. Yet the leading medical jour nals have continued to rely largely on an honor system of disclosure to detect s uch potential bias, asking authors to voluntarily report any industry ties or co ntributors to their manuscripts. But now, in light of recently released evidence that some drug makers have gone to great lengths to turn scientific articles in to marketing vehicles for their products, some influential medical editors are c racking down on industry-financed ghostwriting. These editors are demanding that journals impose tougher disclosure policies for academic authors and that the j ournals enforce their own rules by actively investigating the provenance of manu scripts and by punishing authors who play down extensive contributions by ghostw riters. Calling for a zero tolerance policy, the editors of the medical journal PLoS Medicine, from the Public Library of Science, called for journals to identi fy and retract ghostwritten articles and banish their authors. Authors found to h ave not declared such interest should be banned from any subsequent publication in the journal and their misconduct reported to their institutions. In the past, researchers have raised allegations of ghostwriting in articles about quality-of -life drugs like antidepressants, painkillers and diet pills. But the situation has become more serious this year after a few editors said they had discovered g hostwriting in manuscripts about life-and-death products like cancer and hematol ogy drugs. Note: For background on the prevalence of ghostwriting in major medical journals , click here and here and here.

Health Care Battle: Lobbyists Outnumber Lawmakers 2009-08-14, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/HealthCare/story?id=8322683

The time, money and manpower that lobbying firms devote to courting lawmakers re veals an investment inside the Beltway of staggering proportions. For every lawm aker in Congress, there are about six lobbyists pushing their health care priori ties, according to a Bloomberg News investigation released today. That's about 3 ,300 registered health care lobbyists working Capitol Hill. A total of $263 mill ion has been spent on health lobbying in 2009, according to the latest data from the Center for Responsive Politics. That's more money spent on health than any other sector this year. The list of the top 20 spenders in 2009 across all secto rs includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at No. 1, spending more than $26 millio n, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) at No. 3, spendi ng $13 million, and Pfizer in the No. 6 spot, spending $11 million. Also joining the ranks of the top 20 spenders this year are Blue Cross Blue Shield, AARP, Am erican Hospital Association, American Medical Association and Eli Lilly, each ha ving doled out between $7 and $10 million this year. Wendell Potter, a 20-year h ealth insurance veteran and former CIGNA vice president, ... spoke out about ins urance companies operating behind the scenes. Potter recalled previous health ca re fights, saying insurers have undoubtedly tried to shape the battle. "It is us ually done through the PR firms that work for them," Potter said. "They want to keep their fingerprints off stuff like that. "With this history, you can rest as sured that the industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious P R practices it has used for many years to kill reform this year, or even better, to shape it so that it benefits insurance companies and their Wall Street inves tors far more than average Americans," he said. Note: For lots more on the corrupt medical/governmental complex, click here.

TV host Andrew Castle: 'my daughter almost died from Tamiflu' 2009-08-11, Times of London (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/Swine_flu/article6791102.ece The [UK] Health Secretary appeared on breakfast television this morning in a bid to reassure concerned parents after scientists warned that children should not be given Tamiflu. Instead he was confronted by a GMTV presenter who claimed that the drug had almost killed his daughter. Andy Burnham insisted that the Governm ent was right to advise children to take the anti-viral drug despite a warning f rom researchers at the University of Oxford who called on the Department of Heal th urgently to reconsider its pandemic strategy. But he was tackled live on TV b y Andrew Castle, Britain's former top tennis player, who said his older daughter , Georgina, had a respiratory collapse after being given the drug as a precautio n during the containment stage of the pandemic. I can tell you that my child - wh o was not diagnosed at all - she had asthma, she took Tamiflu and almost died, he said. Georgina, 16, was given Tamiflu when five pupils at Alleyn s School in sout h London were diagnosed with the illness in May. Castle, also a BBC tennis comme ntator, said he feared for his daughter s life as medical professionals backed awa y from the potentially contagious child. He said: Nobody checked that she had swi ne flu beforehand. The Health Protection Agency just handed it out at Alleyn s Sch ool in south London and a lot of kids suffered in the school very heavily. It al most cost my older child her life." The study published yesterday warned that Ta miflu can cause vomiting in some children, which can lead to dehydration and the need for hospital treatment. Note: Remember that the drug companies often place profits above public health. For an article showing how Donald Rumsfeld, former chairman of the board at the pharmaceutical which produced Tamiflu, personally made millions from the sale of Tamiflu during the avian flu scare, click here. To read an article with more in formation showing that Tamiflu and Relenza may not be safe for children, click h ere.

Health Insurance Insider: 'They Dump the Sick' 2009-06-24, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Health/story?id=7911195 Frustrated Americans have long complained that their insurance companies valued the all-mighty buck over their health care. Today, a retired insurance executive confirmed their suspicions, arguing that the industry that once employed him re gularly rips off its policyholders. "[T]hey confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors," former Cigna senior executive Wendell Potter said during a hearing on health insurance today before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Potter, who has more than 20 years of experience working in public relations for insurance compa nies Cigna and Humana, said companies routinely drop seriously ill policyholders so they can meet "Wall Street's relentless profit expectations." "They look car efully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-exi sting condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justifica tion to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payme nt," Potter said. Small businesses, in particular, he said, have had trouble mai ntaining their employee health insurance coverage, he said. "All it takes is one illness or accident among employees at a small business to prompt an insurance company to hike the next year's premiums so high that the employer has to cut be nefits, shop for another carrier, or stop offering coverage altogether," he said . More and more people, he said, are falling victim to "deceptive marketing prac tices" that encourage them to buy "what essentially is fake insurance," policies with high costs but surprisingly limited benefits. Note: For lots more on corruption in the health industry, click here.

Health care outrage goes uncovered 2009-06-19, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/19/begala.health.care/index.html You probably have never heard of Robin Beaton, and that's what's wrong with the debate over health care reform. Beaton, a retired nurse from Waxahachie, Texas, had health insurance -- or so she thought. She paid her premiums faithfully ever y month, but when she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, her health in surance company, Blue Cross, dumped her. The insurance company said the fact tha t she had seen a dermatologist for acne, who mistakenly entered a notation on he r chart that suggested her simple acne was a precancerous condition, allowed Blu e Cross to leave her in the lurch. Beaton testified before a House subcommittee this week. So did other Americans who thought they had insurance but got the sha ft. The subcommittee's chairman, Democrat Bart Stupak of Michigan, called the he aring to highlight the obnoxious and unethical practice called rescission. His r esearchers produced performance reviews of insurance company bureaucrats who wer e praised and rewarded for kicking people off their coverage. Then Stupak asked three health insurance executives the big question: Will your company pledge to end the practice of rescission except in cases of intentional fraud? All three h ealth insurance executives said no. It was as dramatic as congressional testimon y gets. Yet it got no airtime on the networks, nor, as far as I can tell, on cab le news, although CNN.com did run a story. The story did not make The New York T imes. Nor The Washington Post, which found space on the front page the morning a fter the hearing for a story on the cancellation of Fourth of July fireworks in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, but not a story on the cancellation of health insura nce for deathly ill Americans who've paid their premiums.

Note: For lots more on corruption in the health industry, click here.

Hospitalization Rates Higher in Kids Who Get Flu Shots 2009-05-19, Forbes magazine http://www.forbes.com/feeds/hscout/2009/05/19/hscout627168.html Children who get the annual flu vaccine, especially those who have asthma, may b e more likely to be hospitalized than children who don't get the shot, a new stu dy shows. But the researcher noted ... "This may not be a reflection of the vacc ine but that these patients are the sickest, and their doctors insist they get a vaccination," said study author Dr. Avni Y. Joshi, a fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "I would be very cautious about interpreting this," said Dr. Gurjit Khurana Hershey, director of asthma research and professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. "The bottom line is that kids with asthma wh o get the flu vaccine are probably a different population anyway. They may be th e more severely ill children, so it may have very little to do with the vaccine. " The study has too many unknowns and covers too wide an age range over too many flu seasons to indicate any change in recommendations, said Dr. Hank Bernstein, a member of the committee on infectious diseases of the American Academy of Ped iatrics. The authors looked back at 263 children aged 6 months to 18 years who h ad visited the Mayo Clinic between 1999 and 2006 with laboratory-confirmed influ enza. Children -- including children who had asthma -- who received the annual i nactivated flu vaccine were almost three times more likely to be hospitalized th an those who were not inoculated. Note: With hospitalization rates nearly three times that of children who did not get vaccinated, why are these doctors downplaying this study so much? Why the f ocus on asthma, when the study covered a wide range of children? Why isn't anyon e calling fo rmore research on these striking results? For lots of articles rais ing serious questions about the safety of vaccines, click here.

It's official: Men really are the weaker sex 2008-12-07, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-official-men-really-are-the-wea... The male [sex] is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals. The resea rch ... shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. Backed by some o f the world's leading scientists, who say that it "waves a red flag" for humanit y and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for ministers. It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widesp read chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals . "This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat," says Gwynn e Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wro te the report. Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new ch emicals in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per ce nt of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety informa tion on 85 per cent of them. Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" or gender-benders because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalate s, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; f lame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of s ubstances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides. Note: For many key reports on health issues from reliable sources, click here.

Are Our Leading Pediatricians Drug Industry Shills? 2008-07-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/12/IN7G11L6TL.DTL Most parents have never heard of him, but Joseph Biederman of Harvard may be the United States' most influential doctor when it comes to determining whether the ir children are normal or mentally ill. In 1996, for example, Biederman suggeste d that drugs like Ritalin might serve 10 percent of American kids for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. By 2004, one in nine 11-year-old boys was taking the drug. Biederman and his team also are more responsible than anyone for a ch ild bipolar epidemic sweeping America (and no other country) that has 2-year-old s on three or four psychiatric drugs. The science of children's psychiatric medi cations is so primitive and Biederman's influence so great that when he merely m entions a drug during a presentation, tens of thousands of children within a yea r or two will end up taking that drug, or combination of drugs. This happens in the absence of a drug trial of any kind - instead, the decision is based upon wo rd of mouth among the 7,000 child psychiatrists in America. That's why [the] rec ent revelation that Biederman did not declare $1.6 million in drug company consu lting fees is so important, scary and tragic. American medicine, with psychiatry the most culpable, has fallen back to a time more than 100 years ago. Now once again, drug company money is corrupting medical practice and the maintenance of our country's health. Virtually all doctors who receive drug company money say t hey are not influenced, but every independent study examining the effects of suc h money says they are. Note: For lots more on health issues from reliable, verifiable sources, click he re.

Leading Doctor: Vaccines-Autism Worth Study 2008-05-12, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/12/cbsnews_investigates/main4086809.shtml Jordan King was a typical baby. His parents called him vocal and vivacious. Then just before age 2, after a large battery of vaccinations, he simply withdrew fr om the world. "The real scary thing was when I noticed he wasn't looking at us a ny more in the eyes," Mylinda King, Jordan's mother, said. William Mead was a Po ttery Barn baby model and met all the typical milestones. Then, also at age 2, a fter a set of vaccinations, William became very ill and he, too, changed forever . In both children, batteries of tests revealed dangerous levels of the brain to xin mercury in their systems. Their only known exposure: the mercury preservativ e once widely used in childhood shots. Dr. Bernadine Healy is the former head of the National Institutes of Health, and the most well-known medical voice yet to break with her colleagues on the vaccine-autism question. In an exclusive inter view with CBS News, Healy said the question is still open. "I think that the pub lic health officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis as irrational ," Healy said. Healy goes on to say public health officials have intentionally a voided researching whether subsets of children are susceptible to vaccine side eff ects - afraid the answer will scare the public. CBS News has learned the governm ent has paid more than 1,300 brain injury claims in vaccine court since 1988, bu t is not studying those cases or tracking how many of them resulted in autism. Note: For a powerfully revealing article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. showing a major cover-up of this issue, click here. For another suppressed article on a publishe d University of Pittsburgh study with strong evidence of an autism-vaccine link, click here.

Nanotubes seen as new weapon in cancer fight 2007-11-02, Houston Chronicle (Houston's leading newspaper) http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2007_4453780 In what a dying Rick Smalley called the most important application from his Nobe l Prize-winning discovery [of fullerines], Houston researchers are using [carbon ] nanotubes heated by radio waves to kill cancer cells. In a paper posted online by the journal Cancer, a team at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer C enter and Rice University reported that the technique destroyed liver cancer tum ors in rabbits and caused no side effects. It is thought to hold the same potent ial for many other cancers. "I don't want to overstate matters I'm the biggest s keptic in the world given the challenges still ahead of us," Dr. Steven Curley, an M.D. Anderson surgical oncologist and the paper's senior author, said Thursda y. "But my hope is that this will be a very useful tool to safely and efficientl y treat a lot of types of cancer." The therapy marries two disparate disciplines : the relatively ancient field of radio waves and nanotechnology, the cutting-ed ge science of the ultra-small. The rabbit study found the therapy worked only wh en the two were used together. It works not by poisoning but by creating a local ized hyperthermia or small fever that destroys the cancer cells' membranes, prot ein and even DNA. The cells then die and are carried out of the body through nor mal kidney functions. In the experiment recounted in Cancer, the rabbits were in jected with a solution of single-walled carbon nanotubes hollow cylinders of pur e carbon measuring about a billionth of a meter across then exposed to two minut es of radio-frequency treatment. The result, researchers said, was the thermal d estruction of 100 percent of the tumors. The idea was inspired by John Kanzius, an M.D. Anderson leukemia patient and retired Pennsylvania radio and television station owner. He developed a radio-frequency generator after undergoing chemoth erapy and noting its effect on himself and other patients. Note: For many hopeful new developments in the search for cancer cures, click he re.

U.S. health care is bad for your health 2007-06-03, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/03/EDGHQP1J6K1.DTL [A new] study ... finds that not only is the U.S. health care system the most ex pensive in the world (double that of the next most costly comparator country, Ca nada) but comes in dead last in almost any measure of performance. Although U.S. political leaders are fond of stating that we have the best health-care system in the world, they fail to acknowledge an important caveat: It is the best only for the very rich. For the rest of the population, its deficits far outweigh its advantages. [The] study compared the United States with Australia, Canada, Germ any, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Although the most notable way in which the United States differs from the other countries is in the absence of universa l coverage, the United States is also last on dimensions of access, patient safe ty, efficiency and equity. The other five countries considered spend considerabl y less on health care, both per capita and as a percent of gross domestic produc t, than the United States. The United States spends $7,000 per person per year o n health care, almost double that of Australia, Canada and Germany, each of whic h achieve better results on health status indicators than the United States. The United States also lags behind all industrialized nations in terms of health co verage. 46.6 million Americans (about 15.9 percent of the population) had no hea lth insurance coverage during 2005. It is no wonder, then, that medical bills ar e overwhelmingly the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United St

ates. Note: For a treasure trove of reliable information on health, click here.

Man with tuberculosis jailed for not wearing mask 2007-04-03, CNN/Associated Press http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/conditions/04/03/tuberculosis.confinement.ap Behind the county hospital's tall cinderblock walls, a 27-year-old tuberculosis patient ... sits in a jail cell equipped with a ventilation system that keeps ge rms from escaping. Robert Daniels has been locked up indefinitely, perhaps for t he rest of his life, since last July. But he has not been charged with a crime. Instead, he suffers from an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis. I t is considered virtually untreatable. County health authorities obtained a cour t order to lock him up as a danger to the public because ... he did not heed doc tors' instructions to wear a mask in public. "I'm being treated worse than an in mate," Daniels said. "I'm all alone. Four walls. Even the door to my room has be en locked. I haven't seen my reflection in months." He said sheriff's deputies w ill not let him take a shower -- he cleans himself with wet wipes -- and have ta ken away his television, radio, personal phone and computer. His only visitors a re masked medical staff members who come in to give him his medication. Though D aniels' confinement is extremely rare, health experts say it is a situation that U.S. public health officials may have to confront more and more because of the spread of drug-resistant TB and the emergence of diseases such as SARS and avian flu. Note: If the above link fails, click here. What possible reason is there for tak ing away this man's TV, radio, cell phone, and computer? Are we being prepared f or mass quarantines and imprisonment due to disease? For more, click here.

First, do no harm (to whites) 2006-12-31, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/31/RVGNGN44B91.DTL&type=... [Book Review of] Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present. Harriet Washington opens the door on the torture room in "Medical Apartheid". Experimental operations on the skulls of slave children, Washington writes, were a favorite pursuit of a pa rticularly sadistic South Carolinian doctor named J. Marion Sims, widely revered today as the "father of gynecology." For years, Sims experimented on a group of slave women, to whom he refused anesthesia. The most notorious post-slavery rac ial crime of American medicine [was] the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, conducted by t he U.S. Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972. More than 100 black subject s ... were denied treatment, even and especially after the discovery of penicill in in 1943. The research required that they suffer and die, the more slowly the better. Tuskegee was hardly unique. The Rockefeller Institute ... conducted a st udy in 1910 that saw 470 black syphilitics injected with a deadly strain of mala ria. Black Americans were also disproportionately used ... as subjects in govern ment inquiries into the effects of radiation. Washington's chilling history ends with contemporary case studies. At the Incarnation Children's Center in New Yor k, Columbia University doctors continue to administer experimental AIDS drugs to minority orphans, even after many develop painful and debilitating reactions. A s for current clinical trials in Africa, Washington describes the continent as t he new "laboratory for the West," where unsuspecting patients regularly receive experimental therapies that might never receive state sanction in the United Sta tes or Europe.

Note: For more reliable, verifiable information on major corruption in the healt h industry, click here. It's also interesting to not that no other major media c hose to review this important book.

Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill 2006-12-17, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/business/17drug.html The drug maker Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the he alth risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling medication for schizophrenia, according to hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company ma nagers. The documents ... show that Lilly executives kept important information from doctors about Zyprexa s links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood suga r both known risk factors for diabetes. Lilly s own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year o n the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more. But Lill y was concerned that Zyprexa s sales would be hurt if the company was more forthri ght about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabete s, according to the documents, which cover the period 1995 to 2004. Zyprexa has become by far Lilly s best-selling product, with sales of $4.2 billion last year, when about two million people worldwide took the drug. Critics, including the Am erican Diabetes Association, have argued that Zyprexa, introduced in 1996, is mo re likely to cause diabetes than other widely used schizophrenia drugs. As early as 1999, the documents show that Lilly worried that side effects from Zyprexa, whose chemical name is olanzapine, would hurt sales. Olanzapine-associated weight gain and possible hyperglycemia is a major threat to the long-term success of t his critically important molecule, Dr. Alan Breier wrote in a November 1999 e-mai l message to two-dozen Lilly employees. Note: For lots more on corporate corruption from reliable sources, click here.

US scientists reject interference 2006-12-14, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6178213.stm Some 10,000 US researchers have signed a statement protesting about political in terference in the scientific process. The statement, which includes the backing of 52 Nobel Laureates, demands a restoration of scientific integrity in governme nt policy. According to the American Union of Concerned Scientists, data is bein g misrepresented for political reasons. It claims scientists working for federal agencies have been asked to change data to fit policy initiatives. The Union ha s released an "A to Z" guide that ... documents dozens of recent allegations inv olving censorship and political interference in federal science. Campaigners say that in recent years the White House has been able to censor the work of agenci es like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration because a Republican congress has been loath to stand up for scientific integri ty. Michael Halpern from the UCS said the statement of objection to political in terference had been supported by researchers regardless of their political views . "This science statement that has now been signed by the 10,000 scientists is s igned by science advisers to both Republican and Democratic administrations dati ng back to President Eisenhower, stating that this is not business as usual and calling for this practice to stop."

Drug Industry Is on Defensive as Power Shifts 2006-11-24, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/washington/24drug.html?ex=1322024400&en=55e... Hoping to prevent Congress from letting the government negotiate lower drug pric es for millions of older Americans on Medicare, the pharmaceutical companies hav e been recruiting Democratic lobbyists [and] lining up allies in the Bush admini stration and Congress. Many drug company lobbyists concede that the House is lik ely to pass a bill intended to drive down drug prices, but they are determined t o block such legislation in the Senate. If that strategy fails, they are countin g on President Bush to veto any bill that passes. With 49 Republicans in the Sen ate next year, the industry is confident that it can round up the 34 votes norma lly needed to uphold a veto. They began developing strategy last week at a meeti ng of the board of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Bil ly Tauzin, president of that group [and] a former congressman...met with Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who has been trying for six years to a llow drug imports from Canada. The industry vehemently opposes such legislation. The 2003 Medicare law prohibits the federal government from negotiating drug pr ices or establishing a list of preferred drugs. Drug makers have not set a budge t for their campaign. They and their trade groups already spend some $100 millio n a year on lobbying in Washington. Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat o f New Jersey [said] The 2003 Medicare law was essentially written by the drug ind ustry. Drug companies may be open to some changes in the Medicare drug benefit, b ut they say they cannot accept any form of price negotiation. Note: For lots of verifiable information on the power of the drug industry to co rrupt Congress, click here.

FDA rejects new limits on mercury in vaccines 2006-10-24, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15405274 Federal health officials won t put new restrictions on the use of a mercury-based preservative in vaccines and other medicines. A group called the Coalition for M ercury-free Drugs petitioned the Food and Drug Administration in 2004 seeking th e restrictions on thimerosal, citing concerns that the preservative is linked to autism. The FDA rejected the petition. Thimerosal, about 50 percent mercury by weight, has been used since the 1930s to kill microbes in vaccines. There have b een suspicions that thimerosal causes autism. However, studies that tracked thou sands of children consistently have found no association between the brain disor der and the mercury-based preservative. Critics contend the studies are flawed. Since 2001, all vaccines given to children 6 and younger have been either thimer osal-free or contained only trace amounts of the preservative. Thimerosal has be en phased out of some, but not all, adult vaccines as well. Most doses of the fl u vaccine still contain thimerosal. There also are minute amounts of mercury, as thimerosal or phenylmercuric acetate, in roughly 45 eye ointments, nasal sprays and nasal solutions, the FDA said. Note: Why are they still using mercury in flu shots when it is not necessary? He avy metals are well known to be toxic to the human body. The studies mentioned a bove are almost entirely funded by pharmaceutical interests and government bodie s working with them. For lots more on this major cover-up, click here.

How Serious Is the Risk of Avian Flu? 2006-03-27, New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/health/28qna.html?ex=1301202000&en=ce4ccbd2... A human pandemic caused by A(H5N1) is by no means inevitable. Many researchers d oubt it will ever happen. The virus does not infect people easily, and those who do contract it almost never spread it to other humans. Bird flu is what the nam e implies: mostly an avian disease. It has infected tens of millions of birds bu t fewer than 200 people, and nearly all of them have caught it from birds. But w hen A(H5N1) does get into people, it can be deadly. It has killed more than half of its known human victims -- an extraordinarily high rate. The virus lacks jus t one trait that could turn it into a pandemic: transmissibility. Everything han gs on transmissibility. But it is impossible to predict whether A(H5N1) will bec ome contagious among people. Most bird flu viruses do not jump species to people . Some experts say that since A(H5N1) has been around for at least 10 years and the shift has not occurred, it is unlikely to happen. Others refuse to take that bet. The best protection in any flu pandemic will come from a vaccine, but scie ntists cannot tell ahead of time what strain the vaccine should protect against. There is no assurance that the next pandemic will even involve A(H5N1). It may involve a different strain of bird flu, and an A(H5N1) vaccine would not work fo r it. Note: Many thanks to the Times for this rare article which largely dispels fears rather than increasing them. For more excellent information on the avian flu, s ee http://www.WantToKnow.info/avianflu

Selling 'pandemic flu' through a language of fear 2006-03-21, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0321/p09s01-coop.html Americans consider the United States to be a country where debate flourishes. Ye t with regard to avian flu, hyped sound bites predominate. When President Bush a sked Congress for $7.1 billion toward "pandemic flu preparedness," even his crit ics replied "not enough." What is lacking in the overall discussion about pandem ic flu is disagreement, criticism, and skepticism - once the bedrock of science - from researchers willing to question and test the data. Some facts: According to the World Health Organization, the first "outbreak" of the H5N1 virus, also k nown as avian flu, killed six people in 1997. Since then, H5N1 has allegedly kil led 97 more worldwide, the majority of whom lived in poor, rural areas and had d irect contact with dead or sick birds often kept in unsanitary conditions. These numbers do not suggest the human population faces an insurmountable threat from this virus. Peter Palese, flu scientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Ne w York, told The New York Times in a Nov. 8, 2005 article that H5N1 is a false a larm. The virus has been "around for more than a dozen years, but it hasn't jump ed into the human population." The reason? It probably can't. There are better w ays to promote America's health than selling sickness through the language of fe ar. Before the government employs "all instruments of national power," including "quarantine authority," as the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza declare s, we need to be told what "pandemic flu" really means. Note: Not mentioned are the huge profits reaped by the drug companies and their political supporters thanks to the intense fear of bird flu generated by the med ia. For more: http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Bird Flu Victims Die ... After Becoming Resistant to Tamiflu 2005-12-22, CBS/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/21/health/main1156563.shtml

In a development health experts are calling alarming, two bird flu patients in V ietnam died after developing resistance to Tamiflu, the key drug that government s are stockpiling in case of a large-scale outbreak. The experts said the deaths were disturbing because the two girls had received early and aggressive treatme nt with Tamiflu and had gotten the recommended doses. Since 2003, avian flu has killed about 70 people, mostly in Vietnam and Thailand, and nearly all involved close contact with infected birds. Health experts fear the virus could morph int o a form that spreads easily between people. The new report involved eight Vietn amese bird flu patients given Tamiflu upon being hospitalized in 2004 or 2005. H alf of the patients died. Lab tests showed two of those who died...had developed resistance. Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Rumsfeld's growing stake in Tamiflu 2005-10-31, CNN http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld/ The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, bu t it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ot her politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech c ompany that owns the rights to Tamiflu. Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s c hairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million. In the past s ix months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gil ead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer. Rumsfeld isn 't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand for Tamiflu. Former Sec retary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 m illion worth of Gilead since the beginning of 2005.

The Man Behind The Vaccine Mystery 2002-12-12, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/12/eveningnews/main532886.shtml It's been a mystery in Washington for weeks. Just before President Bush signed t he homeland security bill into law an unknown member of Congress inserted a prov ision into the legislation that blocks lawsuits against the maker of a controver sial vaccine preservative called "thimerosal," used in vaccines that are given t o children. Drug giant Eli Lilly and Company makes thimerosal. It's the mercury in the preservative that many parents say causes autism in thousands of children . But nobody in Congress would admit to adding the provision, reports CBS News C orrespondent Jim Acosta until now. House Majority Leader Dick Armey tells CBS Ne ws he did it to keep vaccine-makers from going out of business under the weight of mounting lawsuits. "I did it and I'm proud of it," says Armey, R-Texas. "It's a matter of national security," Armey says. Because Armey is retiring at the en d of the year, some say the outgoing majority leader is the perfect fall guy to take the heat and shield the White House from embarrassment. Note: Though this is old news, it is very important news showing how beholden th e government is to the powerful drug companies.

Former CDC head lands vaccine job at Merck 2009-12-21, Reuters News

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2124506920091221 Dr. Julie Gerberding, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control an d Prevention, was named president of Merck & Co Inc's vaccine division. Gerberdi ng, who led the CDC from 2002 to 2009 and stepped down when President Barack Oba ma took office, will head up the company's $5 billion global vaccine business th at includes shots to prevent chickenpox, cervical cancer and pneumonia. She had led CDC from one crisis to another, including the investigation into the anthrax attacks that killed five people in 2001, the H5N1 avian influenza, the global o utbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and various outbreaks of food poisoning. She may be charged with reigniting flagging sales of Merck's Gar dasil vaccine to prevent cervical cancer by protecting against human papillomavi rus or HPV. After an encouraging launch Gardasil sales have been falling and wer e down 22 percent in the third quarter at $311 million. Note: So the head of the CDC now is in charge of vaccines at one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Could this be considered conflict of inte rest? Could this possibly be payback for supporting the vaccine agenda so strong ly for years? For more on the risks and dangers of vaccines, click here.

Libel gag on talk of 'medical hurricane' 2009-12-20, Times of London http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6962816.ece A healthcare firm is seeking to silence a Danish academic from expressing doubts about one of its products by using England s draconian libel laws. Two years ago in a conference room in the Randolph hotel in Oxford, Henrik Thomsen ... one of Europe s leading radiologists, revealed how patients treated at his hospital had s ubsequently contracted a rare and potentially fatal disease. Thomsen and other d octors at his Copenhagen University hospital were baffled as to why 20 kidney pa tients who had been given routine scans were afflicted by a disorder nephrogenic systemic fibrosis (NSF) in which the skin gradually swells, thickens and tighte ns. Some sufferers were confined to wheelchairs. At least one died. There was no known cure. It was confirmed that all those who had fallen ill with NSF had bee n given the same drug in advance of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. Omn iscan was used to enhance the images produced by the scan. The product was sold around the world and was manufactured by GE Healthcare, a subsidiary of General Electric, one of the world s largest corporations. Thomsen ... now refuses to spea k anywhere in England on the possible risks of Omniscan. The reason is that he f aces another kind of storm: GE Healthcare is suing him in the High Court for lib el. GE has already racked up costs of more than 380,000 pursuing the respected ac ademic. Thomsen will have to pay the firm s costs if he loses the case. Note: For lots more on corporate corruption from reliable sources, click here.

Advisers on Vaccines Often Have Conflicts 2009-12-18, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/health/policy/18cdc.html A new report finds that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a poo r job of screening medical experts for financial conflicts when it hired them to advise the agency on vaccine safety. Most of the experts who served on advisory panels in 2007 to evaluate vaccines for flu and cervical cancer had potential c onflicts that were never resolved, the report said. Some were legally barred fro m considering the issues but did so anyway. In the report ... Daniel R. Levinson , the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, found th

at the centers failed nearly every time to ensure that the experts adequately fi lled out forms confirming they were not being paid by companies with an interest in their decisions. The report found that 64 percent of the advisers had potent ial conflicts of interest that were never identified or were left unresolved by the centers. Thirteen percent failed to have an appropriate conflicts form on fi le at the agency at all, which should have barred their participation in the mee tings entirely, Mr. Levinson found. And 3 percent voted on matters that ethics o fficers had already barred them from considering. Note: For lots more on corporate and government corruption from reliable sources , click here and here.

Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform 2009-11-16, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/16drugprices.html Even as drug makers promise to support Washington's health care overhaul by shav ing $8 billion a year off the nation's drug costs after the legislation takes ef fect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years. In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescr iption drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add m ore than $10 billion to the nation's drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of i nflation for drug prices since 1992. The drug trend is distinctly at odds with t he direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year. Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming ye ars. "When we have major legislation anticipated, we see a run-up in price incre ases," says Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota. A Harvard health economist, Joseph P. Newhouse, sa id he found a similar pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added dr ug benefits to Medicare a few years ago, giving tens of millions of older Americ ans federally subsidized drug insurance. Just as the program was taking effect i n 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen yea rs. "They try to maximize their profits," Mr. Newhouse said. Note: For lots more from reliable sources on corporate corruption, click here.

In House, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists 2009-11-15, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15health.html In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accide nt. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world's largest biotechnology companies. E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show tha t the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans. The lobbyists ... were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress. Ge nentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House mem bers picked up some of its talking points 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an un usual bipartisan coup for lobbyists. In an interview, Representative Bill Pascre ll Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said: "I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was." He said he got his statement from his staff and "did not know where they got the information from." In recent years, Genentech's politic

al action committee and lobbyists for Roche and Genentech have made campaign con tributions to many House members. And company employees have been among the host s at fund-raisers for some of those lawmakers. Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on government corruption, c lick here.

Swine flu skepticism demands deft response 2009-11-12, Reuters News http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-SwineFlu/idUSTRE5A52FU20091112 European scientists and health authorities are facing angry questions about why H1N1 flu has not caused death and destruction on the scale first feared, and the y need to respond deftly to ensure public support. Accusations are flying in Bri tish and French media that the pandemic has been "hyped" by medical researchers to further their own cause, boost research grants and line the pockets of drug c ompanies. Britain's Independent newspaper this week asked "Pandemic? What Pandem ic?." France's Le Parisien newspaper ran the headline: "Swine flu: why the Frenc h distrust the vaccine" and noted a gap between the predicted impact of H1N1 and the less dramatic reality. "Dangerous liaisons between certain experts, the lab s and the government, the obscurity of the contracts between the state and the p harma firms have added to the doubt." In Britain, health authorities' original w orst-case scenario -- which said as many as 65,000 could die from H1N1 -- has tw ice been revised down and the prediction is now for around 1,000 deaths, way bel ow the average annual toll of 4,000 to 8,000 deaths from seasonal winter flu. Note: It's quite interesting and telling that a thorough Internet seach showed t hat no major media picked up this article from Reuters News Agency

Suzanne Somers questions chemo in new book 2009-10-19, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33387002/ns/health-cancer Suzanne Somers is at it again. She's back with a new book [on an] emotional topi c: Cancer treatment. Specifically, she argues against what she sees as the vast and often pointless use of chemotherapy. Somers, who has rejected chemo herself, seems to relish the fight. "Cancer's an epidemic," said the 63-year-old actress ... a day before [the] release of Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Cur ing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place, her 19th book. "An d yet we keep going back to the same old pot, because it's all we've got. Well, this is a book about options." Though she may be one of the most visible, Somers is hardly the only celebrity who's advocated alternative treatments recently. T he late Farrah Fawcett underwent a mix of traditional and alternative treatments , and made a poignant plea for supporting alternative methods in her film, "Farr ah's Story." Actress Jenny McCarthy advocates a special dietary regime, suppleme nts, metal detox and delayed vaccines to treat autism. In fact, Somers does view chemotherapy as effective for some cancers, but not for the most common, includ ing lung and breast cancer. Diagnosed with breast cancer a decade ago, she had a lumpectomy and radiation, but declined chemotherapy, as she did more recently w hen briefly misdiagnosed with pervasive cancer. Note: To watch a video clip of this, click here. For her harrowing experience of being misdiagnosed with stage four cancer, click here. And if you want to under stand how big money sometimes ruthlessly acts to stop cancer cures, click here. For media articles discussing potentially powerful cancer cures and how industry sometimes will not support them, click here.

Healthy people with swine flu should not be given Tamiflu, says WHO 2009-08-21, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/swine-flu/6066444/Healthy-people-with-swine... Healthy people who catch swine flu but show only mild symptoms should not be giv en Tamiflu, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said. The advice contradicts British policy on the issue, which has seen hundreds of thousands of doses of t he antiviral given to people with the virus. Today's advice, published on the WH O website, said most patients were experiencing typical flu symptoms and would g et better within a week. It said Tamiflu (also called oseltamivir) and another a ntiviral Relenza (also called zanamivir) should not be given to healthy people w ho have only mild symptoms. The latest WHO advice, from a panel of international experts, comes as new figures show that 45,986 courses of antivirals were given to patients in England in the week ending August 18. In the previous week, 90,3 63 courses of antivirals were given out. There have been fears that mass use of Tamiflu will encourage the virus to become resistant to the antiviral. Researche rs have also expressed concern over the side effects of the drug, including sick ness, nightmares and insomnia in children. A team from Oxford University said ea rlier this month children with mild symptoms should not be given the antiviral t o combat swine flu and urged the Department of Health to urgently rethink its po licy. Note: To read an article showing Tamiflu and Relenza may not be safe for childre n, click here. For other incisive articles revealing major manipulations involvi ng the swine flu, click here.

Swine flu jab link to killer nerve disease: Leaked letter reveals concern of neu rologists 2009-08-15, Daily Mail (One of the U.K.'s most popular newspapers) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1206807/Swine-flu-jab-link-killer-ner... A warning that the new swine flu jab is linked to a deadly nerve disease has bee n sent by the Government to senior neurologists in a confidential letter. The le tter from the Health Protection Agency, the official body that oversees public h ealth, has been leaked to The Mail on Sunday, leading to demands to know why the information has not been given to the public before the vaccination of millions of people, including children, begins. [The letter] tells the neurologists that they must be alert for an increase in a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Sy ndrome (GBS), which could be triggered by the vaccine. GBS attacks the lining of the nerves, causing paralysis and inability to breathe, and can be fatal. The l etter, sent to about 600 neurologists on July 29, is the first sign that there i s concern at the highest levels that the vaccine itself could cause serious comp lications. It refers to the use of a similar swine flu vaccine in the United Sta tes in 1976 when: * More people died from the vaccination than from swine flu. * 500 cases of GBS were detected. * The vaccine may have increased the risk of co ntracting GBS by eight times. * The vaccine was withdrawn after just ten weeks w hen the link with GBS became clear. * The US Government was forced to pay out mi llions of dollars to those affected. Concerns have already been raised that the new vaccine has not been sufficiently tested and that the effects, especially on children, are unknown. The British Neurological Surveillance Unit (BNSU), part of the British Association of Neurologists, has been asked to monitor closely an y cases of GBS as the vaccine is rolled out. One senior neurologist said last ni ght: I would not have the swine flu jab because of the GBS risk. Note: For more on the swine flu scare and the dangers of vaccines, click here.

Swine flu vaccine rushed through safety checks 2009-07-13, Times of London (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article6694046.ece A swine flu vaccine will be fast-tracked for use in Britain within five days onc e it is developed, and 130 million doses are on order. The Department of Health expects to have enough vaccine this year to give it to half the population. Furt her supplies will be available if needed. Each person will need two doses of the vaccine, unless one single jab is found to provide high rates of immunity. The first doses specific to the H1N1 swine flu virus are set to arrive in September and could be given regulatory approval in less than a week. The move came after the first British patient without underlying health problems died from swine flu , taking the number of swine flu-linked deaths in Britain to 15. Peter Holden, t he British Medical Association s lead negotiator on swine flu, said that ... altho ugh swine flu was not generally causing serious illness in patients, health offi cials were eager to start a mass vaccination campaign, starting first on groups that were susceptible to infection or prone to complications. It is likely that the elderly would be given a seasonal flu jab to guard against other circulating flu strains as happens every year as well as the swine flu vaccination. The high -risk groups will be done at GPs surgeries. People are still making decisions ove r this, but we want to get cracking before we get a second wave, which is tradit ionally far more virulent, Dr Holden said. It takes several weeks or months to ma ke flu vaccines, which are cultured using chicken eggs. The European Medicines A gency said the fast-tracked approval procedure has involved trials of a mock-up va ccine and that the speed would not compromise patient safety. The vaccines are au thorised with a detailed risk management plan, the agency said. Important Note: Don't be fooled by this media propaganda. The same rushed attitu de is what led to hundreds of deaths from the swine flu vaccine in 1976. Click h ere for a powerful CBS 60 Minutes video showing how a huge vaccine propaganda ca mpaign by the government led to these deaths. And a recent article in The Scotsm an quotes a spokesperson for the Scottish government saying "We have said that a vaccine is being worked on and the plan is to vaccinate everybody." Remember th at the media is beholden to pharmaceutical companies for billions of dollars in advertising income. For lots more powerful information on this vital topic, clic k here.

Ignore the health scare professionals: you won't die of swine flu 2009-07-12, The Telegraph blogs (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100002999/ignore-the-health-sc... Swine flu is a nasty disease, but no nastier than other strains of influenza. Tr ue, it has killed hundreds of people in Mexico; but even there, other variants o f flu virus have been far more lethal. Why, then, the urgent need to inoculate th e entire British population? Perhaps I m being overly cynical, but I can t help wond ering whether we re being pushed into a wrong-headed course of action by the healt h scare industry. We re told that Tamiflu needs to be taken at once, without a mom ent s delay meaning that anyone with a sniffle is likely to start glugging the stu ff. We re also told that the virus may mutate, meaning conveniently that we ll soon need a new variety of medicine. In any case, these flu vaccines have short shelf lives. Good news for the drug manufacturers and their lobbyists; bad news for t he taxpayer. Ministers must suspect that the danger is being exaggerated. Yet th ey would rather spend gazillions than run the slightest risk of being accused of not having done enough. And, needless to say, there isn t a medical advisory body in the world that will say: Actually, minister, considering everything in the ro

und, the danger posed by this virus is minor, and we recommend the disbandment o f this panel . You may think I am being unconscionably flippant. But back in April , when newspapers were filling their pages with science fiction scenarios of a d eadly epidemic, I suggested that, taking everything together, we weren t going to die of swine flu. Who has the better track record so far: the Big Pharma doom mo ngers, or this blog?

Senate Bill Would Fine People More Than $1,000 for Refusing Health Care Coverage 2009-07-02, Fox News/Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/02/senate-democrats-trim-cost-health-... Americans who refuse to buy affordable medical coverage could be hit with fines of more than $1,000 under a health care overhaul bill unveiled Thursday by key S enate Democrats looking to fulfill President Barack Obama's top domestic priorit y. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the fines will raise around $36 bil lion over 10 years. Senate aides said the penalties would be modeled on the appr oach taken by Massachusetts, which now imposes a fine of about $1,000 a year on individuals who refuse to get coverage. Under the federal legislation, families would pay higher penalties than individuals. In a revamped health care system en visioned by lawmakers, people would be required to carry health insurance just l ike motorists must get auto coverage now. The government would provide subsidies for the poor and many middle-class families, but those who still refuse to sign up would face penalties. Called "shared responsibility payments," the fines wou ld be set at least half the cost of basic medical coverage, according to the leg islation. The goal is to nudge people to sign up for coverage when they are heal thy, not wait until they get sick. The legislation would exempt certain hardship cases from fines. The fines would be collected through the income tax system. O bama wants a bill this year that would provide coverage to the nearly 50 million Americans who lack it and reduce medical costs. In a statement, Obama welcomed the legislation, saying it "reflects many of the principles I've laid out." The government's costs would be covered by a combination of higher taxes and cuts in projected Medicare and Medicaid spending. Note: How can Congress even consider forcing people to buy insurance with threat of a major fine? What happened to the country of freedom and liberty? And is th e people or the HMOs who benefit here?

How to Deal with Swine Flu: Heeding the Mistakes of 1976 2009-04-27, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1894129,00.html In February 1976, an outbreak of swine flu struck Fort Dix Army base in New Jers ey, killing a 19-year-old private and infecting hundreds of soldiers. Concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a devastating epidemic, President Gerald Ford ordered a nationwide vaccination program at a cost of $135 million (some $500 mi llion in today's money). Within weeks, reports surfaced of people developing Gui llain-Barr syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease that can be caused by the vaccine . By April, more than 30 people had died of the condition. Facing protests, fede ral officials abruptly canceled the program on Dec. 16. The epidemic failed to m aterialize. Medical historians and epidemiologists say ... the decisions made in the wake of the '76 outbreak and the public's response to them provide a cautio nary tale for public health officials, who may soon have to consider whether to institute draconian measures to combat the disease. "I think 1976 provides an ex ample of how not to handle a flu outbreak," says Hugh Pennington, an emeritus pr ofessor of virology at Britain's University of Aberdeen. Despite modern advances in microbiology, today's health officials still make decisions in a "cloud of u

ncertainty," Pennington says. "At the moment, our understanding of the current o utbreak is similarly limited. For example, we don't yet understand why people ar e dying in Mexico but not elsewhere." Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and a historical consultan t to the CDC on flu pandemics, says the most vexing decision facing health offic ials is when to institute mass vaccination programs. Note: To watch two short commercials made in 1976 showing clear scare tactics, c lick here. Only one person died from the actual flu in this 1976 "epidemic," yet more than 30 died of the flu vaccine. To explore the serious risks of vaccines reported in the media, click here. For lots more on bird and swine flu scares, c lick here.

Vioxx maker Merck and Co drew up doctor hit list 2009-04-01, The Australian (One of Australia's leading newspapers) http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25272600-2702,00.html An international drug company made a hit list of doctors who had to be "neutrali sed" or discredited because they criticised the anti-arthritis drug the pharmace utical giant produced. Staff at US company Merck &Co emailed each other about th e list of doctors - mainly researchers and academics - who had been negative abo ut the drug Vioxx or Merck and a recommended course of action. The email, which came out in the Federal Court in Melbourne yesterday as part of a class action a gainst the drug company, included the words "neutralise", "neutralised" or "disc redit" against some of the doctors' names. It is also alleged the company used i ntimidation tactics against critical researchers, including dropping hints it wo uld stop funding to institutions and claims it interfered with academic appointm ents. "We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live," a Merck e mployee wrote, according to an email excerpt read to the court by Julian Burnsid e QC, acting for the plaintiff. Merck & Co and its Australian subsidiary, Merck, Sharpe and Dohme, are being sued for compensation by more than 1000 Australians , who claim they suffered heart attacks or strokes as a result of Vioxx. The dru g was launched in 1999 and at its height of popularity was used by 80 million pe ople worldwide because it did not cause stomach problems as did traditional anti -inflammatory drugs. It was voluntarily withdrawn from sale in 2004 after concer ns were raised that it caused heart attacks and strokes and a clinical trial tes ting these potential side affects was aborted for safety reasons. Merck last yea r settled thousands of lawsuits in the US over the effects of Vioxx for $US 4.85 billion, but made no admission of guilt. Note: For lots more on corporate corruption from reliable sources, click here.

Powerful proponent of psychiatric drugs for children primed for a fall 2009-03-27, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/27/EDAF16N963.DTL Dr. Joseph Biederman, chief of the Massachusetts General Pediatric Psychopharmac ology Clinic, is already under investigation by Harvard University and the Natio nal Institutes of Health for failing to report income received from drug compani es. Biederman has strongly pushed treating children's mental illnesses with powe rful antipsychotic medicines. Diagnoses like ADHD and pediatric bipolar disorder , along with psychiatric drug use in American children, have soared in the last 15 years. No other country medicates children as frequently. Now, in newly relea sed court documents, Biederman appears to be promising drugmaker Johnson & Johns on in advance that his studies on the antipsychotic drug risperidone will prove the drug to be effective when used on preschool age children. Biederman's status

at Harvard and his research have arguably made him, until recently, America's m ost powerful doctor in child psychiatry. Reports from court actions, along with an ongoing investigation of conflict of interest charges led by Sen. Chuck Grass ley, R-Iowa, threaten to topple Biederman from his heretofore untouchable Olympi an heights. Biederman's conflict of interest problems have exposed his strong pr o-drug views to the public for scrutiny. Until now, fear of the Biederman team h as operated quietly on the small club of child psychiatric researchers. Only whe n 2-year-olds started taking three psychiatric drugs simultaneously under a Bied erman protocol for bipolar disorder did the emperor's clothes become so invisibl e as to begin the naming of names. Biederman's personal travails tragically info rm us about a crisis in academic medicine that must be resolved. Note: For a powerful overview of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, clic k here.

Cancer Miracles 2009-02-11, Forbes magazine http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0302/074_cancer_miracles.html Spontaneous tumor regressions are among the rarest and most mysterious events in medicine, with only several hundred cases in the literature that can be conside red well documented. Regressions have most often been reported in melanoma and i n kidney cancer. But the phenomenon may, in fact, be an everyday one, taking pla ce beyond doctors' eyes. A recent study suggests that as many as 1 in 3 breast t umors may vanish on their own before being detected by a doctor. Why do some pat ients get lucky? Scientists are finding tantalizing evidence that the immune sys tem, the body's defense against disease-causing microbes, kicks in to play a cri tical role in combating cancer. The evidence includes the fact that some unexpla ined remissions have occurred after infections, which may propel the immune syst em into high gear--possibly attacking the cancer tumor as well as the infection. The role of the immune system in controlling cancer has been hotly debated for decades--and indeed many scientists remain unconvinced. But Jedd D. Wolchok, an oncologist at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, thinks there is a connection. A spontaneous remission, he says, is "either divine intervention or the immune system." While few researchers directly study such cases--they are far too rare--they provide hints of what the immune system might be able to do if we could harness it. Note: The number of these cancer miracles are likely far more than suggested in this article. The problem is that most doctors ignore or consider them insignifi cant. For a most fascinating example of this, click here. For many exciting repo rts from major media sources describing potentially promising new cancer treatme nts, click here.

FDA Draws Fire Over Chemicals In Baby Formula 2008-11-27, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/26/AR20081126003... Public health groups, consumer advocates and members of Congress blasted the Foo d and Drug Administration yesterday for failing to act after discovering trace a mounts of the industrial chemical melamine in baby formula sold in the United St ates. "This FDA, this Bush administration, instead of protecting the public heal th, is protecting industry," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the Ap propriations subcommittee that oversees the FDA budget. "We're talking about bab ies, about the most vulnerable. This really makes me angry." The FDA found melam ine and cyanuric acid, a related chemical, in samples of baby formula made by ma

jor U.S. manufacturers. Melamine can cause kidney and bladder stones and, in wor st cases, kidney failure and death. If melamine and cyanuric acid combine, they can form round yellow crystals that can also damage kidneys and destroy renal fu nction. Melamine was found in Good Start Supreme Infant Formula With Iron made b y Nestle, and cyanuric acid was detected in Enfamil Lipil With Iron infant formu la powder made by Mead Johnson. The FDA has been testing hundreds of food produc ts for melamine in the aftermath of a scandal this year involving Chinese infant formula tainted with melamine. Chinese manufacturers deliberately added the che mical to watered-down formula to make it appear to contain higher levels of prot ein. More than 50,000 Asian infants were hospitalized, and at least four died. Note: For many reports on government corruption from major media sources, click here.

Study Suggests Some Cancers May Go Away 2008-11-25, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/health/25breast.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pa... Cancer researchers have known for years that it was possible in rare cases for s ome cancers to go away on their own. There were occasional instances of melanoma s and kidney cancers that just vanished. And neuroblastoma, a very rare childhoo d tumor, can go away without treatment. But these were mostly seen as oddities a n unusual pediatric cancer that might not bear on common cancers of adults, a sm attering of case reports of spontaneous cures. And since almost every cancer tha t is detected is treated, it seemed impossible even to ask what would happen if cancers were left alone. Now, though, researchers say they have found a situatio n in Norway that has let them ask that question about breast cancer. And their n ew study, to be published Tuesday in The Archives of Internal Medicine, suggests that even invasive cancers may sometimes go away without treatment and in large r numbers than anyone ever believed. Robert M. Kaplan, the chairman of the depar tment of health services at the School of Public Health at the University of Cal ifornia, Los Angeles, [is] persuaded by the analysis. The implications are poten tially enormous, Dr. Kaplan said. If the results are replicated, he said, it cou ld eventually be possible for some women to opt for so-called watchful waiting, monitoring a tumor in their breast to see whether it grows. People have never tho ught that way about breast cancer, he added. Dr. Kaplan and his colleague, Dr. Fr anz Porzsolt, an oncologist at the University of Ulm, said in an editorial that accompanied the study, If the spontaneous remission hypothesis is credible, it sh ould cause a major re-evaluation in the approach to breast cancer research and t reatment. Note: For reports from major media sources on many hopeful new developments in t he battle against cancer, click here.

State off course on 'personal genomics' 2008-11-02, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/02/INUO12K51K.DTL California officials recently ordered two "personal genomics" firms to cease and desist operations within the state. The companies eventually were allowed to co ntinue operations - with a few more regulatory conditions - but why did the stat e demand that they shut down in the first place? Why would a state that regards itself as progressive and high-tech act to censor what we can know about ourselv es? Though regulators may shut down unscrupulous firms, the services offered by Navigenics and 23andMe meet the highest standards of accuracy, validity and reli ability. The laboratories employed by both companies are fully licensed and trus

ted by researchers around the world. These companies give individuals the abilit y to take a "snapshot" of their DNA. The state objected, determining that doctor s are gatekeepers of the human body, and Californians need a prescription to acc ess their genetic blueprint. Doctors have a powerful lobby in Sacramento, and th ese technologies directly threaten their profits. Personal genomics aims to empo wer the individual, not line the pockets of an elite medical establishment. This establishment believes that individuals cannot be trusted with their own geneti c information. The genome is vast, complicated and poorly understood, the argume nt goes, and therefore customers could be inundated with raw information of litt le or no practical use. Forbidding us from looking at our genes because we don't yet understand them, however, is contrary to science, innovation and human natu re. Note: For revealing reports of government corruption from reliable, verifiable s ources, click here.

American inequality highlighted by 30-year gap in life expectancy 2008-07-17, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-inequality-highligh... The United States of America is becoming less united by the day. A 30-year gap n ow exists in the average life expectancy between Mississippi, in the Deep South, and Connecticut, in prosperous New England. Huge disparities have also opened u p in income, health and education depending on where people live in the US, acco rding to a report published yesterday. The American Human Development Index has [issued a report] measuring well-being ... with shocking results. The US finds i tself ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in survival of infants to a ge. Suicide and murder are among the top 15 causes of death and although the US is home to just 5 per cent of the global population it accounts for 24 per cent of the world's prisoners. The report points to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities. "The report shows that although America is one of the ri chest nations in the world, it is woefully behind when it comes to providing opp ortunity and choices to all Americans to build a better life," the authors said. Some of its more shocking findings reveal that ... Asian-American males have th e best quality of life and black Americans the lowest, with a staggering 50-year life expectancy gap between the two groups. Using official government statistic s, the study points out that because American schools are funded primarily from local property taxes, rich districts get the best state education. The US has no federally mandated sick pay, paternity leave or annual paid vacation. Note: For lots more on health issues from reliable, verifiable sources, click he re.

Cancer cure trials move from mice to men 2008-06-29, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/canc... In a major breakthrough in the search for a cure for cancer, the first human tri als are to begin using a technique that has already been shown to destroy the di sease in mice. The trials are the culmination of years of research prompted by t he discovery of a cancer-proof mouse by researchers almost a decade ago. More th an 20 cancer patients will be given white blood cells with cancer-killing proper ties in an attempt to boost their immune system's fight against the deadly illne ss. The work stems from experiments into the metabolism of a humble laboratory m ouse whose immunity to cancer defied the repeated attempts of scientists to kill it with high-level doses of cancer cells. White blood cells taken from the anim

al and its offspring were subsequently used to cure other mice of advanced cance rs. The white blood cells destroyed the cancer cells but left normal cells alone . This discovery encouraged scientists to study how people might be helped to fi ght off cancer by being given a boost of white blood cells called granulocytes. Laboratory tests have since shown how human granulocytes can destroy cervical, p rostate and breast cancer cells, provided sufficient numbers of cancer-killing g ranulocytes from healthy donors are used. Scientists are now confident that the treatment will prove just as successful in humans as it has been in mice. Hundre ds of donors will be recruited for the new treatment which is called leukocyte i nfusion therapy and a process similar to platelet donation will be used to colle ct the granulocytes. Note: Why is this important news getting so little coverage? For more cancer bre akthroughs, click here.

In Rwanda, visionary doctor is moving mountains again 2008-04-13, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2008/04/13/in_rwanda_visionary_docto... It was November 2004, and Dr. Paul Farmer had agreed to bring his world-renowned Partners in Health model to Rwanda, which was still reeling from the aftershock s of the genocide a decade earlier. Now here he was, with Rwandan health officia ls, to scout out a location for a hospital to serve the poorest of the poor. Far mer, who teaches at Harvard, was taken to Ruhengeri, in the country's northwest corner. But there was already a clean hospital there, with employees and even an X-ray machine. "No, no, no. You don't understand," Farmer recalls saying. "Find me the worst possible place in the country." So they took him to Rwinkwavu, a r emote area two hours east of Kigali. Even Farmer - who works in the world's wors t regions - was taken aback. There were no beds, no patients, no staff, no medic al equipment. "It was abandoned, dirty and scary," Farmer says. There were 200,0 00 people in the district and not a single doctor. It was the perfect place for Farmer. In the summer of 2005, the doors opened at Rwinkwavu Hospital, which now sees 250 patients a day, some of them walking hours to get there. Farmer, [Dr. Michael Rich, who is Rwanda country director for Partners in Health], and their Rwandan counterparts have built a second hospital in an equally remote area of 2 00,000 - also without a single doctor - and built or renovated 19 health centers that feed patients to them. A third hospital is on the drawing board, designed by Harvard architecture students. Ultimately, they plan to expand rural medical services to the entire country. Now 20 years old, Partners in Health, with its e mphasis on treating poverty as well as disease, has expanded to nine countries. Note: Five years ago, Farmer became reluctantly famous with the publication of T racy Kidder's best-selling book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, which told the stor y of the brash Harvard Medical School graduate who changed the face of healthcar e in rural Haiti.

Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists 2008-02-26, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/26/mentalhealth.medicalresearch Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, doe s not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major revi ew released today. The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those gi ven a placebo or sugar pill. When all the data was pulled together, it appeared

that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs. The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, ac cording to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably becau se the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having w orked better. "Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antid epressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alt ernative treatments have failed," says Kirsch. "This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported." The paper, published today in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Sc ience) Medicine, is likely to have a significant impact on the prescribing of th e drugs. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence already recom mends that counselling should be tried before doctors prescribe antidepressants. Note: For many key reports on health issues from reliable sources, click here.

Get kids vaccinated or go to jail? 2007-11-17, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-11-17-vaccines-school_N.htm Scores of grumbling parents facing a threat of jail lined up at a courthouse Sat urday to either prove that their school-age kids already had their required vacc inations or see that the youngsters submitted to the needle. The get-tough polic y in the Washington suburbs of Prince George's County was one of the strongest e fforts made by any U.S. school system to ensure its youngsters receive their req uired immunizations. Two months into the school year, school officials realized that more than 2,000 students in the county still didn't have the vaccinations t hey were supposed to have before attending class. So Circuit Court Judge C. Phil ip Nichols ordered parents in a letter to appear at the courthouse Saturday and either get their children vaccinated on the spot or risk up to 10 days in jail. They could also provide proof of vaccination or an explanation why their kids di dn't have them. "It was very heavy handed," [school mom Aloma Martin] said of th e county's action. "From that letter, it sounded like they were going to start p utting us in jail." Any children who still lack immunizations could be expelled. Their parents could then be brought up on truancy charges, which can result in a 10-day jail sentence for a first offense and 30 days for a second. Maryland, l ike all states, requires children to be immunized against several childhood illn esses including polio, mumps and measles. In recent years, it also has required that students up to high school age be vaccinated against hepatitis B and chicke n pox. Several organizations opposed to mass vaccinations demonstrated outside t he courthouse. While the medical consensus is that vaccines are safe and effecti ve, some people blame immunizations for a rise in autism and other medical probl ems. "People should have a choice" in getting their children immunized, said Cha rles Frohman, representing a physicians' group opposed to vaccines. Note: For more revealing major media reports on the complex issues surrounding v accinations, click here.

U.S. Medical Schools, Drug Makers Share Strong Ties 2007-10-16, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/16/AR20071016014... More than half of department chairs at U.S. medical schools and teaching hospita ls have financial ties with the drug industry, a new study finds. "There is not a single aspect of medicine in which the drug companies do not have substantial and deep relationships, [including] doctors-in-training, resident physicians, re

searchers, physicians-in-practice, the people who review drugs for the federal g overnment and the people who review studies," said lead researcher Eric Campbell , associate professor at the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts Genera l Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. "Drug companies have relationsh ips with everyone," he continued. "They're involved in every aspect of medicine. Someone has to decide which of these is OK." The study, the first to examine th e extent of these institutional relationships, is published in the Oct. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "I think the paper is a ver y valuable contribution, in that it provides what's probably the first comprehen sive documentation of the extent of relationships that involve department chairs , and department chairs are certainly the key agents of overseeing and maintaini ng the day-to-day operations of a medical school or teaching hospital," said Dr. David Korn ... at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D .C. The issue of medicine's ties to industry has been a hot one of late. One stu dy found that third-year medical students get, on average, one gift or attend on e activity sponsored by a drug maker each week. "Now it's up to the policymakers and people who run medical schools," said Campbell. "They need to come up with some rules and they need to be new rules. I believe there's very little reasonab le justification for why drug companies should be involved in the education of m edical students." Note: For a powerful overview of medical corruption, click here.

Report Assails F.D.A. Oversight of Clinical Trials 2007-09-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/health/policy/28fda.html?ex=1348632000&en=d... The Food and Drug Administration does very little to ensure the safety of the mi llions of people who participate in clinical trials, a federal investigator has found. The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, Dan iel R. Levinson, said federal health officials did not know how many clinical tr ials were being conducted, audited fewer than 1 percent of the testing sites and , on the rare occasions when inspectors did appear, generally showed up long aft er the tests had been completed. The F.D.A. has 200 inspectors, some of whom aud it clinical trials part time, to police an estimated 350,000 testing sites. Even when those inspectors found serious problems in human trials, top drug official s in Washington downgraded their findings 68 percent of the time, the report fou nd. Among the remaining cases, the agency almost never followed up with inspecti ons to determine whether the corrective actions that the agency demanded had occ urred. In many ways, rats and mice get greater protection as research subjects in the United States than do humans, said Arthur L. Caplan, chairman of the departm ent of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Animal research centers have to register with the federal government, keep track of subject numbers, ha ve unannounced spot inspections and address problems speedily or risk closing, n one of which is true in human research, Mr. Caplan said. Because no one collects the data systematically, there is no way to tell how safe the nation s clinical r esearch is or ever has been. The drug agency oversees just the safety of trials by companies seeking approval to sell drugs or devices. Using an entirely differ ent set of rules, the Office for Human Research Protections oversees trials fina nced by the federal government. Privately financed noncommercial trials have no federal oversight. Note: For further information on corruption in the health care industry, click h ere.

Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts

2007-06-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/health/psychology/27doctors.html?ex=1340596... As states begin to require that drug companies disclose their payments to doctor s for lectures and other services, a pattern has emerged: psychiatrists earn mor e money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty. How this money may be influencing psychiatrists and other doctors has become one of the most conte ntious issues in health care. For instance, the more psychiatrists have earned f rom drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical antipsychotics to children, for whom the drugs are especially risky and mostly unapproved. Vermont officials disclosed Tuesday that drug comp any payments to psychiatrists in the state more than doubled last year, to an av erage of $45,692 each from $20,835 in 2005. Antipsychotic medicines are among th e largest expenses for the state s Medicaid program. Over all last year, drug make rs spent $2.25 million on marketing payments, fees and travel expenses to Vermon t doctors, hospitals and universities, a 2.3 percent increase over the prior yea r, the state said. The number most likely represents a small fraction of drug ma kers total marketing expenditures to doctors since it does not include the costs of free drug samples or the salaries of sales representatives and their staff me mbers. According to their income statements, drug makers generally spend twice a s much to market drugs as they do to research them. Endocrinologists received th e second largest amount, according to the Vermont analysis, earning an average o f $33,730. Since the state identified the specialties of only the top 100 earner s, these averages represent the money earned by only some of the state s specialis ts. There were 11 psychiatrists and 5 endocrinologists in that top group of 100. Note: For much more reliable, verifiable information on corruption in the pharma ceutical industry, click here.

Doctors Ties to Drug Makers Are Put on Close View 2007-03-21, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/us/21drug.html?ex=1332129600&en=8ab21926768... Dr. Allan Collins ... is president of the National Kidney Foundation. In 2004 .. . the pharmaceutical company Amgen, which makes the most expensive drugs used in the treatment of kidney disease, underwrote more than $1.9 million worth of res earch and education programs led by Dr. Collins. In 2005, Amgen paid Dr. Collins at least $25,800, mostly in consulting and speaking fees. The payments to Dr. C ollins and the research center ... come from Minnesota, the first of a handful o f states to pass a law requiring drug makers to disclose payments to doctors. Th e Minnesota records are a window on the widespread financial ties between pharma ceutical companies and the doctors who prescribe and recommend their products. F rom [1997] through 2005, drug makers paid more than 5,500 doctors, nurses and ot her health care workers in the state at least $57 million. More than 100 people received more than $100,000. Research shows that doctors who have close relation ships with drug makers tend to prescribe more, newer and pricier drugs whether o r not they are in the best interests of patients. Drug companies want somebody wh o can manipulate in a very subtle way, said Dr. Frederick R. Taylor. Kathleen Sla ttery-Moschkau, a former sales representative [said] it all comes down to ways to manipulate the doctors. Some of the doctors receiving the most money sit on comm ittees that prepare guidelines instructing doctors nationwide about when to use medicines. It is critical that the experts who write clinical guidelines be prohi bited from having any conflicts of interest, said Dr. Marcia Angell, a former edi tor of The New England Journal of Medicine. Note: This article only scratches the surface of legal and illegal corruption by the powerful pharmaceutical industry. If you care about who really controls our health system, don't miss Dr. Marcia Angell's incredibly revealing essay showin

g the unbelievable wealth and influence of the drug companies available here.

Myths and misconceptions of the AIDS pandemic 2007-03-11, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/03/11/... Many myths and misconceptions about the AIDS pandemic are spread by the Joint Un ited Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and other mainstream AIDS agencies and activists. UNAIDS continues to perpetuate the fallacy that only aggressive HIV/ AIDS prevention programs ... can prevent the eruption of heterosexual HIV epidem ics. More than two decades of observation and analysis point to far different co nclusions -- there are no "next waves" of HIV epidemics just around the corner. UNAIDS and most AIDS activists reject this analysis. However, all available epid emiologic data show that only the highest risk sexual behavior ... drives HIV ep idemics among heterosexuals. Most AIDS activists claim, without any supporting d ata, that high HIV prevalence in groups of men who have sex with men or injectin g drug users will inevitably "bridge" over to the rest of the population and lea d to "generalized" HIV epidemics. This entrenched myth persists even though ther e is little, if any, HIV spread into any "general" population. Global and region al HIV rates have remained stable or have been decreasing during the past decade . HIV has remained concentrated in groups with the riskiest behavior. HIV is inc apable of epidemic spread among the vast majority of heterosexuals. Most of the public, policymakers and media have no inkling that the UNAIDS working assumptio n is inconsistent with established facts. Scarce health resources in countries w ith low HIV prevalence should be targeted primarily at those who are at the high est HIV risk, instead of being misdirected to the wider public.

Drug company 'hid' suicide link 2007-01-29, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6291773.stm Secret emails reveal that the UK's biggest drug company distorted trial results of an anti-depressant, covering up a link with suicide in teenagers. GlaxoSmithK line (GSK) attempted to show that Seroxat worked for depressed children despite failed clinical trials. And that GSK-employed ghostwriters influenced 'independe nt' academics. GSK faces action in the US where bereaved families have joined to gether to sue the company. As a result, GSK has been forced to open its confiden tial internal archive. Karen Barth Menzies is a partner in one of the firms repr esenting many of the families. She has examined thousands of the documents which are stored, box upon box, in an apartment in Malibu, California. She said: "Eve n when they have negative studies that show that this drug Seroxat is going to h arm some kids they still spin that study as remarkably effective and safe for ch ildren." An email from a public relations executive working for GSK ... said: "O riginally we had planned to do extensive media relations surrounding this study until we actually viewed the results. Essentially the study did not really show it was effective in treating adolescent depression, which is not something we wa nt to publicise." Seroxat was banned for under 18s in 2003 after the MHRA reveal ed that GSK's own studies showed the drug actually trebles the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviour in depressed children. Note: For more reliable information on how the drug companies put profits ahead of your health, click here.

Rise and shine: Wake up to an enhanced life

2007-01-25, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/01/25/ft.newdrugs A new breed of lifestyle drugs could allow us to choose how much we sleep, boost our memories and even allow us to enjoy ourselves more, without any side effect s. Will they unleash human capabilities never seen before or create a dystopian 24-hour society where we are dependent on drugs to regulate our lifestyle and be havior? One drug already available is modafinil, marketed as the vaguely Orwelli an-sounding Provigil. It enables those who take it to stay awake and alert for 4 8 hours. It is a eugeroic that delivers a feeling of wakefulness without the phy sical or mental jitter. There is already a market for it for those without any m edical need - it is developing a cult following among workaholics and students s tudying for exams. The military is also very interested in eugeroic. Their relia nce on amphetamines for lengthy operations have had catastrophic consequences in the past. The "friendly-fire" incidents in Afghanistan in 2002 when U.S. pilots killed Canadian troops was blamed on the "go pills" they had taken. The U.S. De fense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tested a compound called CX717 i n its quest to find a drug that can create a "metabolically dominant war-fighter of the future" able to function for seven days without sleep. CX717 is an ampak ine, a compound that increases the brains computing powers. It re-writes the rul es of what it takes to create a memory and just how strong those memories can be . Will cans of soda containing eugeroics or ampakines be as common as caffeine d rinks on the shelves of 24-hour stores? The potential is certainly there for a b rave new world of personality medication.

Molecule offers cancer hope 2007-01-17, Toronto Star (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/News/article/171898 In results that "astounded" scientists, an inexpensive molecule known as DCA was shown to shrink lung, breast and brain tumours in both animal and human tissue experiments. The study was published yesterday in the journal Cancer Cell. "I th ink DCA can be selective for cancer because it attacks a fundamental process of cancer that is unique to cancer cells," said Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, a profess or at the Edmonton university's medical school and one of the study's key author s. The molecule appears to repair damaged mitochondria in cancer cells. "When a cell is getting too old or doesn't function properly, the mitochondria are going to induce the cell death," lead study author Sebastien Bonnet said yesterday. B onnet says DCA or dichloroacetate appears to reverse the mitochondrial changes i n a wide range of cancers. "One of the really exciting things about this compoun d is that it might be able to treat many different forms of cancer because all f orms of cancer suppress mitochondrial function," Michelakis said. Bonnet says DC A may also provide an effective cancer treatment because its small size allows e asy absorption into the body, ensuring it can reach areas that other drugs canno t, such as brain tumours. Because it's been used to combat other ailments ... DC A has been shown to have few toxic effects on the body. Its previous use means i t can be immediately tested on humans. Unlike other cancer drugs, DCA did not ap pear to have any negative effect on normal cells. It could provide an extremely inexpensive cancer therapy because it's not patented. But ... the lack of a pate nt could lead to an unwillingness on the part of pharmaceutical companies to fun d expensive clinical trials. Note: Even these scientists realize that though this discovery could be a huge b enefit to mankind, because the drug companies will lose profits, they almost cer tainly will not fund studies. Expensive AIDS drugs with promising results, on th e other hand, are rushed through the studies to market. For more reliable, verif iable information on how hugely beneficial health advances are shut down to keep profits high, click here and here.

Industry 'paid top cancer expert' 2006-12-08, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6220440.stm The scientist who first linked smoking to lung cancer was [later] paid by a chem icals firm while investigating cancer risks in the industry. Professor Sir Richa rd Doll held a consultancy post with US firm Monsanto for more than 20 years. Th e BBC has seen private letters which show that Sir Richard ... received a US$1,5 00-a-day consultancy fee from Monsanto in the mid-1980s. During that time he inv estigated the potential cancer causing properties of the powerful herbicide Agen t Orange, made by the company. Sir Richard [argued] that there was no evidence t hat Agent Orange caused cancer. Professor Lennart Hardell, of the Oncology Depar tment at University Hospital Orebro, Sweden, has also studied the potential haza rds posed by Agent Orange. He was one of the scientists whose work was dismissed by Sir Richard. He said: "It's quite OK to have contacts with industry, but you should be fair and say 'well, I'm [working] as a consultant for Monsanto." Furt her documents obtained by The Guardian newspaper allegedly show that Sir Richard was also paid a 15,000 fee by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and chemic als companies Dow Chemicals and ICI for a review of vinyl chloride, used in plas tics, which largely cleared the chemical of any link with cancers apart from liv er cancer. Sir Richard's views on the chemical were used by the manufacturers' t rade association to defend it for more than a decade.

U.S. signs deal to stockpile anti-bird-flu drug 2006-07-01, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/01/MNGDMJNKP21.DTL&h... Federal health authorities have signed a two-year deal to help states buy more t han half a billion dollars worth of the antiviral drug Tamiflu as a hedge agains t a pandemic of deadly avian influenza, but there is a catch: States will have t o pay for three-quarters of it. Under terms of the deal negotiated with Roche by the Department of Health and Human Services, the states can order up to 31 mill ion packets of Tamiflu -- each containing a 10-pill course of treatment -- for a total cost of $596 million over the next two years. The Bush administration ann ounced late Friday that it had contracted with Swiss drugmaker Roche Laboratorie s Inc. to supply Tamiflu for stockpiles in all 50 states. The federal government , meanwhile, plans to build its own centralized stockpile. The plan is to have e nough antiviral drug in state and federal warehouses by December 2008 to treat 8 1 million people. Tamiflu is considered by scientists to be the first line of de fense against the H5N1 strain of bird flu. The disease is currently confined pri marily to chickens, ducks and some wild waterfowl, but researchers fear it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans. Note: No mention is made here that Donald Rumsfeld has already made millions fro m sales of Tamiflu, and that he was on the board of the company that developed t he drug. Many top researchers also believe there is little chance of avian flu m utating. Why are we spending hundreds of millions of dollars to combat a virus w hich has not even mutated yet? To verify these and other vital facts, see http:/ /www.WantToKnow.info/avianflu

Injected Cells Cure Tumors in Mice 2006-05-09, Los Angeles Times http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/09/science/sci-cancer9

White blood cells from mice that are naturally immune to cancer cured tumors in other mice and provided them with lifelong immunity to the disease, researchers reported Monday. The finding indicates the existence of a biological pathway pre viously unsuspected in any species. A small team of researchers is working to un derstand the genetic and immunological basis of the surprising phenomenon. Preli minary studies hint at the existence of a similar resistance in humans. Research ers hope that harnessing the biological process could lead to a new approach to treating cancer. But Dr. Zhen Cui of Wake Forest, whose team published the findi ngs in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, said he expected rapi d replication of the results because the findings were so clear-cut and easily o bserved. "This is a truly remarkable phenomenon -- and it really needs confirmat ion from other institutions," he said. The team took white blood cells from the immune mice...and injected them into mice already carrying a variety of tumors, some of which were extremely aggressive. In every case, the cancers were destroy ed, even if the cells were injected at a point distant from the tumor. Healthy t issues were not affected. The mice that received the cells, furthermore, were pr otected from new tumors for the rest of their lives. The researchers have no ide a how the immunity continues. Note: Why was this not in the headlines and not given a title like "Cancer Cure Found for Mice"? Most major papers didn't even report the story, and an article in the New York Times was titled simply "A Strain of Mice Appears Able to Resist Cancer Cells." Could it be that the power brokers in the medical industry know that a cancer cure would cause huge financial losses for them? For what happened to an incredible scientist in the past who discovered a cancer cure for humans, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/cancercuresroyalrife

Remember Anthrax? 2005-11-02, Newsweek http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9900947/site/newsweek Just as President George W. Bush is launching an ambitious plan to guard against an avian flu pandemic, an administration program to prepare for a potential ant hrax attack is running into new and unexpected hurdles. VaxGen Inc., a Californi a biotech firm that last year was awarded an $877.5 million contract to supply a newly invented, and so far unlicensed, anthrax vaccine, acknowledged this week that it won't begin to start deliveries to the federal government until the latt er part of next year -- six months later than it originally intended. For months , investigators on both sides of the aisle have expressed concerns that the admi nistration may have invested too big a chunk of the nation's biodefenses in one obscure and relatively untested company. Last year's decision by HHS to award th e contract to the little-known VaxGen is being scrutinized by at least two congr essional committees. The company's product will have to pass more large-scale te sts proving its safety and effectiveness on people before it is fully licensed b y the Food and Drug Administration for use on humans, and company officials say they do not expect it to be fully licensed at least until 2007. A New York Times report last December noted that...the company had faced lawsuits filed by inves tors who claimed VaxGen misinformed them about an AIDS vaccine that the company had heavily promoted but which later failed to work. Note: For more on how greed and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry affect s your health and wallet, see our Health Information Center.

Going (Down) by the Book 2005-09-17, New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/opinion/17tierney.html?ex=1284609600&en=7a8... When the Federal Emergency Management Agency's paperwork slowed the evacuation o f patients from the airport, Acadian's frustrated medics waited with empty helic opters. "At one point I had 10 helicopters on the ground waiting to go," said Ma rc Creswell, an Acadian medic, "but FEMA kept stonewalling us with paperwork. Me anwhile, every 30 or 40 minutes someone was dying." The company sent in outside doctors and nurses. FEMA rejected the help because the doctors and nurses weren' t certified members of a National Disaster Medical Team. "When the doctors asked why they couldn't help these critically ill people lying there unattended," Mr. Creswell recalled, "the FEMA people kept saying, 'You're not federalized.' "

Merck's infant vaccine stirs new controversy 2005-03-08, Newsday/Los Angeles Times http://www.nynewsday.com/news/health/ny-usglan084168623mar08,0,3713664.story Merck & Co. continued to supply infant vaccine containing a mercury preservative for two years after declaring that it had eliminated the chemical. Thimerosal, which is nearly 50 percent ethyl mercury, has largely been eliminated from most routine childhood vaccines, although it is present in most flu shots. More than 4,200 parents have filed claims in the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Progr am, alleging that their children suffered autism or other neurological disorders from mercury in their shots.

The Truth About the Drug Companies (Book Review) 2004-07-15, New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244 The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billio n) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33 .7 billion). Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved ver y far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new dru gs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this ind ustry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the m edical profession itself. The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all b ut merely variations of older drugs already on the market. Of the 78 drugs appro ved by the FDA in 2002, only 17 contained new active ingredients, and only seven of these were classified by the FDA as improvements over older drugs. [The] mar ket would collapse virtually overnight if the FDA made approval of new drugs con tingent on their being better in some important way than older drugs already on the market. Many medical schools and teaching hospitals set up "technology trans fer" offices to ... capitalize on faculty discoveries. Medical school faculty en tered into ... lucrative financial arrangements with drug companies, as did thei r parent institutions. One of the results has been a growing pro-industry bias i n medical research exactly where such bias doesn't belong. The industry ... fought the state of Maine all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in 2003 upheld Ma ine's right to bargain with drug companies for lower prices. This industry is ta king us for a ride, and there will be no real reform without an aroused and dete rmined public to make it happen. Note: The above book and book review was written by Dr. Marcia Angell, former ed itor in chief of the prestigious The New England Journal of Medicine. For more r eliable information on the health cover-up, click here.

Trade Secrets: A Moyers Report 2001-03-29, PBS http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/program/overview.html Twenty-three years to the day after he went to work with vinyl chloride and othe r toxic chemicals at a plant in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Dan Ross died of a rare brain cancer. He was 46 years old, convinced that his job had killed him. His w ife, Elaine, sued her husband's former employer and, over the next decade, the p rocess of legal discovery led deeper and deeper into the inner chambers of the c hemical industry and its Washington trade association. Hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were unearthed. In TRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT, journalist Bill Moyers and producer Sherry Jones investigated the Ross archive secrets the chemical industry never intended the public to see and discovered a shocking st ory. The confidential papers reveal the industry's early knowledge of vinyl chlo ride's dangerous effects, as well as the industry's long silence on the subject. The program also reports a much larger story. Buried in the thousands of pages of documents minutes from board meetings, reports from industry scientists, inte rnal memoranda is a never-before-told account of a campaign to limit the regulat ion of toxic chemicals and any liability for their effects, at the same that the companies work to withhold vital information about risks from workers, the gove rnment and the public. Over the last five decades, more than 75,000 chemicals ha ve been produced, turned into consumer products or released into the environment . Today, every man, woman and child has synthetic chemicals in their bodies. No child is born free of them. Are they safe? Does anyone know? Note: This article also mentions that even though Moyers never lived near a chem ical plant, tests showed that his body contained a chemical soup of 84 industria l chemicals, including 31 different types of PCBs, 13 different dioxins, and pes ticides such as DDT. Why are these chemicals so poorly studied and the dangerous effects hidden from us? For lots more from reliable sources on corporate corrup tion, click here.

The Flu Pandemic 1992-11-29, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/29/magazine/the-flu-pandemic.html The existence of the influenza vaccine ... may give us a sense of false security when it comes to the possibility of a pandemic outbreak of influenza. In fact, the flu vaccine must be reformulated each year to keep pace with the newest vari ants of this fast-mutating virus. The recipe for making the flu vaccine is simpl e. Take the current year's variant of the influenza virus, throw it into a stew with a strain of virus that leads to rapid proliferation. Incorporate the fast-g rowing strain into its own genes and start replicating it. From there, it's an e asy matter to take those plentiful viruses and attenuate them for a flu vaccine. But the scientists who must determine what virus will cause the next year's ill ness run a high chance of being wrong. Some observers have put the odds of succe ss at no better than 50-50. Even when they are right, the vaccine lasts only as long as that year's strain. Experts thought they saw big-league trouble coming i n February 1976, when a few cases of severe swine flu broke out among young mili tary recruits in Fort Dix, N.J. One of them, Pvt. David Lewis, 19, died. Lewis a nd four others were shown to be infected with the same H1N1 influenza virus as w as responsible for the 1918 pandemic. But the swine-flu pandemic never materiali zed. In retrospect, some critics now say 40 million Americans were vaccinated fo r nothing. In fact, the only real illness to result from the swine flu adventure was caused by the vaccine: about one thousand people developed Guillain-Barre s yndrome, a serious paralytic disease that could be traced directly to an immunol ogical response to the inoculation.

Note: This article also discusses how new, intensified farming techniques for ch ickens, pigs, and ducks are the prime breeding ground for viruses which spread a round the world. A powerful CBS 60 Minutes clip on the 1976 swine flu scare is a vailable here. The intrepid 60 Minutes team shows how greed and blatant corrupti on led to the death of hundreds and paralysis of thousands as a direct result of the vaccine developed that year, while only one person died from the flu. For l ots more, click here.

Bill Moyers on Health Care Reform 2009-12-18, PBS http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/watch.html [Bill Moyers:] Something's not right here. One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. A s for health care reform, you're about to be forced to buy insurance from compan ies whose stock is soaring, and that's just dandy with the White House. It's cap ital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were fut ures on the hog market. Some of the big insurance companies, Well Point, Cigna, United Health, all surged to a 52 week high in their share prices this week when it was clear there'd be no public option in the health care bill going through Congress right now. What does that tell you? ROBERT KUTTNER: Their strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies, the drug industry going in. And the dea l was, we're not going to attack your customer base, we're going to subsidize a new customer base. And that script was pre-cooked so it's not surprising that th is is what comes out the other side. Once the White House made this deal with th e insurance companies, the public option was never going to be anything more tha n a fig leaf. And over the summer and the fall, it got whittled down, whittled d own, whittled down to almost nothing and now it's really nothing. Note: For lots more on corporate and government corruption from reliable sources , click here and here.

Stop Annual Mammograms, Govt. Panel Tells Women Under 50 2009-11-16, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Health/OnCallPlusBreastCancerNews/mammogram-guidelines-... For the first time in 20 years, a government panel is telling women in their [fo rties] to stop getting routine mammograms and recommending that a host of other breast cancer screenings slow down. The United States Preventive Service Task Fo rce announced ... that it recommends against annual mammograms for women age 40 to 49 because, they say, the benefits of testing do not outweigh the "harms" and risks. USPSTF still recommends doctors start screening all women over age 50, b ut with a mammogram once every two years instead of annually. The task force als o ... said evidence was insufficient to recommend mammograms for women older tha n 74. The recommendations announced today, which contradict the American Cancer Society, have already pitted doctors, women, insurers and radiology groups in a fierce debate about who should get a mammogram and when. Many patient advocates wonder if money fueled the decision. However, Dr. Diana Petitti, vice chair of U SPSTF, said the task force never looked at costs in their research or their reco mmendations. Instead, the task force reviewed a number of studies to compile the benefits of mammograms, such as how many cancers were detected and how many liv es were saved, and the harms of mammograms, such as how many false positives pop ped up, how many unnecessary tests were done and how much extra radiation women were exposed to during the false positive testing.

Note: For a powerful article compiling important information and key quotes of d octors and researchers revealing the dangers of mammograms, click here.

Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies 2009-11-08, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08kristof.html Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It s a synthe tic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies to the tune of six pounds per American per year. More than 92 percent o f Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it ... to everyt hing from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital a bnormalities in boys and girls alike. Now it turns out it s in our food. Consumer Reports magazine tested an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relat ively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell s condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans. The maga zine also says it found BPA in the canned liquid version of Similac Advance infa nt formula ... and in canned Nestl Juicy Juice. The BPA in the food probably came from an interior coating used in many cans. More than 200 other studies have sh own links between low doses of BPA and adverse health effects, according to the Breast Cancer Fund, which is trying to ban the chemical from food and beverage c ontainers. The vast majority of independent scientists those not working for indu stry are concerned about early-life low-dose exposures to BPA, said Janet Gray, a Vassar College professor who is science adviser to the Breast Cancer Fund. Note: For more on BPA and other health issues, click here.

Outrage as Doctors' Group Allows Coca-Cola to Sponsor Health Advice 2009-11-05, Fox News/Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,571930,00.html Advice about soft drinks and health from one of the nation's largest doctors gro ups will soon be brought to you by Coke. The American Academy of Family Physicia ns has prompted outcry and lost members over its new six-figure alliance with th e Coca-Cola Co. The deal will fund educational materials about soft drinks for t he academy's consumer health and wellness Web site, www.FamilyDoctor.org. "CocaCola, like other sodas, causes enormous suffering and premature death by increas ing the risks of obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, gout, and cavities," Harvard University nutrition expert Dr. Walter Willett said in an e-mail. He said the ac ademy "should be a loud critic of these products and practices, but by signing w ith Coke their voice has almost surely been muzzled." Dr. Henry Blackburn, a Uni versity of Minnesota public health specialist, said the deal "will inevitably ha ve a chilling effect on the focus of their message in regards to sweet drinks." Note: For more on corruption in the medical/corporate complex, click here.

Nanomaterials Under Study by the E.P.A. 2009-09-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/science/earth/30nano.html The Environmental Protection Agency detailed its plans ... for research into the possible health and environmental risks of nanomaterials, tiny substances that are finding growing use in products like sunscreens and industrial adhesives. Th

e document ... calls for work to identify sources of nanomaterials, which can me asure as little as perhaps one-10,000th the width of a human hair. Research will also center on how they move in the environment, the problems they might cause for people, animals and plants, and how these problems could be avoided or mitig ated. The federal National Nanotechnology Initiative is charged with coordinatin g research by various agencies on the issue. But in a highly critical report las t year, the National Academy of Sciences dismissed its effort as inadequate. Lit tle is known about whether substances engineered at the nano scale persist and a ccumulate in the environment in unusual and potentially harmful ways. In August, a coalition of groups including Friends of the Earth and Consumers Union issued a report urging people to avoid sunscreens containing nano-forms of zinc oxide, saying their risks were unknown.

F.D.A. Reveals It Fell to a Push by Lawmakers 2009-09-25, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/health/policy/25knee.html The Food and Drug Administration [has admitted] that four New Jersey congressmen and its own former commissioner unduly influenced the process that led to its d ecision last year to approve a patch for injured knees. The agency s scientific re viewers repeatedly and unanimously over many years decided that the device, know n as Menaflex and manufactured by ReGen Biologics Inc., was unsafe because the d evice often failed, forcing patients to get another operation. But after receivi ng what an F.D.A. report described as extreme, unusual and persistent pressure from four Democrats from New Jersey ... agency managers overruled the scientists and approved the device for sale in December. All four legislators made their inquir ies within a few months of receiving significant campaign contributions from ReG en, which is based in New Jersey, but all said they had acted appropriately and were not influenced by the money. Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, the former drug agency s commissioner, said he had acted properly. The agency has never before pub licly questioned the process behind one of its approvals, never admitted that a regulatory decision was influenced by politics, and never accused a former commi ssioner of questionable conduct. The report, written by top agency officials, sa id that Dr. von Eschenbach, who resigned as F.D.A. commissioner in January, beca me as a result of political pressure personally engaged in the details of a proce ss usually coordinated by scientific staff. One agency manager concluded that Dr. von Eschenbach was demanding not only an expedited process but also an outcome i n favor of ReGen, the report stated. Note: For a powerful summary of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.

Vaccine skepticism is in the air 2009-09-14, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-hew-no-fear-side14-2009sep14,0,4079... The nation's political crosscurrents appear to have created vaccine skeptics of many stripes. Many citizens are less inclined than ever to accept the warnings o f the Department of Health and Human Services or the recommendations of its Cent ers for Disease Control and Prevention, says Sandra Quinn, a University of Pitts burgh public health professor who has just completed a national survey of attitu des about the flu vaccine. Vaccine refusers have long decried vaccine mandates a nd campaigns as an unwarranted intrusion of parents' and local school boards' ri ghts. For a new generation of vaccine skeptics, there are new objects of distrus t. For some, it flows from a suspicion of the multinational corporations that de velop and manufacture vaccines. For others, it comes from a belief that media ou

tlets have hyped the pandemic flu story to secure the attention of readers and t he revenue of advertisers. And many simply doubt the competency and independence of government agencies, which they believe are too inept, overwhelmed or co-opt ed by corporate interests to secure the safety of the nation's drugs and food su pply. Adding to the wariness toward the forthcoming H1N1 vaccine is the fact tha t the formulations used on patients in the United States might require the use o f adjuvants -- special agents added to a vaccine mix that rev up the immune syst em and foster a stronger immune response. While adjuvants have been used in vacc ines in Europe for many years, the FDA has never approved them for widespread us e in the United States. Some vaccine critics in Great Britain have charged that one adjuvant used in European formulations -- squalene -- is associated with a w ide range of vague but persistent symptoms. Note: Adjuvants are being added to vaccines, yet the resulting combined formula is not being tested for safety; the individual components are tested separately. The process for the testing of vaccines is endangering our health. For lots mor e on the dangers of vaccines and squalene in particular, read respected Dr. Jose ph Mercola's incisive article available here.

Big Food vs. Big Insurance 2009-09-10, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html To listen to President Obama, or to just about anyone else in the health care de bate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is th perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and proce e system itself dures, lack of competition, and greed. No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that t he United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on h ealth care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the adminis tration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disea se linked to diet. That s why our success in bringing health care costs under cont rol ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to ta ke on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry. Accor ding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat preventable chronic diseases. Not all of these di seases are linked to diet there s smoking, for instance but many, if not most, of them are. We re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diab etes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over th e past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care. The America n way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health ca re. Note: For a detailed overview of some of the critical risks of the industriallyengineered modern American diet, click here.

CDC leery of estimates about swine flu's toll 2009-08-26, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/27/health/main5268541.shtml U.S. government health officials are urging Americans not to panic over estimate s that up to 90,000 people might die in the United States from swine flu this ye

ar. "Everything we've seen in the U.S. and everything we've seen around the worl d suggests we won't see that kind of number if the virus doesn't change," said D r. Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the swine flu seems quite easy to catch, it so far hasn't been more deadly than the flu strains seen every fall and winter many people have only mild illness. And close genetic tracking of the new virus as it circled the globe over the las t five months so far has shown no sign that it's mutating to become more virulen t. Still, the CDC has been preparing for a worst-case flu season as a precaution in July working from an estimate slightly more grim than one that made headline s this week to make sure that if the virus suddenly worsened or vaccination plan s fell through, health authorities would know how to react. On Monday the White House released a report from a group of presidential advisers that included a sc enario where anywhere from 30 percent to half of the population could catch what doctors call the "2009 H1N1" flu, and death possibilities ranged from 30,000 to 90,000. "We don't think that's the most likely scenario," CDC flu specialist Dr . Anne Schuchat said of the presidential advisers' high-end tally. In a regular flu season, up to 20 per cent of the population is infected and 36,000 die. Note: Like the avian flu several years ago, the swine flu is turning out to be l argely fear-mongering which has poured billions of dollars into the deep pockets of the medical/industrial complex. For lots more reliable information from majo r media reports on this, click here.

Doctors may refuse swine flu vaccine 2009-08-24, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/24/doctors-refuse-swine-flu-vaccine Many GPs, as well as their patients, may be reluctant to be immunised against sw ine flu once a vaccine is developed, surveys suggest today. A survey of GPs publ ished on Healthcare Republic, the website of GP magazine, found that up to 60% o f GPs may decline vaccination. Although the numbers who responded were small 216 GPs they are in line with a much bigger survey of nurses published a week ago b y Nursing Times, which found that a third of 1,500 nurses would refuse vaccinati on. A Canadian study published today in the journal Emerging Health Threats sugg ests the public, too, will have reservations that must be overcome if a vaccinat ion campaign is to be successful in the autumn or winter. The study, which used focus groups to establish the likely response of different people to a vaccine, pointed to the need to win over people who believe that alternative therapies an d a good diet are a better option than vaccines. But the biggest problem in pers uading people and healthcare professionals to have the jab may be the relative s hortage of evidence from trials about its safety and efficacy. Because of the ur gent need for a vaccine, testing will be limited. Among the GPs who responded to the survey published by Healthcare Republic, 29% said they would not choose to have the vaccine and 29% said they were unsure whether or not they would. The bi ggest reason given by those who said they would not have it was concern that the safety trials would not be adequate: 71.3% said they were "concerned that the v accine has not yet been through sufficient trials to guarantee safety". Half 50. 4% said they "believe that swine flu is too mild to justify taking the vaccine". Note: Yet the Massachusetts Senate has now passed a bill which would impose fine s up to $1,000 and jail up to 30 days for those who refuse vaccines or quarantin e orders in a health emergency. Other states are considering similar legislation . For lots more on the real dangers of the swine flu vaccine, click here.

Flu Drugs Inappropriate for Healthy Adults: Study 2009-08-21, ABC News

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=8385370 The flu drugs Tamiflu and Relenza may not be worthwhile to treat seasonal influe nza in healthy adults, British researchers reported on Friday. "Recommending the use of antiviral drugs for the treatment of people presenting with symptoms is unlikely to be the most appropriate course of action," wrote Jane Burch of the U niversity of York and colleagues. Their study, published in the Lancet Infectiou s Diseases, supports an advisory from the World Health Organization that says he althy patients who get H1N1 swine flu without suffering complications do not nee d to be treated with antivirals. Burch's team reviewed many different published studies on Tamiflu and Relenza. "We present the results for healthy adults and p eople at-risk of influenza-related complications," they wrote. Both drugs shaved about half a day, on average, off the time patients were ill, they found. Influ enza usually affects people for about a week. The drugs worked a little better i n people who have a high risk of complications, such as patients with diabetes o r asthma, with Relenza cutting sickness by almost a day and Tamiflu by three-qua rters of a day, on average. This suggests the drugs should be reserved for peopl e who need them the most, the researchers concluded. Note: To read a powerful account of the real dangers of the swine flu scare, cli ck here.

Flu Vaccine Panel Creates Priority List 2009-07-30, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/29/AR20090729036... A complicated list of who should get [swine] flu vaccine in the fall is now set. When the vaccine starts arriving in September, first in line will be pregnant w omen; the caretakers of infants; children and young adults; older people with ch ronic illness; and health-care workers. That's the advice of a 15-member committ ee of experts, which met all day Wednesday at the Centers for Disease Control an d Prevention in Atlanta to advise the federal government on vaccine policy. The priority list names targeted groups and suggests the order in which they should be vaccinated. "The results of this meeting will kick planning into high gear," said Pascale Wortley of the CDC's Immunization Services Division. "This is a wat ershed moment." All that's missing is the vaccine, knowledge of how well it work s and the nitty-gritty details of how to deliver it to people's arms and noses. The vaccine will come in two forms: the traditional flu shot and a "live" vaccin e squirted into the nose that contains a weakened version of the new virus. Some of the vaccine will be stored in multi-dose vials containing thimerosal, an ant ibacterial additive that contains mercury. But there will also be single-dose sy ringes without thimerosal, a substance that some assert is harmful to children. Among the many unanswered questions is whether two doses will be necessary to pr ovide full protection, how close in time two shots can be given and how big the dose will be. Vaccination programs may start before the answers are known. Note: Why is thimerosal being used? It is a mercury additive around which there appears to be a major cover-up. For several other revealing articles which sugge st an dangerous agenda with the swine flu vaccine, click here.

Agencies to set up mass swine flu vaccinations 2009-07-21, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/21/BA6H18PA5J.DTL Public health experts are gearing up for swine flu vaccinations this fall in wha t could be the largest mass-immunization campaign since the polio vaccine was in

troduced more than 50 years ago. Local public health agencies will bear much of the responsibility for vaccinating the public. For now, there are more questions than answers with regard to flu vaccinations, including how much of the vaccine will be made, when it will available, and who will get it first. In fact, the f ederal government has not officially announced plans to make a vaccine widely av ailable, although it is expected to do so by the end of summer. "There's still a lot of information we have to figure out, and we're learning as we go," said Dr . Mantu Davis, deputy health officer with the Alameda County Public Health Depar tment. "It's definitely a larger vaccination than anything we've seen, or anythi ng in my lifetime." California authorities designed a mass vaccination plan year s ago, under the assumption of a deadly pandemic flu and a limited vaccine suppl y, said Dr. John Talarico with the state public health department's Center for I nfectious Disease. That plan is being revised, given that swine flu seems to be fairly mild so far and that a relatively large amount of vaccine may be availabl e, even if it's not enough to give to everyone at once. A swine flu vaccine is s till being designed, and the World Health Organization reported last week that a licensed version may not be available until the end of the year - weeks after t he start of the flu season. An unlicensed vaccine - one that is still being test ed but is deemed safe enough for the general public - may be available sooner. Note: After hundreds died and flu in 1976, how can they be s more on the swine flu scare armaceutical corporations and thousands were crippled by a vaccine for the swine talking about using an unlicensed vaccine? For lot and the billions in profits for well-connnected ph their major investors, click here.

Legal immunity set for swine flu vaccine makers 2009-07-20, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31971355/ns/health-swine_flu The last time the government embarked on a major vaccine campaign against a new swine flu, thousands filed claims contending they suffered side effects from the shots. This time, the government has already taken steps to head that off. Vacc ine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from a ny new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Hum an Services Kathleen Sebelius, government health officials said Friday. Since th e 1980s, the government has protected vaccine makers against lawsuits over the u se of childhood vaccines. The document signed by Sebelius last month grants immu nity to those making a swine flu vaccine, under the provisions of a 2006 law for public health emergencies. It allows for a compensation fund, if needed. The go vernment takes such steps to encourage drug companies to make vaccines, and it's worked. Federal officials have contracted with five manufacturers to make a swi ne flu vaccine. The last time the government faced a new swine flu virus was in 1976. Federal officials vaccinated 40 million Americans during a national campai gn. A pandemic never materialized, but thousands who got the shots filed injury claims, saying they suffered a paralyzing condition called Guillain-Barre Syndro me or other side effects. Note: Note for a powerfully revealing CBS report on blatant fear mongering and p rofiteering from the 1976 swine flue scare, click here. For many revealing repor ts on corruption in the medical/governmental complex, click here.

Chemicals and Our Health 2009-07-16, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/opinion/16kristof.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&... However careful you are about your health, your body is almost certainly home to

troubling chemicals called phthalates. These are ubiquitous in modern life, fou nd in plastic bottles, cosmetics, some toys, hair conditioners, and fragrances a nd many scientists have linked them to everything from sexual deformities in bab ies to obesity and diabetes. The problem is that phthalates suppress male hormon es and sometimes mimic female hormones. Chemicals called endocrine disruptors ar e believed to explain the proliferation of intersex fish male fish that produce eg gs as well as sexual deformities in animals and humans. Phthalates ... are among the most common endocrine disruptors, and among the most difficult to avoid. Th ey re even in tap water, and levels soar in certain plastic water bottles. In girl s, some research suggests that phthalates may cause early onset puberty. Most vu lnerable of all, it seems, are male fetuses in the first trimester of pregnancy, just as they are differentiating their sex. At that stage, scholars believe, ph thalates may feminize these boys. Commonly used phthalates may undervirilize humans , concluded a study by the University of Rochester. There has also been a flurry of scientific articles questioning whether endocrine disruptors are tied to obes ity, autism and allergies, although the evidence there is less firm than with ge nital abnormalities and depressed sperm count. Dr. Theo Colborn, the founder of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange, ... tells researchers working with her to tos s out plastic water bottles and use stainless steel instead. I don t have plastic f ood containers in my house, she added. I use glass. Note: For many more important health reports from reliable sources, click here.

Wendell Potter on Profits Before Patients 2009-07-10, PBS Bill Moyers Journal http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/profile.html Last month, testimony in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by a former health insurance insider named Wendell Potter ma de news even before it occurred: CBS NEWS headlined: "Cigna Whistleblower to Tes tify." After Potter's testimony the industry scrambled to do damage control: "In surers defend rescissions, take heat for lack of transparency." In his first ext ended television interview since leaving the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter tells Bill Moyers why he left his successful career as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, one of the nation's largest insurers, and decided to speak out against the industry. Potter began his trip from health care spokesperson t o reform advocate while back home in Tennessee. Potter attended a "health care e xpedition," a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, "It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates , I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls." Looking back over hi s long career, Potter sees an industry corrupted by Wall Street expectations and greed. According to Potter, insurers have every incentive to deny coverage ever y dollar they don't pay out to a claim is a dollar they can add to their profits , and Wall Street investors demand they pay out less every year. Under these con ditions, Potter says, "You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations. " Note: To educate yourself on this important issue, watch this revealing PBS Bill Moyers segment available here.

Swine flu shots may go to kids first, Sebelius says 2009-06-16, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-06-16-swine-flu-vaccine_N.htm

Schoolchildren could be first in line for swine flu vaccine this fall and school s are being put on notice that they might even be turned into shot clinics. Heal th and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday she is urging sch ool superintendents around the country to spend the summer preparing for that po ssibility, if the government goes ahead with mass vaccinations. "If you think ab out vaccinating kids, schools are the logical place," Sebelius told The Associat ed Press. No decision has been made yet on whether and how to vaccinate millions of Americans against the new flu strain that the World Health Organization last week formally dubbed a pandemic, meaning it now is circulating the globe unchec ked. But the U.S. is pouring money into development of a vaccine in anticipation of giving at least some people the shots. While swine flu doesn't yet seem any more lethal than the regular flu that each winter kills 36,000 people in the U.S . alone, scientists fear it may morph into a more dangerous type. Even in its cu rrent form, the WHO says about half of the more than 160 people worldwide killed by swine flu so far were previously young and healthy. If that trend continues, "the target may be school-age children as a first priority" for vaccination, Se belius said Tuesday. "That's being watched carefully." The last mass vaccination against a different swine flu, in the U.S. in 1976, was marred by reports of a paralyzing side effect for a feared outbreak that never happened. The secretary said: "The worst of all worlds is to have the vaccine cause more damage than the flu potential." Note: This article admits "swine flu doesn't yet seem any more lethal than the r egular flu that each winter kills 36,000 people in the U.S. alone." Be very caut ious around any vaccination campaign. Vaccines are extremely poorly regulated an d known to fill the wallets of rich politicians invested in them. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on this, click here.

Drug Agency May Reveal More Data on Actions 2009-06-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/health/policy/02fda.html For years, the Food and Drug Administration has withheld information about drugs and medical devices from the public when their makers cite trade secrecy even i n cases where the agency suspects that the products are causing serious illness or death. Now the new leadership at the F.D.A. may change that. The Obama admini stration ... is setting up a task force within the agency to recommend ways to r eveal more information about F.D.A. decisions, possibly including the disclosure of now secret data about drugs and devices under study. The goal is to open up a system in which the agency failed to inform the public that a widely prescribe d heartburn drug was especially toxic to babies; that a diabetes medicine and a painkiller increased heart attack risks; and that antidepressants increased suic idal thoughts and behavior in children and teenagers. Many people have been harme d over the last decade because the F.D.A. has treated clinical trial results of drugs and devices as trade secrets, said Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic who has campaigned for the release of such information. In 200 7, Dr. Nissen published a study showing that Avandia, a popular diabetes medicin e made by GlaxoSmithKline, increased the risk of heart attack by 42 percent. The data Dr. Nissen used was made public because of a lawsuit, but the agency had k nown of the possible risk for nearly two years. Repeated scandals led the Bush a dministration in 2005 to promise to make public its product safety investigation s more quickly, but it did not recommend changing the laws and regulations that govern the release of trade secrets and agency records. Note: For a powerful summary of corrupt practices by government and corporations in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.

Life-threatening disease is the price we pay for cheap meat 2009-05-01, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-lif... A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue that [it] is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So i s the way we produce our food really making us sick as a pig? The scientific evi dence increasingly suggests that we have unwittingly invented an artificial way to accelerate the evolution of these deadly viruses and pump them out across the world. They are called factory farms. They manufacture low-cost flesh, with a s ide-dish of viruses to go. In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed sno ut-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces. T he virus ... has a pool of thousands [of pigs], constantly infecting and reinfec ting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. The ammoni um from the waste they live above burns the pigs' respiratory tracts, making it easier yet for viruses to enter them. Better still, the pigs' immune systems are in free-fall. They are stressed, depressed, and permanently in panic, making th em far easier to infect. There is no fresh air or sunlight to bolster their natu ral powers of resistance. They live in air thick with viral loads, and they are exposed every time they breathe in. As Dr Michael Greger, director of Public Hea lth and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: "Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these supe r-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of thes e factory farms as possible." Note: For many important reports on health issues from reliable sources, click h ere.

Risky therapy may cream peanut allergy 2009-03-15, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29707036 Scientists have the first evidence that life-threatening peanut allergies may be cured one day. A few kids now are allergy-free thanks to a scary treatment tiny amounts of the very food that endangered them. Don t try this at home. Doctors mo nitored the youngsters closely in case they needed rescue, and there s no way to d ice a peanut as small as the treatment doses required. But over several years, t he children s bodies learned to tolerate peanuts. Immune-system tests show no sign of remaining allergy in five youngsters, and others can withstand amounts that once would have left them wheezing or worse. We re optimistic that they have lost t heir peanut allergy, said the lead researcher, Dr. Wesley Burks, Duke s allergy chi ef. Rhonda Cassada['s] 7-year-old son, Ryan, has been labeled allergy-free for t wo years and counting. It s a big change for a child who couldn t tolerate one-sixth of a peanut when he entered the study at age 2 1/2. By 5, Ryan could eat a whop ping 15 peanuts at a time with no sign of a reaction. More rigorous research is under way to confirm the pilot study, released Sunday at a meeting of the Americ an Academy of Asthma and Immunology. If it pans out, the approach could mark a m ajor advance for an allergy that afflicts 1.8 million people in the United State s. Millions of people have food allergies and peanut allergy is considered the m ost dangerous, with life-threatening reactions possible from trace amounts. It a ccounts for most of the 30,000 emergency-room visits and up to 200 deaths attrib uted to food allergies each year. Although some children outgrow peanut allergy, that s rare among the severely affected. There s no way to avoid a reaction other t han avoiding peanuts. Note: For many hopeful reports on health issues from major media sources, click

here.

FDA Will Continue To Study Chemical: No Action Planned on Bisphenol A 2008-12-16, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/15/AR20081215029... The Food and Drug Administration, criticized by its own scientific advisers for ignoring available data about health risks posed by a chemical found in everyday plastic, said yesterday it has no plans to amend its position on the substance but will continue to study it. The agency has been reviewing its risk assessment s for bisphenol A, a chemical used to harden plastic that is found in a wide var iety of products, from baby bottles to compact discs to the lining of canned goo ds. The chemical, commonly called BPA, mimics estrogen and may disrupt the body' s carefully calibrated endocrine system. Over the past decade, more than 130 stu dies have linked BPA to breast cancer, obesity, diabetes, neurological problems and other disorders. Much of the new research suggests that BPA has an effect at very low doses -- lower than the current safety standard set by the FDA. The mo st prominent finding was by the National Toxicology Program, part of the Nationa l Institutes of Health, which reported that there is "some concern" that BPA may affect the brain and behavioral development of fetuses, infants and young child ren. In October, the FDA was faulted by its own panel of independent science adv isers, who said the agency's position on BPA was scientifically flawed. Yesterda y, Laura Tarantino, director of the FDA's Office of Food Additive Safety, said t he FDA will respond to that recommendation by performing additional analysis. Sh e said she did not know if it would last months or years. "I can't tell you when we will finalize this," she said. Note: For important new results in health research from reliable sources, click here.

Standing in Someone Else s Shoes, Almost for Real 2008-12-02, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/health/02mind.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&page... Neuroscientists have shown that they can [create] a body swapping illusion that co uld have a profound effect on a range of therapeutic techniques. At the annual m eeting of the Society for Neuroscience last month, Swedish researchers presented evidence that the brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can qui ckly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own. You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in blac k and vice versa, said Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockhol m. The technique is simple. A subject stands or sits opposite the scientist, as if engaged in an interview. Both are wearing headsets, with special goggles, the scientist s containing small film cameras. The goggles are rigged so the subject sees what the scientist sees: to the right and left are the scientist s arms, and below is the scientist s body. To add a physical element, the researchers have eac h person squeeze the other s hand, as if in a handshake. Now the subject can see a nd feel the new body. In a matter of seconds, the illusion is complete. In a serie s of studies, using mannequins and stroking both bodies bellies simultaneously, t he Karolinska researchers have found that men and women say they not only feel t hey have taken on the new body, but also unconsciously cringe when it is poked o r threatened. In previous work, neuroscientists have induced various kinds of ou t-of-body experiences using similar techniques. The brain is so easily tricked, they say, precisely because it has spent a lifetime in its own body.

Boston launches flu shot tracking 2008-11-21, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/11/21/boston_lau... Using technology originally developed for mass disasters, Boston disease tracker s are embarking on a novel experiment - one of the first in the country - aimed at eventually creating a citywide registry of everyone who has had a flu vaccina tion. The resulting vaccination map would allow swift intervention in neighborho ods left vulnerable to the fast-moving respiratory illness. The trial starts thi s afternoon, when several hundred people are expected to queue up for immunizati ons at the headquarters of the Boston Public Health Commission. Each of them wil l get a bracelet printed with a unique identifier code. Information about the va ccine's recipients, and the shot, will be entered into handheld devices similar to those used by delivery truck drivers. Infectious disease specialists in Bosto n and elsewhere predicted that the registry approach could prove even more usefu l if something more sinister strikes: a bioterrorism attack or the long-feared a rrival of a global flu epidemic. In such crises, the registry could be used to t rack who received a special vaccine or antidote to a deadly germ. "Anything you can do to better pinpoint who's vaccinated and who's not, that's absolutely vita l," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Resear ch & Policy at the University of Minnesota. "I wish more cities were doing this kind of thing." When people arrive for their shots, they will get an ID bracelet with a barcode. Next, basic information - name, age, gender, address - will be entered into the patient tracking database. There will be electronic records, to o, of who gave the vaccine and whether it was injected into the right arm or the left, and time-stamped for that day. Note: For more on the serious risks and dangers posed by vaccines, click here an d here.

Gift to Center Headed by FDA Panel Chairman Raises Questions 2008-10-13, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/12/AR20081012015... A retired medical supply manufacturer who considers bisphenol A to be "perfectly safe" gave $5 million to the research center headed by the chairman of a Food a nd Drug Administration panel about to rule on the chemical's safety. The July do nation from Charles Gelman is nearly 50 times the annual budget of the Universit y of Michigan Risk Science Center, where Martin Philbert is founder and co-direc tor. Philbert did not disclose the donation to the FDA, and agency officials lea rned of it when reporters asked about it. Gelman said he considers the chemical, which is used to make baby bottles and aluminum can liners, to be safe. He said he had made his views clear to Philbert in several conversations. Philbert deni ed that. Philbert's committee is expected to release its opinion this month. The decision of Philbert's committee is expected to have huge implications on the r egulation and sale of the chemical in items such as baby bottles, reusable food containers and plastic wraps. Since the late 1990s, studies have linked bispheno l A to cancer, heart disease, obesity, reproductive failures and hyperactivity i n laboratory animals. Gelman, a retired manufacturer of syringes and medical fil tration devices, has fought against government regulation of pollutants for year s. He is an anti-regulation activist and an outspoken supporter of organizations such as JunkScience.com, the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Inst itute that attack the credibility of government and academic scientists on such topics as global warming and hazardous chemicals. Note: For key reports on government corruption from reliable sources, click here .

Researchers Question Wide Use of HPV Vaccines 2008-08-21, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/health/21vaccine.html?partner=rssuserland&e... Two vaccines against cervical cancer are being widely used without sufficient ev idence about whether they are worth their high cost or even whether they will ef fectively stop women from getting the disease, two articles in this week s New Eng land Journal of Medicine conclude. Both vaccines target the human papillomavirus , a common sexually transmitted virus that usually causes no symptoms and is cle ared by the immune system, but which can in very rare cases become chronic and c ause cervical cancer. The two vaccines, Gardasil by Merck Sharp & Dohme and Cerv arix by GlaxoSmithKline, target two strains of the virus that together cause an estimated 70 percent of cervical cancers. Despite great expectations and promisin g results of clinical trials, we still lack sufficient evidence of an effective vaccine against cervical cancer, Dr. Charlotte J. Haug ... wrote in an editorial in Thursday s issue of The New England Journal. With so many essential questions st ill unanswered, there is good reason to be cautious. The vaccines have been studi ed for a relatively short period both were licensed in 2006 and have been studie d in clinical trials for at most six and a half years. Researchers have not yet demonstrated how long the immunity will last, or whether eliminating some strain s of cancer-causing virus will decrease the body s natural immunity to other strai ns. Because cervical cancer develops only after years of chronic infection with HPV, Dr. Haug said there was not yet absolute proof that protection against thes e two strains of the virus would ultimately reduce rates of cervical cancer.

Buzzzzzzzz kill 2008-07-30, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-oe-meyerhoff30-2008jul30,0,2821586.story It's likely that most people have never heard of Gaucho. And no, it's not a Sout h American cowboy. I'm talking about a pesticide. There is increasing reason to believe that Gaucho and other members of a family of highly toxic chemicals -- n eonicotinoids -- may be responsible for the deaths of billions of honeybees worl dwide. Some scientists believe that these pesticides, which are applied to seeds , travel systemically through the plant and leave residues that contaminate the pollen, resulting in bee death or paralysis. The French refer to the effect as " mad bee disease" and in 1999 were the first to ban the use of these chemicals, w hich are currently only marketed by Bayer (the aspirin people) under the trade n ames Gaucho and Pancho. Germany followed suit this year. So why did the U.S. Env ironmental Protection Agency in 2002 grant an "emergency" exemption allowing inc reased use of Gaucho -- typically invoked during a major infestation -- when onl y a few beetles were found in blueberries? Why did the agency also grant a "cond itional" registration for its close relative, Pancho, allowing the chemical on t he market with only partial testing? And why is the agency, hiding behind a curt ain of "trade secrets," still refusing to disclose whether the additional tests required of companies in such cases were conducted and, if so, with what results ? [Pesticides] are regulated ...- under the antiquated Federal Insecticide, Fung icide and Rodenticide Act. This law allows a chemical on the market unless it's proved to pose "an unreasonable risk," far too weak a standard. Note: For many revealing reports on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.

Pittsburgh Cancer Center Warns of Cell Phone Risks 2008-07-23, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=5436718 The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warnin g to his faculty and staff: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. The warning [came] from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the Univer sity of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Herberman is basing his alarm on early unpu blished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science and he belie ves people should take action now especially when it comes to children. "Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn't wait for a definitive study to c ome out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later," Herberman s aid. [His] advice is sure to raise concern among many cell phone users and espec ially parents. In the memo he sent to about 3,000 faculty and staff, he says chi ldren should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing. Adults should keep the phone away from the head and use the speaker phone or a wireless headset, he says. He even warns against using cell phones in public places like a bus because it exposes others to the phone's electromagnet ic fields. Herberman cites a "growing body of literature linking long-term cell phone use to possible adverse health effects including cancer." "Although the ev idence is still controversial, I am convinced that there are sufficient data to warrant issuing an advisory to share some precautionary advice on cell phone use ," he wrote in his memo. Note: For many important reports on health issues, click here.

The Benefits of Biofeedback 2008-06-05, U.S. News and World Report http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/living-well-usn/2008/06/05/the-benef... Because she was planning to get pregnant, Janelle ... decided last year to go of f powerful medication for stress-induced migraines in favor of a more fetus-frie ndly therapy. With sensors attached to her fingertips, neck, and abdomen, she sp ent 20 sessions learning to relax her muscles and slow her breathing and heart r ate while watching a computer monitor for proof of the desired result. Eventuall y, she was able to do the work on her own. "The migraine pain doesn't go away co mpletely," says the 39-year-old from Bethesda, Md., who has remained off medicat ion since her son's birth two months ago. "But it's been greatly reduced, and I' m able to deal with it better." Like meditation and yoga, the biofeedback method that Janelle now swears by is enjoying a sort of renaissance; while it's been a round for some 40 years, a growing body of research has brought it to the mainst ream, indicating that it can relieve some hard-to-manage conditions exacerbated by stress. Many major hospitals and clinics, including Harvard's Brigham and Wom en's Hospital and Duke University Medical Center, now offer biofeedback to peopl e with hypertension and jaw pain as well as headaches, for example. Biofeedback' s major appeal is that one series of sessions purportedly teaches a set of skill s you can use for life without side effects. And it's pre-emptive. "Biofeedback te aches you to identify early signs that stress is starting to get to you and to b ring that stress reaction down before it causes physical symptoms," explains Fra nk Andrasik, a professor of psychology at the University of West Florida in Pens acola. Note: For the Institute of HeartMath's pioneering research in this field, click here. For other exciting reports on new health research, click here.

'Silver' mercury fillings may harm pregnant women

2008-06-05, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/health/chi-julie-silver-link,0,6352807... Amalgam or 'silver' dental fillings contain mercury which may have neurotoxic ef fects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetuses, according to th e U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "Pregnant women and persons who may have a health condition that makes them more sensitive to mercury exposure, including i ndividuals with existing high levels of mercury bioburden, should not avoid seek ing dental care, but should discuss options with their health practitioner," the agency said in the udpated "Question and Answer" fact sheet about dental amalga ms. The FDA will issue a more specific rule next year for fillings that contain mercury, FDA spokeswoman Peper Long [said]. Dental amalgam, which is made up of liquid mercury and a powder containing silver, tin, copper, zinc and other metal s, has long been used to fill or restore teeth that have cavities. The mercury c oncentration in dental amalgams is generally about 50 percent by weight, while t he silver concentration ranges from 20 to 35 percent, according to the FDA. Note: For another excellent ABC News article on this topic, click here. For lots more on health issues from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

Mercury Teeth Fillings May Harm Some: FDA 2008-06-04, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/wireStory?id=5001657 Silver-colored metal dental fillings contain mercury that may cause health probl ems in pregnant women, children and fetuses, the Food and Drug Administration sa id, after settling a related lawsuit. As part of the settlement with several con sumer advocacy groups, the FDA agreed to alert consumers about the potential ris ks ... and to issue a more specific rule next year for fillings that contain mer cury. "Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetuses," the FDA said. "Pregnant wo men and persons who may have a health condition that makes them more sensitive t o mercury exposure, including individuals with existing high levels of mercury b ioburden, should not avoid seeking dental care, but should discuss options with their health practitioner," the agency said. The lawsuit settlement was reached ... with several advocacy groups, including Moms Against Mercury, which had soug ht to have mercury fillings removed from the U.S. market. Some consumer groups c ontend the fillings can trigger a range of health problems such as multiple scle rosis and Alzheimer's disease. Mercury has been linked to brain and kidney damag e at certain levels. Amalgams contain half mercury and half a combination of oth er metals. Charles Brown, a lawyer for one of the groups called Consumers for De ntal Choice, said the agency's move represented an about-face. "Gone, gone, gone are all of FDA's claims that no science exists that amalgam is unsafe," he said . Note: For many reliable reports on health issues, click here.

Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer 2008-06-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/health/03well.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=... What do brain surgeons know about cellphone safety that the rest of us don t? Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that th ey did not hold cellphones next to their ears. I think the safe practice, said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain. Dr. Vini Khur

ana, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Australian National Universit y who is an outspoken critic of cellphones, said: I use it on the speaker-phone m ode. I do not hold it to my ear. And CNN s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, said that like Dr. Black he used an earpiece. In recent studies that suggest a risk, ... tumors tend to occu r on the same side of the head where the patient typically holds the phone. The most important of these studies is called Interphone, a vast research effort in 13 countries, including Canada, Israel and several in Europe. Some of the resear ch suggests a link between cellphone use and three types of tumors: glioma; canc er of the parotid, a salivary gland near the ear; and acoustic neuroma, a tumor that essentially occurs where the ear meets the brain. Last year, The American J ournal of Epidemiology published data from Israel finding a 58 percent higher ri sk of parotid gland tumors among heavy cellphone users. Also last year, a Swedis h analysis of 16 studies in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine showed a doubling of risk for acoustic neuroma and glioma after 10 years of heav y cellphone use. Note: For a treasure trove of important reports on health issues from reliable s ources, click here.

Doctor finds higher calling when death knocks 2008-05-04, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/04/BA8MUSL28.DTL Dr. Frank Artress looked down at his fingers. His nail beds were turning blue. H e was running out of oxygen near the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. A cardiac anes thesiologist, Artress knew the signs of high altitude pulmonary edema. He knew t here was a 75 percent chance that he would perish on Africa's highest peak. Artr ess led his wife to a rock, and they sat together above the clouds. Then it hit him. He wasn't afraid to die; he was ashamed. He had lived only for himself - pr acticing medicine in a Modesto hospital, traveling with his wife, purchasing lux ury vacation homes and collecting art. He felt as if he had nothing to show for his 50 years. He felt as if his life had been a waste. In that moment, Artress a nd his wife realized they were living for the wrong reasons. In that moment, eve rything changed. Some people dream of giving up the trappings of success and sta rting life anew, with a purpose, with a social conscience. For Artress and his w ife, the idea suddenly seemed real. That day on Mount Kilimanjaro would lead the Modesto doctor and his wife to leave their comfortable life in California to be come bush doctors, dedicated to easing the heartbreak of Africa. They knew their decision was the right one when they returned to their creekside ranch home in Modesto. The things they normally missed when they were away - the matching silv er sports cars, the signed Mirs and Picassos, the full-throttle espresso machine and the swimming pool - no longer had any charm. That week, Artress quit his job at Doctors Medical Center in Modesto and Gustafson gave notice as an educationa l psychologist for the public schools. Then they sold everything ... and made pl ans to return to the foot of Kilimanjaro to administer medical care as a way of repaying the community that saved Artress' life. Note: This inspiring story should be read in its entirety.

White House Undermines EPA On Cancer Risks, GAO Says 2008-04-28, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/28/ap/tech/main4052341.shtml The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency's abi lity to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting nonscientists hav

e a bigger -- often secret -- say, congressional investigators say in a report o btained by The Associated Press. The administration's decision to give the Defen se Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of d elay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program's credibility, t he Government Accountability Office concluded. At issue is the EPA's screening o f chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determi ne if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses. A new review process begun by the White House in 2004 is adding more speed bumps for EPA scientists, the GAO said in its report. A formal policy effectively doubling the number of s teps was adopted two weeks ago. Cancer risk assessments for nearly a dozen major chemicals are now years overdue, the GAO said, blaming the new multiagency revi ews for some of the delay. GAO investigators said extensive involvement by EPA m anagers, White House budget officials and other agencies has eroded the independ ence of EPA scientists charged with determining the health risks posed by chemic als. The Pentagon, the Energy Department, NASA and other agencies -- all of whic h could be severely affected by EPA risk findings -- are being allowed to partic ipate "at almost every step in the assessment process," said the GAO. Those agen cies, their private contractors and manufacturers of the chemicals face restrict ions and major cleanup requirements, depending on the EPA's scientific determina tions. Note: For many other revealing reports on health issues, click here.

Case renews debate on vaccine-autism link 2008-03-05, CNN/Associated Press http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/05/autism.vaccines.ap/index.html Government health officials have conceded that childhood vaccines worsened a rar e, underlying disorder that ultimately led to autism-like symptoms in a Georgia girl, and that she should be paid from a federal vaccine-injury fund. Thousands of families are seeking compensation for disabilities they attribute to vaccines and a preservative. Medical and legal experts say the narrow wording and circum stances probably make the case an exception -- not a precedent for thousands of other pending claims. However, parents and advocates for autistic children see t he case as a victory that may help certain others. Although the science on this is very limited, the girl's disorder may be more common in children with autism than in healthy ones. "It's a beginning," said Kevin Conway, a Boston, Massachus etts, lawyer representing more than 1,200 families with vaccine injury claims. " Each case is going to have to be proved on its individual merits. But it shows t o me that the government has conceded that it's biologically plausible for a vac cine to cause these injuries. They've never done it before." Nearly 5,000 famili es are seeking compensation for autism or other developmental disabilities they say are caused by vaccines and a mercury-based preservative, thimerosal. It once was commonly used to prevent bacterial contamination but since 2001 has been us ed only in certain flu shots. Some cases contend that the cumulative effect of m any shots given at once may have caused injuries. The cases are before a special "vaccine court" that doles out cash from a fund Congress set up to pay people i njured by vaccines and to protect makers from damages as a way to help ensure an adequate vaccine supply. Note: To read further highly informative reports from major media sources on the dangers of vaccines, click here.

Cancer and the bacterial connection 2008-02-18, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-lab18feb18,0,3038791.story

Today, some scientists think [that] germs can teach our bodies how to fight back against tumors. Dr. John Timmerman, a cancer immunotherapy expert at UCLA's Jon sson Cancer Center, says this revolution has produced "the most exciting sets of compounds in cancer immunology." New studies are revealing that certain cancers may be reduced by exposure to disease-causing bacteria and viruses. The studies also imply that our cleaner, infection-free lifestyles may be contributing to t he rise in certain cancers over the last 50 years, scientists say, because they make the immune system weaker or less mature. Germs cause disease but may also f ortify the body, a notion summed up in a 2006 report by a team of Canadian resea rchers as "whatever does not kill me makes me stronger." In the 1980s, dermatolo gists began noticing that patients with severe acne, which is caused by another type of bacterium, have reduced rates of skin cancer, lymphoma and leukemia. Acc ording to a paper by Dr. Mohammad Namazi at the Shiraz University of Medical Sci ences in Iran, studies showed that these bacteria, when injected into animals, a ppear to stimulate the immune system and shrink tumors. In reports published in the last two years, Harvey Checkoway, a University of Washington epidemiologist, has found that female cotton workers in Shanghai have a 40% to 60% lower risk o f lung, breast, and pancreas cancer than other factory workers. Other recent stu dies by Giuseppe Mastrangelo at the University of Padua in Italy found that dair y farmers exposed to high levels of manure dust are up to five times less likely to develop lung cancer than their colleagues who work in open fields. Note: For exciting reports of promising new approaches to curing cancer, click h ere.

U.S. expanding the law - domestic and foreign - to benefit corporations 2008-02-17, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/17/EDR1V0LCD.DTL As a U.S. taxpayer, you may be contributing to fewer cheap drugs on internationa l shelves. Public dollars support the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, t he trade agency with authority to pressure foreign governments to change their d omestic intellectual property laws. As such, the agency actively presses for law s that would keep generic drugs out of markets worldwide. Congress is considerin g legislation to create a separate executive branch office dedicated to using go vernment resources for lobbying other countries to change their laws, sometimes exclusively to benefit certain U.S. companies. That's a bad idea for patients he re and abroad, because it would give the U.S. government more power in an area w here it should instead have less. The trade agency's interpretation of what othe r countries' domestic laws need to cover expands beyond the broadest definitions within U.S. law. To give one example, data gathered during clinical trials of n ew drugs are not protected by copyright, patent or trademark in the United State s. The Food and Drug Administration restricts use of test results finding that a brand-name drug is safe when considering the safety of identical generic drugs. The trade representative is using its authority to press for comparable rules r estricting the approval process for generic drugs in other countries. It doesn't take much sleuthing to follow the money back to the U.S. pharmaceutical manufac turers on the trade agency's advisory panel, who can maintain monopolist profits while a generic drug is blocked from the market in Guatemala, Malaysia or any o f the dozen other countries that the trade agency is pressuring to adopt U.S.-st yle restrictions on generic drug approval. Note: For more reports on the power of the pharmaceutical industry to influence government policy, click here.

Science of the orgasm 2008-02-11, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-orgasm11feb11,1,6621596.story As they seek to document and demystify one of life's great thrills, scientists h ave run across some real head-scratchers. How, for example, can they explain the fact that some men and women who are paralyzed and numb below the waist are abl e to have orgasms? How to explain the "orgasmic auras" that can descend at the o nset of epileptic seizures -- sensations so pleasurable they prompt some patient s to refuse antiseizure medication? And how on Earth to explain the case of the amputee who felt his orgasms centered in that missing foot? No one -- no sexolog ist, no neuroscientist -- really knows. For a subject with so many armchair expe rts, the human orgasm is remarkably mysterious. But today, a few scientists are making real progress -- in part because they're changing their focus. To uncover the orgasm's secrets, researchers are looking ... to the place behind the scene s where the true magic happens. They're examining the central nervous system: th e network of electrical impulses that zip to and fro through the brain and spina l cord. In an orgasm orchestra, the genitalia may be the instruments, but the ce ntral nervous system is the conductor. Armed with new lab tools and fearless vol unteers, scientists are getting first-ever glimpses of how the brain lights up ( and, in places, shuts down) when the orgasmic fireworks go off. They're tracing nerves and finding new pathways for pleasure that help explain how people with s hattered spinal cords can defy sexual expectations.

Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms 2007-12-17, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/16/AR20071216019... Until recently ... even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only smal l snippets of DNA -- an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for e xample, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought. Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by co mpletely artificial DNA. Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's f irst entirely [artificial] chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory. In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to [be able to direct] the waiting cell to do its bid ding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a nat ural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are alr eady under construction. The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scien tists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line betwe en biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive. That unprecedented degree of control over creation raises mor e than philosophical questions, however. What kinds of organisms will scientists ... make? How will these self-replicating entities be contained? And who might end up owning the patent rights to the basic tools for synthesizing life? Some e xperts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly co ntrol over the core "operating system" for artificial life and are poised to bec ome the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could ... place enormous power in a few people's hands. "Ultimately synthetic biology means cheaper and widely acc essible tools to build bioweapons, virulent pathogens and artificial organisms t hat could pose grave threats to people and the planet," concluded a recent repor t by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, one of dozens of advocacy groups that want a ba n on releasing synthetic organisms pending wider societal debate and regulation. Note: Remember that top secret government programs are usually at least a decade ahead of anything reported to the public. To read more on the dangers of geneti cally modified organisms, click here.

Chip implants linked to animal tumors 2007-09-09, Associated Press http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hYssebw3_FRuof2bdR1YdCo8OgXA When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in hum ans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny tr ansponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found " reasonable assurance" the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one o f 2005's top "innovative technologies." But neither the company nor the regulato rs publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, datin g to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats. "The transponders were the cause of the tumors," said Ke ith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining ... the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. Leading cancer specialists reviewed t he research for The Associated Press and ... said the findings troubled them. So me said they would not allow family members to receive implants, and all urged f urther research before the glass-encased transponders are widely implanted in pe ople. To date, about 2,000 of the so-called radio frequency identification, or R FID, devices have been implanted in humans worldwide. Did the agency know of the tumor findings before approving the chip implants? The FDA declined repeated AP requests to specify what studies it reviewed. The FDA is overseen by the Depart ment of Health and Human Services, which, at the time of VeriChip's approval, wa s headed by Tommy Thompson. Two weeks after the device's approval took effect on Jan. 10, 2005, Thompson left his Cabinet post, and within five months was a boa rd member of VeriChip Corp. and Applied Digital Solutions. He was compensated in cash and stock options. Note: For more reliable information about the use and dangers of microchips, cli ck here.

Doctors accuse US of 'unethical practices' at Guantanamo Bay 2007-09-07, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article2938962.ece More than 260 doctors from around the world have launched an unprecedented attac k on the American medical establishment for its failure to condemn unethical pra ctices by medical practitioners at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. In a letter to The Lancet, the doctors from 16 countries, including Britain and Ameri ca, say the failure of the US regulatory authorities to act is "damaging the rep utation of US military medicine". They compare the actions of the military docto rs, whom they accuse of being involved in the force-feeding of prisoners at Guan tanamo Bay and of turning a blind eye to evidence of torture in Iraq and elsewhe re, to those of the South African security police involved in the death of the a nti-apartheid activist Steve Biko 30 years ago. The group highlighted the forcefeeding of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last year and suggested the physicians in volved should be referred to their professional bodies for breaching internation ally accepted ethical guidelines. The doctors wrote: "No healthcare worker in th e War on Terror has been charged or convicted of any significant offence despite numerous instances documented including fraudulent record-keeping on detainees who have died as a result of failed interrogations ... The attitude of the US mi litary establishment appears to be one of 'See no evil, hear no evil, speak no e vil'." The US introduced the policy of force-feeding, in which prisoners are str apped to a chair and a tube is forced down the throat into the stomach, after mo re than 100 prisoners went on hunger strike in 2005. "Fundamental to doctors' re sponsibilities in attending a hunger striker is the recognition that prisoners h ave a right to refuse treatment," the doctors wrote.

Food Conscious 2007-06-27, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/27/FDGFMQJFG21.DTL Opponents of GE [genetically engineered] food ... say problems suggested in some health studies could take years to show up. Meanwhile, we're eating lots of GE foods anyway, whether we know it or not -- especially in processed foods, becaus e corn, soy and canola are the Big 3 GE food crops." Since our government has re fused to label these foods, how do we avoid buying and eating these foods?" asks [Andrew] Kimbrell, an attorney who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Food Safety, a vocal opponent of GE foods. His new book, Your Right to Know: Gen etic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your Food ... answers that question. For conscious eaters, the heart of the book is a 14-page guide to your local sup ermarket. It tells you which foods are the most likely to contain GE ingredients (chips, snacks and baby formula), which aren't (fruits, vegetables, wheat), and how to read labels for "hidden ingredients" derived from corn, soy or canola (h int: look for high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin and canola oil). A passport -size version of the guide, small enough to slide into most pockets or purses, c omes along with the book. "I wanted to give people a usable tool to avoid these foods so they don't feel so helpless," said Kimbrell. The book isn't intended to present the pros and cons of GE foods. Kimbrell is 100 percent against the tech nology and spends a lot of time in court fighting companies like Monsanto, to ke ep GE crops from spreading. The Center for Food Safety also opposes irradiation and food animal cloning, and has labored to keep industry from weakening federal organic standards. In fact, Kimbrell is the man who calls the current administr ation's efforts to protect food safety "Katrina on a plate."

Intricate Toiling Found In Nooks of DNA Once Believed to Stand Idle 2007-06-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR20070613024... The first concerted effort to understand all the inner workings of the DNA molec ule is overturning a host of long-held assumptions about the nature of genes and their role in human health and evolution, scientists reported yesterday. The ne w perspective reveals DNA to be not just a string of biological code but a daunt ingly complex operating system that processes many more kinds of information tha n previously appreciated. The findings ... confirm growing suspicions that the s tretches of "junk DNA" flanking hardworking genes are not junk at all. But the s tudy goes further, indicating for the first time that the vast majority of the 3 billion "letters" of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of p reviously invisible tasks. The new work also overturns the conventional notion t hat genes are discrete packets of information arranged like beads on a thread of DNA. Instead, many genes overlap one another and share stretches of molecular c ode. The new picture of the inner workings of DNA probably will require some ret hinking in the search for genetic patterns that dispose people to diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease, the scientists said, but ultimately the f indings are likely to speed the development of ways to prevent and treat a varie ty of illnesses. One implication is that many, and perhaps most, genetic disease s come from errors in the DNA between genes rather than within the genes, which have been the focus of molecular medicine. Complicating the picture, it turns ou t that genes and the DNA sequences that regulate their activity are often far ap art along the six-foot-long strands of DNA.

Sicko? The truth about the US healthcare system 2007-06-04, The Independent http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2611736.ece Within a few hours, Cynthia Kline was dead. She died in an American city with on e of the highest concentrations of top-flight medical specialists in the world. And it happened largely because of America's broken health care system - one whe re 50 million people are entirely without insurance coverage and tens of million s more struggle to have the treatment they need approved. As a result, medical p roblems go unattended until they reach crisis point. America's health system off ers a tremendous paradox. In medical technology and in the scientific understand ing of disease, it is second-to-none. And yet many, if not most, Americans are u nable to reap the advantages of this. In fact, as The New York Times columnist P aul Krugman has argued, the very proliferation of research and high-tech equipme nt is part of the reason for the imbalance in coverage between the privileged fe w and the increasingly underserved masses. "[The system] compensates for higher spending on insiders, in part, by consigning more people to outsider status --ro bbing Peter of basic care in order to pay for Paul's state-of-the-art treatment, " Krugman wrote. "Thus we have the cruel paradox that medical progress is bad fo r many Americans' health." Having the system run by for-profit insurance compani es turns out to be inefficient and expensive as well as dehumanising. America sp ends more than twice as much per capita on health care as France, and almost two and a half times as much as Britain. And yet it falls down in almost every key indicator of public health, starting ... with infant mortality, which is 36 per cent higher than in Britain.

Got rbST in your milk? 2007-03-25, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/25/BUGBROQASE1.DTL Richard Cotta, CEO of California Dairies Inc., the nation's second-largest dairy cooperative, is guided by a simple business philosophy: "If you want milk with little blue dots, you'll have it, as long as you are willing to pay for it." So, when a string of major customers, including supermarket giant Safeway, came to his co-op saying they would no longer accept milk from cows treated with a genet ically engineered growth hormone, the co-op bowed to the inevitable. In January, California Dairies' board voted to ask its members not to inject synthetic bovi ne growth hormone into their cows. The action by a co-op that ships 50 million p ounds of milk every day is part of a sweeping, consumer-driven agricultural make over. Demand for natural foods is rising, while increasing numbers of consumers are avoiding products that rely on antibiotics or growth hormones. And food reta ilers are listening. Recombinant bovine somatotropin, or rbST, was approved by t he Food and Drug Administration 14 years ago. It sustains lactation by stimulati ng cows' appetites so they eat more and produce more milk, perhaps an extra 5 qu arts per day. The European Union, Japan, Canada and Australia did not approve rb ST. The reasons included questions about human and animal safety, as well social and economic considerations. Research that shows injections of rbST increase an other hormone, insulin-like growth factor 1, or IGF-1, in cows. Too much IGF-1 i n humans is linked with increased rates of colon, breast and prostate cancer. Sy nthetic hormone use also ... leads to increased use of antibiotics, whose overus e is already a serious problem in the livestock industry. Note: For many years the media has avoided even mentioning the major controversy over growth hormone use in milk and other animal products. To better understand how the mass media and big industry sometimes work together for profit at the e xpense of your health, click here.

Are GM Crops Killing Bees? 2007-03-22, Der Spiegel (Germany's leading magazine) http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,473166,00.html A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic pro portions. In the United States ... bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the b ees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor. Since last November, the US has see n a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous inciden ces of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complai n that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent. Scientists call the mysterious phenomenon "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), and it is fast turning into a national catastrophe. A number of universities and government agencies ha ve formed a "CCD Working Group" to search for the causes of the calamity, but ha ve so far come up empty-handed. They are already referring to the problem as a p otential "AIDS for the bee industry." Diana Cox-Foster, a member of the CCD Work ing Group ... said that the bees' death is accompanied by a set of symptoms "whi ch does not seem to match anything in the literature." Some had five or six infe ctions at the same time and were infested with fungi -- a sign, experts say, tha t the insects' immune system may have collapsed. The fact that genetically modif ied, insect-resistant plants are now used in 40 percent of cornfields in the Uni ted States could be playing a role. Note: Bees play a vital role in fertilizing most flowers and crops. The conseque nces of this bee calamity could be far reaching. For an abundance of reliable, v erifiable evidence that genetically modified crops, which are already a part of the normal U.S. diet, can be very damaging to the health of bees and humans, cli ck here.

When Organic Isn't Really Organic 2007-03-14, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1599110,00.html When you buy a gallon of organic milk, you expect to get tasty milk from happy c ows who haven't been subjected to antibiotics, hormones or pesticides. But you m ight also unknowingly be getting genetically modified cattle feed. Albert Straus , owner of the Straus Family Creamery ... decided to test the feed that he gives his 1,600 cows last year and was alarmed to find that nearly 6% of the organic corn feed he received from suppliers was "contaminated" by genetically modified (GM) organisms. Organic food is, by definition, supposed to be free of genetical ly modified material. But as GM crops become more prevalent, there is little tha t an organic farmer can do to prevent a speck of GM pollen or a stray GM seed fr om being blown by the wind onto his land. In 2006, GM crops accounted for 61% of all the corn planted in the U.S. and 89% of all the soybeans. So Straus and fiv e other natural food producers, including industry leader Whole Foods, announced last week that they would seek a new certification for their products, "non-GMO verified," in the hopes that it will become a voluntary industry standard for G M-free goods. In a few weeks, Straus expects to become the first food manufactur er in the country to carry the label in addition to his "organic" one. With Whol e Foods in the ring, the rest of the industry will soon be under competitive pre ssure to follow. Genetically modified crops have become so prevalent in the U.S. that chances are you've been buying and eating them for years. You just wouldn' t know it from the label: the U.S. Department of Agriculture, unlike agencies in Europe and Japan, do not require GM foods to be labeled.

Note: This article also states "scientists have not identified any specific heal th risks from eating GM foods." This is a clear lie, when two sentences later th e article mentions Jeffrey Smith, who has written an entire book with excellent documentation showing many scientific studies in which animals died shortly afte r consuming GM foods. To see an excellent summary of this book including reliabl e footnotes, click here.

Bird flu drug probe after 18 teenage deaths in Japan 2007-03-01, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper) http://www.smh.com.au/news/health/bird-flu-vaccine-linked-to-18-teenage-suici... Japanese health authorities are investigating a flu medicine that is also availa ble in Australia after a teenager jumped 11 storeys to his death after taking th e drug. It was the 18th juvenile fatality linked to Tamiflu in 17 months. The Mi nistry of Health, Labour and Welfare has asked the Japanese importer of Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug regarded as the most important shield against bird flu in hu mans, to collect information about the conditions of patients who take the drug. The 14-year-old boy's death follows a similar case two weeks ago, when a girl a lso 14, died after jumping from an apartment building at Gamagori, in central Ja pan. It also comes after a warning by the US Food and Drug Administration late l ast year about the dangers of giving children Tamiflu. The drug is being stockpi led in Australia as the first line of defence against bird flu. In Australia, as in Japan, it is only available by prescription. Drug companies reported that 54 people using Tamiflu died in Japan before November, the ministry said. Note: Tamiflu is the vaccine on which Donald Rumsfeld profited $5 million and on which the U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars stockpiling , even though it might not work. For more, click here.

Merck Suspends Lobbying for Vaccine 2007-02-21, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/21/ap/business/mainD8NDU4AG0.shtml Pediatricians, gynecologists and even health insurers all call Gardasil, the fir st vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, a big medical advance. But medical groups , politicians and parents began rebelling after disclosure of a behind-the-scene s lobbying campaign by Gardasil's maker, Merck & Co., to get state legislatures to require 11- and 12-year-old girls to get the three-dose vaccine as a requirem ent for school attendance. Some parents' groups and doctors particularly objecte d because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted disease. Vaccines mandated for school attendance usually are for diseases easily spread through ca sual contact, such as measles and mumps. Bowing to pressure, Merck said Tuesday that it is immediately suspending its controversial campaign, which it had funde d through a third party. Legislatures in roughly 20 states have introduced measu res that would mandate girls have the vaccine to attend school. Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Feb. 2 issued an executive order requiring Texas girls entering the six th grade as of 2008 get the vaccinations. Dr. Anne Francis, who chairs an Americ an Academy of Pediatrics committee [stated] "I believe that their timing was a l ittle bit premature," she said, "so soon after (Gardasil's) release, before we h ave a picture of whether there are going to be any untoward side effects." The c ountry has been "burned" by some drugs whose serious side effects emerged only a fter they were in wide use, including Merck's withdrawn painkiller Vioxx. The va ccine also is controversial because of its price - $360 for the three doses requ ired.

Note: $360 for every girl in school would amount to quite a hefty transfer of fu nds from taxpayers into the pockets of Merck. Could profit and campaign contribu tions be behind the move to make this mandatory?

Scientists find way to slash cost of drugs 2007-01-02, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,1981200,00.html Two UK-based academics have devised a way to invent new medicines and get them t o market at a fraction of the cost charged by big drug companies. Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College ... calls their revolution ary new model "ethical pharmaceuticals". Improvements they devise to the molecul ar structure of an existing, expensive drug turn it technically into a new medic ine which is no longer under a 20-year patent to a multinational drug company an d can be made and sold cheaply. The process has the potential to undermine the m onopoly of the big drug companies and bring cheaper drugs not only to poor count ries but back to the UK. Professor Shaunak and his colleague from the London Sch ool of Pharmacy, Steve Brocchini, have linked up with an Indian biotech company which will manufacture the first drug - for hepatitis C. Hepatitis C affects 170 million people worldwide and at least 200,000 in the UK. Multinational drug com panies put the cost of the research and development of a new drug at $800m (408m) . Professors Shaunak and Brocchini say the cost of theirs will be only a few mil lion pounds. Professor Shaunak says it is time that the monopoly on drug inventi on and production by multinational corporations - which charge high prices becau se they need to make big profits for their shareholders - was broken. The team's work on the hepatitis C drug has impeccable establishment credentials. But the professors' ethical pharmaceutical model is unlikely to find much favour with th e multinational pharmaceutical companies, which already employ large teams of la wyers to defend the patents which they describe as the lifeblood of the industry . Note: This is very exciting news, but we'll see what happens when the hugely pro fitable pharmaceutical industry presses its might against this effort. For more, click here.

Has Politics Contaminated the Food Supply? 2006-12-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/opinion/11schlosser.html?ex=1323493200&en=4... One hundred years ago, companies were free to follow their own rules. The public ation of Upton Sinclair s novel The Jungle in 1906 with its descriptions of rat-infe sted slaughterhouses and rancid meat created public outrage over food safety. Ev en though the book was written by a socialist agitator, a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, eagerly read it. After confirming Sinclair s claims, Roosevelt battled the drug companies, the big food processors and the meatpacking compani es to protect American consumers from irresponsible corporate behavior. Over the past 40 years, the industrialization and centralization of our food system has greatly magnified the potential for big outbreaks. As a result, a little contami nation can go a long way. The Taco Bell distribution center in New Jersey now be ing investigated as a possible source of E. coli supplies more than 1,100 restau rants in the Northeast. Since 2000, the fast-food and meatpacking industries hav e given about four-fifths of their political donations to Republican candidates for national office. In return, these industries have effectively been given con trol of the agencies created to regulate them. The current chief of staff at the Agriculture Department used to be the beef industry s chief lobbyist. The person who headed the Food and Drug Administration until recently used to be an executi

ve at the National Food Processors Association. Cutbacks in staff and budgets ha ve reduced the number of food-safety inspections conducted by the F.D.A. to abou t 3,400 a year from 35,000 in the 1970s. Note: If ical and ioned in xcellent you care about the health of our nation's food supply, write your polit media representatives encouraging the passage of the Safe Food Act ment this article, which by the way, was written by the author of the most e book, Fast Food America.

Genetically Engineered Rice Wins USDA Approval 2006-11-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR20061124011... The Department of Agriculture declared safe for human consumption yesterday an e xperimental variety of genetically engineered rice found to have contaminated th e U.S. rice supply this summer. The move ... to deregulate the special long-grai n rice, LL601, was seen as a legal boon to its creator, Bayer CropScience. The c ompany applied for approval shortly after the widespread contamination was discl osed in August and now faces a class-action lawsuit filed by hundreds of farmers in Arkansas and Missouri. The experimental rice ... escaped from Bayer's test p lots after the company dropped the project in 2001. The resulting contamination, once it became public, prompted countries around the world to block rice import s from the United States, sending rice futures plummeting and farmers into fits. In approving the rice, the USDA allowed Bayer to take a regulatory shortcut and skip many of the usual safety tests. Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the no nprofit Center for Food Safety, said the quick approval shows that the USDA is m ore concerned about the fortunes of the biotechnology industry than about consum ers' health. "USDA is telling agricultural biotechnology companies that it doesn 't matter if you're negligent, if you break the rules, if you contaminate the fo od supply with untested genetically engineered crops, we'll bail you out," Mende lson said in a statement. Officials in Europe, where genetically altered rice is derisively dubbed "Frankenfood," made clear as recently as last week that Europ ean countries will not accept any U.S. rice, he said. Note: For reliable information on the deception and dangers of GM (Genetically M odified) food, click here.

Big Tobacco Lied to Public, Judge Says 2006-08-18, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR20060817007... A federal judge ruled yesterday that tobacco companies have violated civil racke teering laws, concluding that cigarette makers conspired for decades to deceive the public about the dangers of their product. But U.S. District Judge Gladys Ke ssler said that under a 2005 appellate court ruling, she could not impose billio ns of dollars in penalties that had been sought by the Justice Department in its civil racketeering suit. In the opinion...Kessler wrote that there is "overwhel ming evidence" [that the industry] conspired to violate, and indeed violated, fe deral racketeering laws. "In short," she wrote, "defendants have marketed and so ld their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social cos ts that success exacted. Over the course of more than 50 years, defendants lied, misrepresented and deceived the American public, including smokers and the youn g people...about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tob acco smoke." Kessler added that the companies "suppressed research, they destroy ed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetu

ate addiction...and they abused the legal system in order to achieve their goal -- to make money." The Justice Department lawsuit originally sought $280 billion . But the U.S. Court of Appeals [ruled] a company could not be forced to turn ov er past profits as a way of preventing future misconduct. The Justice Department subsequently proposed a $130 billion penalty to pay for anti-smoking programs, but...it scaled that back to a total of $14 billion.

Sickened Iraq Vets Cite Depleted Uranium 2006-08-13, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2307268 A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through but ter. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billi on years. Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium f or nuclear weapons and energy plants. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Wash ington, D.C., [Herbert Reed] ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and an other. They began to talk. [They] all have depleted uranium in their urine. The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, cla iming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks. T he Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe. Military re search on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations. Fifteen years aft er it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitori ng veterans exposed to depleted uranium. Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. D epleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War Syndrome, from which no trea tment has emerged. About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in t he first Gulf War still suffer [this] baffling array of symptoms. Depleted urani um has long been suspected as a possible contributor. It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange...was linked to [major diseas e and] sufferings. It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World Wa r II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb . Note: Why isn't the media reporting more on this health disaster? For lots more on how veterans suffer from corporate and governmental denial and manipulations, see what a highly decorated U.S. General has to say on the suffering of soldier s at http://www.WantToKnow.info/warcoverup. For an amazingly revealing documenta ry with interviews from top sources on the depleted uranium cover-up, click here .

Vitamin C: Cancer cure? 2006-06-18, Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia's leading newspaper) http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/health/14842932.htm Government nutrition researcher [Dr. Mark Levine] has published new evidence tha t suggests vitamin C can work like chemotherapy - only better. But so far, he ha sn't been able to interest cancer experts in conducting the kind of conclusive s tudies that, one way or the other, would advance treatment. "If vitamin C is use ful in cancer treatment, that's wonderful. If it's not, or if it's harmful, that 's fine, too," said Levine, a Harvard-educated physician at the National Institu te of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. The distinction between oral a nd intravenous is crucial. The body automatically gets rid of extra C through ur ine. Levine's lab has shown that, at high concentrations, the vitamin is toxic t o many types of cancer cells in lab dishes. But to get that much C into the body before it's eliminated, it must be put directly into the blood. Five out of nin

e types of cancer cells that were put in simulated body-cavity fluid died when c oncentrated ascorbate or peroxide was added to the dish. And the best part: This same lethal marinade had no effect on healthy cells. "Interest is definitely gr owing," said Kenneth Bock, physician and president of the American College for A dvancement in Medicine, an alternative-medicine society that teaches ascorbate i nfusion protocols. The American Cancer Society and the American Association of C linical Oncologists warn patients against high-dose C, as do leading cancer cent ers such as the University of Pennsylvania's and Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Note: If the above link does not work, the article is also available on the webs ite of the San Diego Union-Tribune. For why this is not making major headlines i n the news, click here and here.

AIDS Drug Maker to Pay $704M in Settlement 2005-10-17, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=1223871 Serono Laboratories agreed Monday to pay $704 million and plead guilty to federa l conspiracy charges that it increased the market for the AIDS drug Serostim by offering kickbacks to doctors and manipulating a test for AIDS patients. Eightyfive percent of prescriptions written for Serostim, accounting for roughly $615 million in sales, were unnecessary. The cost of many of those prescriptions, $21 ,000 for 12 weeks of treatment, was paid by Medicaid, the joint federal-state he alth program for the poor, and other government insurance plans. Serono offered doctors free trips to the south of France in return for agreeing to write up to 30 new prescriptions for Serostim. The company also conspired to introduce a tes t for AIDS wasting, despite not having FDA approval. The test diagnosed AIDS was ting even without weight loss. Monday's settlement is the latest in a series of whistleblower claims that have resulted in more than $3 billion in payments from drug companies in recent years. Note: For lots more on this vital topic: http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoveru p

'The Future of Food' 2005-09-30, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/30/DDGHOEVICB1.DTL#f... Food insiders may already know the disturbing facts highlighted by this film, bu t the general public is in for a shock at how corporations are using misleading campaigns -- and scare tactics -- to ensure that people around the world become dependent on genetically modified food. Monsanto and other corporate behemoths a re motivated (not surprisingly) by profits, according to farmers, academics and others who talk to documentarian Deborah Koons Garcia. Canadian farmer Percy Sch meiser was targeted by Monsanto's lawyers because some of the corporation's pate nted seedlings were found on his property. Schmeiser didn't plant them there; wi nd blew the insecticide-resistant seeds onto his farm from another farm, or the seeds fell off a passing truck. Monsanto didn't care, ordering Schmeiser to kill all his family's seed because they'd potentially been contaminated by its paten ted product. Schmeiser ... fought Monsanto, spending his retirement money agains t the sort of legal attack that has already scared farmers throughout North Amer ica. Incredibly, a judge ruled in favor of Monsanto. Garcia's documentary shows how much the U.S. federal government favors these corporations, especially throu gh lax oversight (the [FDA] and the Department of Agriculture seem to rubber-sta mp every corporate project having to do with genetically modified food). In the past 20 years, Monsanto's alumni have occupied the high reaches of American powe

r. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, did legal work for the co rporation, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was president of a Monsant o subsidiary. Note: To view this highly educational film, click here. To read another excellen t review of this important documentary, click here.

A child's return from autism 2005-05-25, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/25/BAGU0CU2K71.DTL A Lafayette couple, certain that chelation therapy has helped their autistic son , stepped squarely into the controversy surrounding the causes of autism and its treatment Tuesday as they joined 150 other parents in launching an internationa l support group that will aggressively promote the treatment. The Handleys are n ow among a small minority of parents -- who, believing that the autism was cause d by the mercury in thimerosal, a preservative that was routinely used in vaccin es until recently -- are treating their children with chelation therapy, a lotio n or pill that strips the body of heavy metals. It has been used for decades to detoxify people contaminated in industrial accidents, but no studies have proved whether it is an effective treatment for autism. For Jamie's parents, the proof they need is in front of them: Jamie, now 3 years old and several months into t reatment, is plump and playing baseball. His smile has returned. The Handleys sa id the new support group, Generation Rescue, www.generationrescue.com, will offe r information on chelation therapy and connect parents with those who can help. Note: For why the some powerful people may be covering up this important informa tion, click here.

Of Mice, Men and In-Between 2004-11-20, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63731-2004Nov19 In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, th ere are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice pee r from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a li on's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and inte ract ... inside the bodies of living creatures. But with no federal guidelines i n place ... how human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules sho uld kick in? Chimerism becomes a more sensitive topic when it involves growing e ntire human organs inside animals. And it becomes especially sensitive when it d eals in brain cells. Imagine, said Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy a nd bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, a human-chimpanzee chimera endowed with speech ... what some have called a "humanzee." Perhaps the most ambitious e fforts to make use of chimeras come from Irving Weissman, director of Stanford U niversity's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Weissman helped make the first mouse with a nearly complete human immune system. More recently h is team injected human neural stem cells into mouse fetuses, creating mice whose brains are about 1 percent human. Now Weissman says he is thinking about making chimeric mice whose brains are 100 percent human. Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Biotech critics at risk : Economics calls the shots in the debate 2004-01-11, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/11/INGH... Between 1999 and 2001, unbeknownst to the others, each [of four scientists] made a simple but dramatic discovery that challenged the catechism of the same power ful industry -- biotechnology -- that by then had become the handmaiden of indus trial agriculture and the darling of venture capitalists. When he was the princi pal scientific officer of the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, Hungarian citizen Arpad Pusztai fed transgenically modified [GMO] potatoes to rodents in o ne of the few experiments that have ever tested the safety of genetically modifi ed food. Almost immediately, the rats displayed tissue and immunological damage. After he reported his findings, which eventually underwent peer review and were published in the United Kingdom's leading medical journal, Lancet, Pusztai's ho me was burglarized and his research files taken. Soon thereafter, he was fired f rom his job at Rowett, and he has since suffered an orchestrated international c ampaign of discreditation. [Read full article for the other three distrubing sto ries of scientific suppression] These four men were not attacked because of flaw ed or imperfect experiments but because the findings of their work have a potent ial economic effect. The sad part is that the academies and other allegedly inde pendent institutions that once defended scientific freedom and protected employe es like Hayes, Chapela, Losey and Pusztai are abandoning them to the wolves of c ommerce, the brands of which are being engraved over the entrances to a disturbi ng number of university labs. Note: Big money is clearly stifling good science and keeping the public in the d ark about genetic modifications in the food we eat. To educate yourself on this most important topic, click here.

Radiation from CT scans linked to cancers, deaths 2009-12-15, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-12-15-radiation15_st_N.htm CT [Computed Tomography] scans deliver far more radiation than has been believed and may contribute to 29,000 new cancers each year, along with 14,500 deaths, s uggest two studies in today's Archives of Internal Medicine. One study, led by t he National Cancer Institute's Amy Berrington de Gonzalez, used existing exposur e data to estimate how many cancers might be caused by CT scans. Another study i n the journal suggests the problem may even be worse. In that study, researchers found that people may be exposed to up to four times as much radiation as estim ated by earlier studies. While previous studies relied on dummies equipped with sensors, authors of the new paper studied 1,119 patients at four San Francisco-a rea hospitals. Based on those higher measurements, a patient could get as much r adiation from one CT scan as 74 mammograms or 442 chest X-rays. Young people are at highest risk from excess radiation, partly because they have many years ahea d of them in which cancers could develop. Among 20-year-old women who get one co ronary angiogram, a CT scan of the heart, one in 150 will develop cancer related to the procedure. Note: For many important health reports from reliable sources, click here.

A Cloud Still Hangs Over Bhopal 2009-12-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/opinion/03mehta.html

This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster. [It] started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capabl e of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not get up. Half a million mor e fell ill, many with severely damaged lungs and eyes. An additional 15,000 peop le have since died from the aftereffects, and 10 to 30 people are said to die ev ery month from exposure to the hundreds of tons of toxic waste left over in the former factory. But amazingly, the site still has not been cleaned up, because D ow Chemical, which since acquired Union Carbide, refuses to accept any responsib ility. In 2001, the maker of napalm married the bane of Bhopal: Dow Chemical bou ght Union Carbide for $11.6 billion and promptly distanced itself from the disas ter. Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the inter national legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carb ide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Uni on Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition re quest. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an indus trial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he d be sunning himself in Goa? Note: For lots more from reliable sources on corporate corruption, click here.

Health care lessons from Europe 2009-11-29, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/11/29/MN3U1AL75B.DTL Critics point to Canada and Britain as the poster children of what could happen here with a "government takeover" of health coverage. But three other wealthy na tions - the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany - offer much closer parallels, as well as lessons. Health care systems in the three nations more closely resemb le the U.S. system of insurance-based coverage. Holland and Switzerland rely exc lusively on private insurance, and all three rely on private doctors. The three European nations deliver universal coverage and world-class quality at a fractio n of what Americans spend. All of them require that everyone purchase insurance, make sure everyone can afford it and ban insurers from such practices as refusi ng to cover the sick that are common in the United States. European health care is universal, but contrary to popular perception, it is not all nationalized. Mo st of Europe spends about 10 percent of its national income on health care and c overs everyone. The United States will spend 18 percent this year and leave 47 m illion people uninsured. Europe has more doctors, more hospital beds and more pa tient visits than the United States. Take Switzerland: 4.9 doctors per thousand residents compared with 2.4 in the United States. And cost? The average cost for a hospital stay is $9,398 in relatively high-cost Switzerland and $17,206 in th e United States. Note: Maybe it boils down to whether we want our health controlled more by profi t motive or by government bureaucracies One thing is for sure, the average U.S. citizen is getting much less for a greater cost than those in other developed co untries.

In Ukraine, H1N1 pandemic sets off panic and politicking 2009-11-21, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR20091120040... As the pandemic H1N1 influenza surges with the onset of winter, the nations of E

astern Europe and the former Soviet Union appear particularly vulnerable to the deadly virus. Burdened with weak health-care systems, relatively inexperienced n ews media outlets and shaky governments that have little public trust, the regio n also seems ripe for panic and political strife over the flu. The potential for trouble is already on display in Ukraine, where 1.5 million of its 46 million p eople have had diagnoses of flu and respiratory illnesses since the start of the outbreak and 356 have died, according to the government. More telling than the numbers, however, has been the widespread fear the virus has caused in Ukraine, and the outsize impact it has had on the nation's political landscape. Anxious r esidents have overwhelmed hospitals and pharmacies, buying up supplies of medici ne, gauze masks and home remedies such as lemons and garlic. Rumors have prolife rated that people are dying of a new, more lethal strain of the virus. Semyon Gl uzman, a psychiatrist and Soviet-era dissident in Kiev, said the fear was a rati onal response in a nation with a dysfunctional health-care system and a corrupt, ineffective government. "What we're seeing is a normal, psychological reaction to the complete incompetence of the state authorities," he said. "People are sca red, and they don't know who to trust anymore."

9/11's delayed legacy: cancer for many of the rescue workers 2009-11-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/11/cancer-new-york-rescuers A spate of recent deaths of New York police and fire officers who took part in t he emergency operation at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks has heightened fear s that it could be the start of a delayed epidemic of cancer-related illness. Fi ve firefighters and police officers, all of whom were involved in the rescue and clear-up at the site of the collapsed Twin Towers, have died of cancer in the p ast three months, the oldest being 44. Three died last month within a four-day p eriod. Up to 70,000 people took part in the massive operation at Ground Zero, in cluding police, firefighters and construction workers who came to New York volun tarily from all over the US. Many worked for months amid a toxic soup of dust an d chemicals. Amid the pollutants within the giant pile of 1.8m tons of debris an d the surrounding air were ... about 1,000 tons of asbestos that was used in the construction of the Twin Towers, pulverised lead from computers, mercury and hi ghly carcinogenic by-products from the burning of plastics and chlorinated chemi cals. No official tally is available for the number of those who have died as a result of the 9/11 clear-up. The New York state health department has recorded 8 17 deaths of emergency workers. Claire Calladine, a campaigner who runs the orga nisation 9/11 Health Now, said the fear was that the recent rise in cancer cases was just the start. "We have only seen the tip of the iceberg. How bad will it get that is the big question." Note: To read important questions raised by hundreds of government officials, ac ademics and professionals about what really happened on 9/11, click here and her e.

Health care bills do little to address medical errors 2009-10-16, San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst News Bureau http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/16/MNR01A6COQ.DTL Health care legislation before Congress takes only modest steps to address a pro blem that is more deadly than inadequate medical insurance - medical error. Stud ies show that preventable medical errors - ranging from poor sanitation to mista kes during surgery - kill four times as many people as the lack of medical insur ance. In August, a Hearst investigation, "Dead by Mistake," concluded that as ma ny as 200,000 people die each year from medical errors and infections in the Uni

ted States and that many measures to alleviate the problem have not been adopted 10 years after a landmark federal study, "To Err Is Human." A new Hearst analys is shows that the health care reform bills under consideration by Congress also do not include key recommendations, outlined in the study, that the health care industry has lobbied against ever since. Experts agree that the proposed legisla tion does not address key aspects of the problem. "We are not seeing a lot about safety, which is interesting, because the nation is acknowledging the 10-year a nniversary of 'To Err is Human' and there is a lot of frustration that we have n ot made more progress," said Jim Conway, senior vice president at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Boston nonprofit that has been pushing hospitals t oward safer care. Two major recommendations of the federal study are mandatory r eporting of medical errors and, based on those reports, systemic changes to prev ent future mistakes. None of the bills include mandatory reporting. Note: For a powerful summary of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.

Judge Rejects Approval of Biotech Sugar Beets 2009-09-23, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/business/23beet.html A federal judge has ruled that the government failed to adequately assess the en vironmental impacts of genetically engineered sugar beets before approving the c rop for cultivation in the United States. The decision could lead to a ban on th e planting of the beets, which have been widely adopted by farmers. Judge Jeffre y S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco said that the Agriculture Department should have done an environmental impact statement. He said it should have assessed the consequences from the likely spread of the genetically engine ered trait to other sugar beets. The decision echoes another ruling two years ag o by a different judge in the same court involving genetically engineered alfalf a. In that case, the judge later ruled that farmers could no longer plant the ge netically modified alfalfa until the Agriculture Department wrote the environmen tal impact statement. Two years later, there is still no such assessment. We expe ct the same result here as we got in alfalfa, said Andrew Kimbrell, executive dir ector of the Center for Food Safety, a Washington advocacy group that was also i nvolved in the alfalfa lawsuit. It will halt almost any further planting and sale because it s no longer an approved crop. The Center for Food Safety was joined in the suit by the Sierra Club, the Organic Seed Alliance and High Mowing Organic S eeds, a small seed company. The beets contain a bacterial gene licensed by Monsa nto that renders them impervious to glyphosate, an herbicide that Monsanto sells as Roundup. Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered cr ops might spread to non-engineered beets. Note: For an excellent overview of the dangers posed by genetically modified foo ds, click here. For other major media news articles revealing the dangers of alr eady widespread GM foods, click here.

Mafia 'sank ships of toxic waste' 2009-09-16, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8257912.stm A shipwreck apparently containing toxic waste is being investigated by authoriti es in Italy amid claims that it was deliberately sunk by the mafia. An informant from the Calabrian mafia said the ship was one of a number he blew up as part o f an illegal operation to bypass laws on toxic waste disposal. The sunken vessel has been found 30km (18 miles) off the south-west of Italy. The informant said

it contained "nuclear" material. Officials said it would be tested for radioacti vity. Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact and alongsid e it are a number of yellow barrels. Labels on them say the contents are toxic. The informant said the mafia had muscled in on the lucrative business of radioac tive waste disposal. But he said that instead of getting rid of the material saf ely, he blew up the vessel out at sea, off the Calabrian coast. He also says he was responsible for sinking two other ships containing toxic waste. For years th ere have been rumours that the mafia was sinking ships with nuclear and other wa ste on board, as part of a money-making racket. The environmental campaign group Greenpeace and others have compiled lists over the past few decades of ships th at have disappeared off the coast of Italy and Greece. Processing waste is highl y specialised and is supposed to be an industry where security is the top priori ty. If tests show that there is nuclear material on the seabed it will prove tha t the mafia has moved into its dirtiest business yet.

For Your Health, Froot Loops 2009-09-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05smart.html A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation s largest food manufacturers, is designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices. The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including to the surprise of many nutritionists sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops. Th ese are horrible choices, said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition depar tment of the Harvard School of Public Health. He said the criteria used by the S mart Choices Program were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. It s a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I m afraid, not credible, Mr. Wi llett said. Froot Loops qualifies for the label because it meets standards set b y the Smart Choices Program for fiber and Vitamins A and C, and because it does not exceed limits on fat, sodium and sugar. It contains the maximum amount of su gar allowed under the program for cereals, 12 grams per serving, which in the ca se of Froot Loops is 41 percent of the product. That is more sugar than in many popular brands of cookies. Froot Loops is an excellent source of many essential v itamins and minerals and it is also a good source of fiber with only 12 grams of sugar, said Celeste A. Clark, senior vice president of global nutrition for Kell ogg s, which makes Froot Loops. Dr. Clark, who is a member of the Smart Choices bo ard, said that the program s standard for sugar in cereals was consistent with fed eral dietary guidelines. Note: For many revealing reports on health issues, click here.

Mobile phone towers threaten honey bees: study 2009-08-31, MSN News/Agence France Presse http://news.sg.msn.com/topstories/article.aspx?cp-documentid=3558876 The electromagnetic waves emitted by mobile phone towers and cellphones can pose a threat to honey bees, a study published in India has concluded. An experiment conducted in the southern state of Kerala found that a sudden fall in the bee p opulation was caused by towers installed across the state by cellphone companies to increase their network. The electromagnetic waves emitted by the towers crip pled the "navigational skills" of the worker bees that go out to collect nectar from flowers to sustain bee colonies, said Dr. Sainuddin Pattazhy, who conducted the study. He found that when a cell phone was kept near a beehive, the worker bees were unable to return, leaving the hives with only the queens and eggs and

resulting in the collapse of the colony within ten days. Over 100,000 people in Kerala are engaged in apiculture and the dwindling worker bee population poses a threat to their livelihood. The bees also play a vital role in pollinating flow ers to sustain vegetation. If towers and mobile phones further increase, honey b ees might be wiped out in 10 years, Pattazhy said.

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food 2009-08-21, Time magazine http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bit e one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is do sed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mat es on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket nei ghboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millio ns of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 month s of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an America n addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflic ting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mis sissippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish fo r miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon circa 2009. The U.S. ag ricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at r emarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animal s and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmla nd, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can't even raise thei r wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming our energy-intensive foo d system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the econom y. And perhaps worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous . Note: For a powerful summary of the dangers of modern industrial food production , click here.

Questions for Dr. Marcia Angell 2009-08-12, New York Times blog http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/questions-for-dr-marcia-angell [Anne Underwood:] President Obama hopes to increase the number of Americans with insurance and to rein in costs. Do you believe any of the plans under considera tion by Congress will accomplish those goals? [Dr. Marcia Angell:] They won t, and that s the essential problem. If you keep health care in the hands of for-profit companies, you can do one or the other increase coverage by putting more money i nto the system, or control costs by decreasing coverage. But you cannot do both unless you change the basic structure of the system. Q. Segments of the health c are industry pharmaceutical companies, for instance are promising to cut costs. A. It s not going to happen. These are investor-owned companies. Their fiduciary r esponsibility is to maximize profits. If they behaved like charities, heads woul d roll in the executive suites. Q. But what about market mechanisms for reducing costs? Wouldn t the public option, for instance, provide competition for the insu rance companies? A. Theoretically it would, but I doubt the public plan will pas s. Industry is lobbying against it, and the president has not said this is a must . Even if it does pass, I m afraid the private insurance industry will use their cl

out in Congress and they have enormous clout in Congress to hobble the public op tion and use it as a dumping ground for the sickest while they cream off the you ng and healthy for themselves. Q. How? Won t insurance companies have to cover all applicants regardless of health status? A. It s hard to regulate an enormous indu stry without setting up a bureaucracy to oversee it. That s very expensive and cre ates a whole new set of problems. Note: Dr. Marcia Angell is a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medic al School and former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. A longtime c ritic of the pharmaceutical industry, she has called for an end to market-driven delivery of health care in the United States. To read a two-page summary of her critique of market-driven health care, click here.

Will Safety Fears Hurt Swine Flu Vaccinations? 2009-07-30, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/story?id=8206167 With the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hoping to have 120 mill ion doses of H1N1 swine flu virus vaccine ready before flu season this fall, som e are raising concerns over what they see as an effort to rush the drug through safety trials. The source of many of these concerns is the probability that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal will be an ingredient in some of the doses of the new vaccine. Concern over thimerosal has lingered for years. Groups opposed to current vaccination practices continue to condemn thimerosal as a to xin responsible for the development of autism and related ailments in children. Additionally, the possibility that the swine flu vaccine could also contain an a djuvant, an ingredient that would allow more doses to be created from existing s upplies of the vaccine, has also worried these groups. "We don't have adequate s afety studies on this vaccine before we are moving forward to market," said Lyn Redwood, president and co-founder of the group SafeMinds. "I'm really not convin ced that we know for sure that the risk of the disease outweighs the risk of the vaccine, especially since this is a brand new additive that we have never used before in combination with thimerosal." During the 1976-77 flu season, a vaccine developed to prevent the spread of a strain of the swine flu was linked to an a s-yet-unexplained increase in cases of a rare neurological condition known as Gu illain-Barre syndrome in those who received immunizations. Note: For many powerful reports from reliable sources on the dangers of vaccines , click here.

Swine flu doses on way to Wales 2009-07-13, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/wales_politics/8148345.stm Enough doses of swine flu vaccines for everyone in Wales should begin arriving i n the next few weeks. Latest figures show 64 confirmed Welsh cases, but new coun ting methods mean up to 1m people in Wales could be diagnosed with the illness l ong term. Up to six million doses would become available, with two per person, a nd those most at risk would be first in line to receive a jab. Experts will carr y out tests and work out how to administer the vaccine. Wales' chief medical off icer Dr Tony Jewell said it would be a huge logistical exercise. Dr Jewell said the vaccine would reduce the impact of a second phase of swine flu. "It will put us in a good position to modify it. It is an unprecedented situation," he said. So far 64 cases of swine flu in Wales have been confirmed by laboratory testing . Latest figures across Wales reveal that 426 people have gone to their local do ctor in the past week with flu-like symptoms. Three were admitted to hospital ov

er the last few days. Health officials said for every 100,000 people there have been 14.2 cases of flu-like illnesses. But Wales is behind other parts of the UK for infection rates. In Scotland the rate is 23.6 cases, while in England it is 51.9 cases. Seven people in Wales with swine flu had to be hospitalised but fiv e have since been discharged. 17 people in the UK have died - all but one of the m had underlying health problems. Experts say that for most people the illness i s mild and gets better within five to seven days. Note: 426 people had flu-like symptoms? Couldn't that be the normal flu? And all but one of the 17 who died had underlying health problems. Hmmmm. So why are th ey preparing six million vaccine doses? Could there be lots of money to be made here? A Wall Street Journal article states that $1 billion of our tax dollars ha ve already been set aside with $7.5 billion more on the way. For more reliable i nformation on manipulations involving swine flu, click here and here.

U.S. to vaccinate millions against swine flu 2009-07-10, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR20090709003... School-age children will be a key target population for a pandemic flu vaccine i n the fall, and they may be vaccinated at school in a mass campaign not seen sin ce the polio epidemics of the 1950s. The federal government should get about 100 million doses of vaccine by mid-October, if the current production by five comp anies goes as planned. But enough vaccine for wide use by the 120 million people especially vulnerable to the newly emerged strain of H1N1 influenza virus will not be available until later in the fall. Those were among the messages administ ration officials delivered to about 500 state, territorial, city and tribal heal th officials yesterday at a "flu summit" at the National Institutes of Health's Bethesda campus. President Obama, speaking by audio link from the Group of Eight summit in L'Aquila, Italy, urged "complete ownership" of preparations for what he termed a "significant outbreak" of H1N1 flu in the next few months. "We want to make sure that we are not promoting panic, but we are promoting vigilance and preparation," he said. He added that "the most important thing for us to do is to make sure that state and local officials prepare now to implement a vaccinati on program in the fall." Children, pregnant women, adults with chronic illnesses , and health-care workers would probably be first in line for the vaccine, Healt h and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the gathering. Education S ecretary Arne Duncan said "we would absolutely welcome" the idea that the nation 's schools be a principal venue for delivering the vaccine. He called them "natu ral sites" and said that "to open our doors and be part of the solution really m akes sense." Note: The fear-mongering and vaccination plan continues. Note the Post's claim t hat "more than 1 million Americans have become ill from it." Where did they get this number? The CDC website at this link as of July 10th claims around 40,000 c ases in the US. Could this mistake have been intentional? For lots more on this, see this link. And to watch a powerful segment from CBS 60 Minutes showing how government propoganda killed and maimed thousands during the swine flu scare of 1976, click here.

Weed-Whacking Herbicide Proves Deadly to Human Cells 2009-06-23, Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=weed-whacking-herbicide-p Used in yards, farms and parks throughout the world, Roundup has long been a top -selling weed killer. But now researchers have found that one of Roundup s inert i

ngredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. The new findings intensify a debate about so-called inerts the solven ts, preservatives, surfactants and other substances that manufacturers add to pe sticides. Nearly 4,000 inert ingredients are approved for use by the U.S. Enviro nmental Protection Agency. Glyphosate, Roundup s active ingredient, is the most wi dely used herbicide in the United States. About 100 million pounds are applied t o U.S. farms and lawns every year, according to the EPA. Until now, most health studies have focused on the safety of glyphosate, rather than the mixture of ing redients found in Roundup. But in the new study, scientists found that Roundup s i nert ingredients amplified the toxic effect on human cells even at concentration s much more diluted than those used on farms and lawns. One specific inert ingre dient, polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself - a finding the res earchers call astonishing. This clearly confirms that the [inert ingredients] in Ro undup formulations are not inert, wrote the study authors from France s University of Caen. Moreover, the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause c ell damage and even death [at the] residual levels found on Roundup-treated crops , such as soybeans, alfalfa and corn, or lawns and gardens. Note: Monsanto, Roundup s manufacturer, is the same company that has been using a corrupt judicial system to bankrupt farmers who won't use their seeds. For more on this important topic, click here.

Lawmakers Reveal Health-Care Investments 2009-06-13, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR20090612040... Almost 30 key lawmakers helping draft landmark health-care legislation have fina ncial holdings in the industry, totaling nearly $11 million worth of personal in vestments in a sector that could be dramatically reshaped by this summer's debat e. The list of members who have personal investments in the corporations that wi ll be affected by the legislation -- which President Obama has called this year' s highest domestic priority -- includes Congress's most powerful leaders and a b ipartisan collection of lawmakers in key committee posts. Their total health-car e holdings could be worth $27 million, because congressional financial disclosur e forms released yesterday require reporting of only broad ranges of holdings ra ther than precise values of assets. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev. ), for instance, has at least $50,000 invested in a health-care index, and Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), a senior member of the health committee, has between $254,0 00 and $560,000 worth of stock holdings in major health-care companies, includin g Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck. The family of Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), a s enior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee drafting that chamber's legislation, held at least $3.2 million in more than 20 health-care companies at the end of last year. "If someone is going to be substantially enriched by the consequences of the vote, particularly if it represents a meaningful amount of t heir net worth, then there is a problem," said Harlan Krumholz, a professor of m edicine at Yale University. Note: For more powerful information on major corruption in health care reform, c lick here. For lots more on government corruption from reliable, verfiiable sour ces, click here.

Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You 2009-01-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27brod.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&page...

Ask mothers why babies are constantly picking things up from the floor or ground and putting them in their mouths, and chances are they ll say that it s instinctive that that s how babies explore the world. But why the mouth, when sight, hearing, touch and even scent are far better at identifying things? Accumulating evidenc e strongly suggests that eating dirt is good for you. In studies of what is call ed the hygiene hypothesis, researchers are concluding that organisms like the mi llions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with d irt spur the development of a healthy immune system. Several continuing studies s uggest that worms may help to redirect an immune system that has gone awry and r esulted in autoimmune disorders, allergies and asthma. These studies, along with epidemiological observations, seem to explain why immune system disorders like multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma and alle rgies have risen significantly in the United States and other developed countrie s. What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment, Mary Ruebush, a microbiology and immunology instructor, wrote in her new book, Why Dirt Is Good. Not only does this allow for practice of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ign ored. Note: For many key reports on new health research from reliable sources, click h ere.

Major Flu Strain Found Resistant to Leading Drug, Puzzling Scientists 2009-01-09, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/health/09flu.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagew... Virtually all the dominant strain of flu in the United States this season is res istant to the leading antiviral drug Tamiflu, and scientists and health official s are trying to figure out why. The problem is not yet a public health crisis be cause this has been a below-average flu season so far, and because the Tamiflu-r esistant strain, one of three circulating, is still susceptible to other drugs. But infectious disease specialists are worried nonetheless. Last winter, about 1 1 percent of the throat swabs from patients with the most common type of flu tha t were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for genetic typing showed a Tamiflu-resistant strain. This season, 99 percent do. It s quite shocking , said Dr. Kent A. Sepkowitz, director of infection control at Memorial Sloan-Ket tering Cancer Center in New York. We ve never lost an antimicrobial this fast. It b lew me away. The single mutation that creates Tamiflu resistance appears to be sp ontaneous, and not a reaction to overuse of the drug. Complicating the problem, antiviral drugs work only if taken within the first 48 hours of infection. Note: Isn't Tamiflu the same drug that was, according the the U.K.'s respected I ndependent, "bought in massive amounts by Governments to treat a possible human pandemic of the disease [avian flu]," and from which Donald Rumsfeld "made more than $5m in capital gains from selling shares"? What ever happened to all the pa nic about the avian flu? Could it be that it was only fear mongering? For reliab le information on this key topic, click here.

UCSF says reports on drug trials skew positive 2008-12-15, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/14/MNKF14GTLO.DTL What are the pills in your medicine cabinet, and how do you know they're best fo r you? When drug companies seek approval to market new medicines, they must show the U.S. Food and Drug Administration the results of all the tests they've run

on volunteer patients - at first on only a few, then on dozens, and finally on h undreds or sometimes thousands. After winning approval, the companies typically sponsor reports of those tests in medical journal publications, which many docto rs often rely on to determine whether to prescribe new drugs for their patients. Now a skeptical team of medical investigators at UCSF has accused the major dru g companies of bias by distorting the results of their trials in those publicati ons, making it hard for doctors to judge for themselves the pros and cons of pre scribing the new drugs. As a result, the researchers say, patients may sometimes be taking medicines they don't need - or with unwanted side effects - that thei r doctors have prescribed on the basis of inadequate information. The UCSF team, led by Lisa A. Bero of the medical center's Institute for Health Policy Studies , probed the details of 164 drug trials involving as many as 1,500 patients over a two-year period and then examined reports on those trials that were published in medical journals, as well as those that remained unpublished. "We found real ly important information from the official trial reports that were either not pu blished at all or that stressed mostly the positive results of trials in the pub lished versions," said Kristin Rising, a physician at the institute who did the major investigation. Note: For lots more on corporate corruption from reliable sources, click here.

Mobile phone use 'raises children's risk of brain cancer fivefold' 2008-09-21, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mobile-phone-use-raises-childrens-r... Children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if they us e mobile phones, startling new research indicates. The study, experts say, raise s fears that today's young people may suffer an "epidemic" of the disease in lat er life. At least nine out of 10 British 16-year-olds have their own handset, as do more than 40 per cent of primary schoolchildren. Yet investigating dangers t o the young has been omitted from a massive 3.1m British investigation of the ris ks of cancer from using mobile phones, launched this year, even though the offic ial Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Programme which is cond ucting it admits that the issue is of the "highest priority". Despite recommenda tions of an official report that the use of mobiles by children should be "minim ised", the Government has done almost nothing to discourage it. Last week the Eu ropean Parliament voted by 522 to 16 to urge ministers across Europe to bring in stricter limits for exposure to radiation from mobile and cordless phones, Wi-f i and other devices, partly because children are especially vulnerable to them. They are more at risk because their brains and nervous systems are still develop ing and because since their heads are smaller and their skulls are thinner the r adiation penetrates deeper into their brains. David Carpenter, dean of the Schoo l of Public Health at the State University of New York said: "Children are spend ing significant time on mobile phones. We may be facing a public health crisis i n an epidemic of brain cancers as a result of mobile phone use." Note: For many important reports on health issues from reliable sources, click h ere.

FDA proposes approval process for genetically modified animals 2008-09-19, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-genetic19-2008sep19,0,4... The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday opened the way for a bevy of geneti cally engineered salmon, cows and other animals to leap from the laboratory to t he marketplace, unveiling an approval process that would treat the modified crea

tures like drugs. The guidelines for the first time make explicit the regulatory hoops companies would have to jump through to sell engineered salmon that grow twice as fast as wild fish; pigs with high levels of ... omega-3 fatty acids in their meat; or goats that produce ... proteins, such as insulin, in their milk. Many experts ... say the proposed regulations may not go far enough to protect t he public. In particular, they argue that the approval process would be highly s ecretive to guard the commercial interests of the companies involved, and that t he new rules do not place sufficient weight on the potential environmental effec t of what many consider to be Frankenstein animals. Animals can't be treated exa ctly like drugs, said Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst at the Center for Food Saf ety in Washington. "Drugs don't go out and breed with each other. When a drug ge ts loose, you figure you can control it. When a bull gets loose, it would be har der to corral." The first product likely to be sold under the new rules is a gen etically engineered Atlantic salmon produced by Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc. of Waltham, Mass. Inserted genes from two other fish allow it to reach full size i n 18 months rather than the normal 30. Aqua Bounty, along with other biotechnolo gy companies, has been pushing the FDA to establish guidelines and hopes to win approval next year. Note: For a superb survey of the risks to health from genetically modified food organisms, click here.

Psychiatric Group Faces Scrutiny Over Drug Industry Ties 2008-07-12, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/washington/12psych.html?partner=rssuserland... It seemed an ideal marriage, a scientific partnership that would attack mental i llness from all sides. Psychiatrists would bring ... their expertise and clinica l experience, drug makers would provide their products and the money to run rigo rous studies, and patients would get better medications, faster. But now the pro fession itself is under attack in Congress, accused of allowing this relationshi p to become too cozy. After a series of stinging investigations of individual do ctors arrangements with drug makers, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of I owa, is demanding that the American Psychiatric Association, the field s premier p rofessional organization, give an accounting of its financing. "I have come to u nderstand that money from the pharmaceutical industry can shape the practices of nonprofit organizations that purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions," Mr. Grassley said. In 2006 ... the drug industry accounted for about 3 0 percent of the association s $62.5 million in financing. One of the doctors name d by Mr. Grassley is the association s president-elect, Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg of Stanford, whose $4.8 million stock holdings in a drug development company raised the senator s concern. Commercial arrangements are rampant throughout medicine. I n the past two decades, drug and device makers have paid tens of thousands of do ctors and researchers of all specialties. Worried that this money could taint do ctors research plans or clinical judgment, government agencies, medical journals and universities have been forced to look more closely at deal details. Note: For many powerful reports of corporate corruption, click here.

Chemical Law Has Global Impact 2008-06-12, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/11/AR20080611035... Europe this month rolled out new restrictions on makers of chemicals linked to c ancer and other health problems, changes that are forcing U.S. industries to fin d new ways to produce a wide range of everyday products. The new laws in the Eur

opean Union require companies to demonstrate that a chemical is safe before it e nters commerce -- the opposite of policies in the United States, where regulator s must prove that a chemical is harmful before it can be restricted or removed f rom the market. The changes come at a time when consumers are increasingly worri ed about the long-term consequences of chemical exposure and are agitating for m ore aggressive regulation. The European Union's tough stance on chemical regulat ion is the latest area in which the Europeans are reshaping business practices w ith demands that American companies either comply or lose access to a market of 27 countries and nearly 500 million people. From its crackdown on antitrust prac tices in the computer industry to its rigorous protection of consumer privacy, t he European Union has adopted a regulatory philosophy that emphasizes the consum er. "There's a strong sense in Europe and the world at large that America is let ting the market have a free ride," said Sheila Jasanoff, professor of science an d technology studies at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Governmen t. "The Europeans believe . . . that being a good global citizen in an era of su stainability means you don't just charge ahead and destroy the planet without co ncern for what you're doing." Note: For lots more on health issues from reliable, verifiable sources, click he re.

Research Finds Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region 2008-06-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/health/research/05disparities.html?partner=... Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quali ty of the medical treatment a patient receives, according to new research showin g that blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likel y than whites to have a leg amputated and that women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine. The study, by researchers at Dar tmouth, examined Medicare claims for evidence of racial and geographic dispariti es and found that on a variety of quality indices, blacks typically were less li kely to receive recommended care than whites within a given region. But the most striking disparities were found from place to place. For instance, the widest r acial gaps in mammogram rates within a state were in California and Illinois, wi th a difference of 12 percentage points between the white rate and the black rat e. But the country s lowest rate for blacks 48 percent in California was 24 percen tage points below the highest rate 72 percent in Massachusetts. The statistics w ere for women ages 65 to 69 who received screening in 2004 or 2005. In all but t wo states, black diabetics were less likely than whites to receive annual hemogl obin testing. But blacks in Colorado (66 percent) were far less likely to be scr eened than those in Massachusetts (88 percent). The study was commissioned by th e nation s largest health-related philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation , which on Thursday planned to announce a three-year, $300 million initiative in tended to narrow health care disparities across lines of race and geography. Note: For a treasure trove of important reports on health issues from reliable s ources, click here.

EPA Scientists Decry Political Pressure 2008-04-23, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/23/tech/main4037465.shtml Hundreds of Environmental Protection Agency scientists complain they have been v ictims of political interference and pressure from superiors to skew their findi ngs. The Union of Concerned Scientists said that more than half of the nearly 1,

600 EPA staff scientists who responded online to a detailed questionnaire report ed they had experienced incidents of political interference in their work. Franc esca Grifo, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Scientific Integrity Program, said the survey results revealed "an agency in crisis" with low morale, especially among scientists involved in risk assessment and crafting regulation s. "The investigation shows researchers are generally continuing to do their wor k, but their scientific findings are tossed aside when it comes time to write re gulations," said Grifo. The group sent an online questionnaire to 5,500 EPA scie ntists and received 1,586 responses, a majority of them senior scientists who ha ve worked for the agency for 10 years or more. The survey included chemists, tox icologists, engineers, geologists and experts in the life and environmental scie nces. The report said that 60 percent of those responding, or 889 scientists, re ported personally experiencing what they viewed as political interference in the ir work over the last five years. Senior managers and the White House Office of Management and Budget frequently second-guess scientific findings and change wor k conducted by EPA's scientists, the report said. Nearly 400 scientists said the y had witnessed EPA officials misrepresenting scientific findings, 284 said they had [witnessed] the "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome" and 224 scientists said they had been directed to "inappropr iately exclude or alter technical information" in an EPA document. Note: For a treasure trove of reports from reliable, verifiable sources on gover nment corruption, click here.

VA stalling on care, judge told at S.F. trial 2008-04-21, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/MNQK109AA7.DTL More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a fed eral judge. The rights of hundreds of thousands of veterans are being violated b y the Department of Veterans Affairs, "an agency that is in denial," and by a go vernment health care system and appeals process for patients that is "broken dow n," Gordon Erspamer, lawyer for two advocacy groups, said in an opening statemen t at the trial of a nationwide lawsuit. He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 email - and the agency's backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an inc rease of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003. U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti ... ruled in January that the case could go to trial. In doing so, he reje cted the government's argument that civil courts have no authority over the VA's medical decisions or how it handles grievances. If the advocates can prove thei r claims, Conti said in his ruling, they would show that "thousands of veterans, if not more, are suffering grievous injuries as the result of their inability t o procure desperately needed and obviously deserved health care." He also ruled that veterans are legally entitled to five years of government-provided health c are after leaving the service, despite federal officials' argument that they are required to provide only as much care as the VA's budget allows in a given year . The trial follows publication of a Rand study last week that estimated 300,000 U.S. troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, or 18.5 percent of the total, suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress. Note: For many reports from reliable, verifiable sources detailing the devastati ng impacts of modern war, click here. For a revealing commentary by a top U.S. g eneral on how soldiers lives are ruined by needless wars, click here.

First British human-animal hybrid embryos created by scientists 2008-04-02, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/apr/02/medicalresearch.ethicsofscience Britain's first human-animal hybrid embryos have been created, forming a crucial first step, scientists believe, towards a supply of stem cells that could be us ed to investigate debilitating and so far untreatable conditions such as Alzheim er's disease, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease. Lyle Armstrong, who led the work, gained permission in January from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to create the embryos, known as "cytoplasmic hybrids". His team at Newcastle University produced the embryos by inserting human DNA from a skin cell into a hollowed-out cow egg. An electric shock then induced the hybrid emb ryo to grow. The embryo, 99.9% human and 0.1% other animal, grew for three days, until it had 32 cells. Eventually, scientists hope to grow such embryos for six days, and then extract stem cells from them. The researchers insisted the embry os would never be implanted into a woman and that the only reason they used cow eggs was due to the scarcity of human eggs. Cardinal Keith O'Brien used his East er sermon to denounce what he called experiments of "Frankenstein proportion" an d called the bill a "monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human l ife". Catholics object to the idea of putting human and animal DNA in the same e ntity and to the notion of creating what they regard as a life for the purposes of research, a life that will then be destroyed. Note: For more on this important issue, click here.

Lawmakers blast USDA for food inspection lapses 2008-02-19, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/19/MN17V4MU9.DTL Lawmakers and watchdog groups had harsh words Monday for the U.S. Department of Agriculture after the agency ordered a recall of 143 million pounds of beef from a Southern California slaughterhouse. Beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006, tha t came from Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. of Chino (San Bernardino County) are subj ect to the recall, which is the largest such action in U.S. history. The notice came after the Humane Society of the United States shot undercover video showing crippled and sick animals being shoved with forklifts - treatment that has also triggered an animal-abuse investigation. A congresswoman who chairs a House sub committee that determines funding levels for the USDA sent a letter ... to the a gency's undersecretary for food safety demanding an explanation of the Westland case before a March 5 budgetary review hearing. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., chai rwoman of the House Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration Appropriations Sub committee, called the scenes in the video inhumane and said the video "demonstra tes just how far our food safety system has collapsed." DeLauro has called for a n investigation into the government's ability to secure the safety of meat in th e nation's schools. Westland was a major supplier of beef for the National Schoo l Lunch Program. She also asked how the agency is addressing staff shortages amo ng slaughterhouse inspectors - an issue also raised by several food safety exper ts and watchdog groups. According to Felicia Nestor, a senior policy analyst wit h Food and Water Watch, a consumer advocacy group based in Washington, anywhere from 7 to 21 percent of slaughterhouse inspector positions have been left vacant by the USDA, depending on the district. "They just don't fill vacancies," Nesto r said. Note: For many revealing articles from reliable sources on government corruption , click here.

USDA Recommends That Food From Clones Stay Off the Market 2008-01-16, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/15/AR20080115015... The U.S. Department of Agriculture yesterday asked U.S. farmers to keep their cl oned animals off the market indefinitely even as Food and Drug Administration of ficials announced that food from cloned livestock is safe to eat. Bruce I. Knigh t, the USDA's undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, requested an ongoing "voluntary moratorium" to buy time for "an acceptance process" that Kni ght said consumers in the United States and abroad will need, "given the emotion al nature of this issue." Yet even as the two agencies sought a unified message -- that food from clones is safe for people but perhaps dangerous to U.S. market s and trade relations -- evidence surfaced suggesting that Americans and others are probably already eating meat from the offspring of clones. Executives from t he nation's major cattle cloning companies conceded yesterday that they have not been able to keep track of how many offspring of clones have entered the food s upply, despite a years-old request by the FDA to keep them off the market pendin g completion of the agency's safety report. At least one Kansas cattle producer also disclosed yesterday that he has openly sold semen from prize-winning clones to many U.S. meat producers in the past few years, and that he is certain he is not alone. "This is a fairy tale that this technology is not being used and is not already in the food chain," said Donald Coover, a Galesburg cattleman and ve terinarian who has a specialty cattle semen business. "Anyone who tells you othe rwise either doesn't know what they're talking about, or they're not being hones t." Last year, [only] 22 percent of Americans who responded to a major survey sa id they had a favorable impression of food from clones. Note: For lots more reliable information on how big business takes huge risks wi th the food we eat, click here.

Ricki Lake in 'Business of Being Born,' about birth in America 2008-01-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) Things did not exactly go as planned when Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein conceived the idea of working together on an expose of America's delivery rooms. Called "T he Business of Being Born," the documentary examines the politics, economics and history of how and where most Americans take their first breaths. This includes the births of Epstein's and Lake's own babies - Lake delivered at home aided by a midwife. Although they were longtime friends, Epstein had written off Lake's interest in home birth and midwifery as a "reckless" crusade that she admits she "totally didn't get." That all changed in 2004 when Lake showed Epstein a home video of [Lake] giving birth to her second son in a bathtub in 2001. "Ricki's vi deo was so inspiring. I didn't know you could have a baby like that - with no bl ood, in her own home," Epstein says. "It was clean. It was beautiful. She looked so powerful and so in control." While "The Business of Being Born" clearly take s a stance in defending the craft of midwifery, Epstein and Lake insist that the ir mission is more about empowering women with knowledge and reminding them that they may have more choices than they realize. "The film is not advocating anyth ing but choice. I'm not at all telling people to have a home birth like me," say s Lake, who after reading a book called Spiritual Midwifery decided she wanted t o give birth to her second child at home. Citing statistics that show home-birth ing rates declining from 95 percent in 1900 to less than 1 percent by 1955, the film questions whether American women today have been convinced that they are no t responsible for the births of their children or simply don't know how to give birth on their own.

'Second Thoughts about Fluoride,' Reports Scientific American 2008-01-02, MSNBC/Reuters http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22471906 "Some recent studies suggest that over-consumption of fluoride can raise the ris ks of disorders affecting teeth, bones, the brain and the thyroid gland," report s Scientific American [magazine]. "Scientific attitudes toward fluoridation may be starting to shift," writes author Dan Fagin. "Fluoride, the most consumed dru g in the USA, is deliberately added to [two-thirds] of public water supplies the oretically to reduce tooth decay, but with no scientifically-valid evidence prov ing safety or effectiveness," says lawyer Paul Beeber [of the] New York State Co alition Opposed to Fluoridation. Fagin, Director of New York University's Scienc e, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, writes, "There is no universally accepted optimal level for daily intake of fluoride." After [three] years of scr utinizing hundreds of studies, a National Research Council committee "concluded that fluoride can subtly alter endocrine function, especially in the thyroid -the gland that produces hormones regulating growth and metabolism," reports Fagi n. Fluoride in foods, beverages, medicines and dental products can result in flu oride over-consumption, visible in young children as dental fluorosis -- white s potted, yellow, brown and/or pitted teeth. Reports Fagin, "a series of epidemiol ogical studies in China have associated high fluoride exposures with lower IQ. E pidemiological studies and tests on lab animals suggest that high fluoride expos ure increases the risk of bone fracture, especially in vulnerable populations su ch as the elderly and diabetics." Note: If above MSNBC link fails, click here. For many highly informative reports on health issues, click here.

His parasite theory stirs a revolution 2007-12-31, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2007/12/31/his_parasite_theory_st... "What if I told you," Joel Weinstock said, "there were countries where the docto rs had never seen hay fever?" It is another piece of evidence, another "aha" mom ent in the global medical mystery that Weinstock - the chief of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts-New England Medical Center - has narrowed down to one c hief suspect: the worms. Weinstock, 59, specializes in studying why immunologica l diseases ... are on the rise in developed countries but remain relatively unco mmon in undeveloped countries. He believes these diseases, many of which were al most unheard of 100 years ago, are because of changes in our environment, a lack of exposure to something. And he thinks that something may be the worms. "We re alized that one thing people always had was intestinal worms," he said. The para sites that we have been told to avoid - such as hookworm and pinworm - may be th e good guys, while excessive hygiene may be the bad guy. "I get about 5,000 e-ma ils a year from patients all over the world asking what to do," he said. "People know that something isn't right. They keep their kids in the cleanest environme nts and they get asthma. We get all of these things that were rare becoming comm on. And a lot of it comes down to hygiene. Excessive hygiene can potentially lea d to disease." The "hygiene hypothesis," which was first proposed nearly two dec ades ago, argues that aspects of cleanliness prevent the immune system from prog ramming itself to fight off disease. "The big question is what are those aspects ? We don't want to go back to the standards of the 1800s," Weinstock said. "Publ ic hygiene and cleanliness are very good for us, but removing ourselves entirely from our natural environment is bad for us. We need to figure out the aspects o f dirt and exposure that are good for us and hopefully we can find a balance." Note: For many reliable reports on health issues, click here.

Chinese Chemicals Flow Unchecked Onto World Drug Market 2007-10-31, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/world/asia/31chemical.html?ex=1351483200&en... Pharmaceutical ingredients exported from China are often made by chemical compan ies that are neither certified nor inspected by Chinese drug regulators, The New York Times has found. Because the chemical companies are not required to meet e ven minimal drug-manufacturing standards, there is little to stop them from expo rting unapproved, adulterated or counterfeit ingredients. The substandard formul ations made from those ingredients often end up in pharmacies in developing coun tries and for sale on the Internet, where more Americans are turning for cheap m edicine. [At a pharmaceutical trade show in Milan], the Times identified at leas t 82 Chinese chemical companies that said they made and exported pharmaceutical ingredients yet not one was certified by the State Food and Drug Administration in China, records show. Nonetheless, the companies were negotiating deals at the pharmaceutical show, where suppliers wooed customers with live music, wine and vibrating chairs. In China, chemical manufacturers that sell drug ingredients fa ll into a regulatory hole. Pharmaceutical companies are regulated by the food an d drug agency. Chemical companies that make products as varied as fertilizer and industrial solvents are overseen by other agencies. The problem arises when che mical companies cross over into drug ingredients. We have never investigated a ch emical company, said Ms. Yan [Jiangying], deputy director of policy and regulatio n at the State Food and Drug Administration. We don t have jurisdiction. China has a n estimated 80,000 chemical companies, and the United States Food and Drug Admin istration does not know how many sell ingredients used in drugs consumed by Amer icans. The Times examined thousands of companies selling products on major busin ess-to-business Internet trading sites and found more than 1,300 [Chinese] chemi cal companies offering pharmaceutical ingredients. Note: For many other reliable reports concerning health, click here.

A Life Saver Called "Plumpynut" 2007-10-21, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/19/60minutes/main3386661.shtml Every year, malnutrition kills five million children -- that's one child every s ix seconds. But now, the Nobel Prize-winning relief group "Doctors Without Borde rs" says it finally has something that can save millions of these children. It's cheap, easy to make and even easier to use. What is this miraculous cure? It's a ready-to-eat, vitamin-enriched concoction called "Plumpynut," an unusual name for a food that may just be the most important advance ever to cure and prevent malnutrition. "It's a revolution in nutritional affairs," says Dr. Milton Tecton idis, the chief nutritionist for Doctors Without Borders. "Now we have something . It is like an essential medicine. In three weeks, we can cure a kid that ... l ooked like they're half dead. It s just, boom! It's a spectacular response," Dr. T ectonidis says. No kids need it more than ... in Niger, a desperately poor count ry in West Africa, where child malnutrition is so widespread that most mothers h ave watched at least one of their children die. Why are so many kids dying? Beca use they can't get the milk, vitamins and minerals their young bodies need. Moth ers in these villages can't produce enough milk themselves and can't afford to b uy it. Even if they could, they can't store it -- there s no electricity, so no re frigeration. Powdered milk is useless because most villagers don't have clean wa ter. Plumpynut was designed to overcome all these obstacles. Plumpynut is a rema rkably simple concoction: it is basically made of peanut butter, powdered milk, powdered sugar, and enriched with vitamins and minerals. It tastes like a peanut butter paste. It is very sweet, and because of that kids cannot get enough of i

t. The formula was developed by a nutritionist. It doesn't need refrigeration, w ater, or cooking; mothers simply squeeze out the paste. Many children can even f eed themselves. Each serving is the equivalent of a glass of milk and a multivit amin.

Drug Co. To Pay $515M Over Marketing 2007-09-28, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/28/business/main3310529.shtml Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and a former subsidiary have agreed to pay more than $5 15 million to settle federal and state investigations into their drug marketing and pricing practices. The civil settlement ... resolves a broad array of allega tions against Bristol-Myers Squibb, dating from 1994 through 2005. Among them wa s a charge that the ... company illegally promoted the sale of Abilify, an antipsychotic drug, for pediatric use and to treat dementia-related psychoses. Neith er use is approved by the U.S. [FDA]. Although physicians are permitted to presc ribe drugs for off-label uses, drug companies are prohibited from marketing them for uses that have not been approved by the FDA. U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan said when pharmaceutical companies market drugs for unapproved uses, there is a potential risk that patients could be harmed, because the drugs have not been t ested as rigorously as they are during the FDA approval process. The government also alleged the company paid illegal inducements in the form of consulting fees and trips to luxury resorts to influence doctors and other health care provider s to buy and prescribe the company's drugs. The company's former generic drug su bsidiary, Apothecon Inc., also was accused of giving illegal enticements to indu ce retail pharmacy and wholesale customers to buy its products. Bristol-Myers Sq uibb misreported its best price for the anti-depression drug Serzone, violating a law that requires drug companies to report their lowest price to Medicaid, pro secutors said. The company was selling Serzone to a larger commercial purchaser at a lower price, prosecutors said. Bristol-Myers Squibb and Apothecon also infl ated prices for an assortment of oncology and generic drugs knowing that federal health care programs established reimbursement rates based on those prices, Sul livan said. Note: For lots more on corporate corruption, click here.

Diagnosis: Conflict of Interest 2007-06-13, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/opinion/13carlat.html?ex=1339387200&en=68ba... The revelation that the diabetes drug Avandia can potentially cause heart diseas e is the latest in a string of pharmaceutical disappointments. Vioxx was pulled from the market in 2004 because it doubled the risks for heart attacks and strok es. Eli Lilly recently paid $750 million to settle lawsuits alleging that Zyprex a causes diabetes. Many have criticized the Food and Drug Administration as bein g too lax about monitoring drug safety. While those criticisms have merit, there is another culprit: the transformation of continuing medical education into an enterprise for drug marketing. The chore of teaching doctors how to practice med icine has been handed to the pharmaceutical industry. As a result, dangerous sid e effects are rarely on the curriculum. Most states require that doctors obtain a minimum number of credit hours of continuing medical education each year to ma intain their medical licenses. Not so long ago, most of these courses were produ ced and paid for by universities and medical associations. But this has changed drastically over the past decade. Drug-industry financing of continuing medical education has nearly quadrupled since 1998, from $302 million to $1.12 billion. Half of all continuing medical education courses in the United States are now pa

id for by drug companies, up from a third a decade ago. Because pharmaceutical c ompanies now set much of the agenda for what doctors learn about drugs, crucial information about potential drug dangers is played down, to the detriment of pat ient care. For example, GlaxoSmithKline footed the bill for dozens of educationa l courses intended to emphasize the benefits of Avandia over other drugs. Note: For a concise, reliable overview of medical corruption, click here.

Former Marine Claims Illness From Mystery Vaccine 2007-05-07, WLWT-TV (Cincinnati, Ohio's NBC affiliate) http://www.wlwt.com/news/13271378/detail.html An alarming number of U.S. troops are having severe reactions to some of the vac cines they receive in preparation for going overseas. "This is the worst cover-u p in the history of the military," said an unidentified military health officer who fears for his job. A shot from a syringe is leaving some U.S. servicemen and women on the brink of death. Lance Corporal David Fey, 20, has dialysis three d ays a week. His kidneys are failing, his military career is over, and he feels l ike his country abandoned him. Fey said he loved every minute of boot camp and c ombat training at 29 Palms in California. But on Nov. 28, 2005, his life would c hange forever. Fey was one of a group of Marines who lined up for an undisclosed shot. "They asked us our name. We stood on these yellow footprints, and they ga ve us this shot, and we got the rest of the day off," he recalled. "After that s hot, I started swelling up. I gained 30 pounds of water. My eyes swelled up wher e I couldn't see. I started snoring. I developed a rash on my hand." Three weeks later, Fey was back in Clermont County on his death bed at Clinton Memorial Hos pital. His kidneys were failing, and his body was so swollen that it left stretc h marks. Fey is one of a growing number of U.S. servicemen and women who are get ting sick after receiving vaccines. And the ... Department of Defense medical of ficer who spoke with [WLWT] said that the number is up in the thousands. The sym ptoms range from joint aches and pains and arthritic symptoms to death. The offi cer said those who have claimed to have had adverse reactions to shots are treat ed like it is all in their heads. Asked whether servicemen and women are receivi ng experimental vaccines, the officer said, "I would hope to God not. But from w hat I've seen, I would have to say yes."

Doctors' Ties to Drug Companies Called Commonplace 2007-04-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/25/AR20070425022... The ties between doctors and drug manufacturers are close indeed. Most physician s (94 percent) reported some type of relationship with the pharmaceutical indust ry ... according to [a] study, published in the April 26 issue of the New Englan d Journal of Medicine. Most of these relationships involved receiving food in th e workplace (83 percent) or receiving drug samples (78 percent). More than one-t hird of the respondents (35 percent) were reimbursed for costs associated with p rofessional meetings or continuing medical education, while more than one-quarte r (28 percent) were paid for consulting, delivering lectures or enrolling patien ts in clinical trials. Over the past two decades, physician-industry relationshi ps have attracted increasing scrutiny. One review found that, on average, physic ians meet with industry representatives four times a month, and medical resident s accept six gifts annually from industry representatives. "We know that these r elationships have benefits and risks, and we know that they benefit the companie s that are involved, and we know from our data that they benefit doctors," said study author Eric G. Campbell, an assistant professor of health care policy at t he Institute for Health Policy at Harvard Medical School. "The real question is

to what extent do these relationships benefit patients, and the answer is, we do n't know." Campbell said that he found it hard to believe that free football tic kets for a doctor would trickle down to benefit patients. Note: For an excellent article by one of the foremost doctors in the nation on h ow the pharmaceutical industry has corrupted politics and damaged our health, cl ick here.

F.D.A. Warns of Sleeping Pills Strange Effects 2007-03-15, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/business/15drug.ready.html?ex=1331611200&en... The most widely prescribed sleeping pills can cause strange behavior like drivin g and eating while asleep, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday, anno uncing that strong new warnings will be placed on the labels of 13 drugs. Use of those medications and other similar drugs has soared by more than 60 percent si nce 2000, fueled by television, print and other advertising. Last year, makers o f sleeping pills spent more than $600 million on advertising aimed at consumers. Sales in the United States of Ambien and Lunesta alone last year exceeded $3 bi llion. Last year ... some users of the most widely prescribed drug, Ambien, star ted complaining online and to their doctors about unusual reactions ranging from fairly benign sleepwalking episodes to hallucinations, violent outbursts, noctu rnal binge eating and most troubling of all driving while asleep. Sleep-drivers reported frightening episodes in which they recalled going to bed, but woke up t o find they had been arrested roadside in their underwear or nightclothes. The a gency also received reports of people making phone calls, purchasing items over the Internet, or having sex under the influence of sleep medication. In each cas e the consumers had no recollection of the events, which they said had occurred after they took their pills and headed for bed. "Hopefully this will make doctor s think twice before blindly giving patients a prescription," said Dr. Mahowald. He also criticized marketing of the products. "I personally think the extent of advertising has just been unconscionable," he said. Note: A reliable insider told us of a harrowing story where his company and the FDA made a secret agreement not to report numerous deaths resulting from one tes t drug so that it would pass and bring major profits. For lots more reliable, ve rifiable information on major corruption in the drug companies affecting your he alth, click here.

Texas Governor Defends Vaccine Order 2007-02-22, MSNBC/Associated Press http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=AP&Date=2... Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday angrily defended his relationship with Merck & Co. a nd his executive order requiring that schoolgirls receive the drugmaker's vaccin e against the sexually transmitted cervical-cancer virus. The Associated Press r eported Wednesday that Perry's chief of staff had met with key aides about the v accine on Oct. 16, the same day Merck's political action committee donated $5,00 0 to the governor's campaign. In issuing the order, the governor made Texas the first state to require the vaccine Gardasil for all schoolgirls. But many lawmak ers have complained about his bypassing the Legislature altogether. The executiv e order has inflamed conservatives, who said it contradicts Texas' abstinence-on ly sexual education policies and intrudes into families' lives. Critics have pre viously questioned Perry's ties to Merck. Mike Toomey, Perry's former chief of s taff, now lobbies for the drug company. And the governor accepted a total of $6, 000 from Merck during his re-election campaign. Merck has waged a behind-the-sce

nes lobbying campaign to get state legislatures to require girls to get the thre e-dose vaccine to enroll in school. But on Tuesday the pharmaceutical company an nounced it was suspending the effort because of pressure from parents and medica l groups. The Kentucky House on Thurday passed a bill that would require the vac cination for middle school girls unless their parents sign a form opposing it. V irginia lawmakers have also passed legislation requiring the vaccine, but the go vernor has not decided if he will sign it. Note: The drug company lobby is the most powerful in the U.S., as reported by th e former editor-in-chief of one of the most respected medical journals in the U. S. Click here for more.

Journals 'regularly publish fraudulent research 2006-05-03, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,1766642,00.html Fraudulent research regularly appears in the 30,000 scientific journals publishe d worldwide, a former editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) said today. Ev en when journals discover that published research is fabricated or falsified the y rarely retract the findings, according to Richard Smith, who was also chief ex ecutive of the BMJ publishing group. Writing in the latest edition of the Journa l of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr Smith called on editors to blow the whist le on bad research and to use their clout to pressure universities into taking a ction against dodgy researchers. The former BMJ editor said it was likely that r esearch fraud was "equally common" in the 30,000 plus scientific journals across the globe but was "invariably covered up". His call for action comes in the wak e of several high profile cases of fraudulent research, including the Korean sci entist Hwang Woo-suk who fabricated stem cell research that it was claimed would open up new ways to treat diseases like Parkinson's. Dr Smith criticised the fa ilure of scientific institutions, including universities, to discipline dodgy re searchers even when alerted to problems by journals. "Few countries have measure s in place to ensure research is carried out ethically," he said. "Most cases ar e not publicised. They are simply not recognised, covered up altogether or the g uilty researcher is urged to retrain, move to another institution or retire from research." Note: For reliable information on the collusion of industry, government, and res earch facilities who place profits above advances in public health: http://www.W antToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Exposed: the secret corporate funding behind health research 2006-02-07, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1703694,00.html Academics and the media have failed dismally to ask the crucial question of scie ntists' claims: who is paying you? In the 1990s...[Arise] was one of the world's most influential public-health groups. It described itself as "a worldwide asso ciation of eminent scientists who act as independent commentators". Its purpose. ..was to show how "everyday pleasures, such as eating chocolate, smoking, drinki ng tea, coffee and alcohol, contribute to the quality of life". "Scientific stud ies show that enjoying the simple pleasures in life, without feeling guilty, can reduce stress and increase resistance to disease". Between September 1993 and M arch 1994,...[Arise] generated 195 newspaper articles and radio and television i nterviews, in places such as the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald T ribune, the Independent, the Evening Standard, El Pas, La Repubblica, Rai and the BBC. In 1998...[tobacco] firms were obliged to place their internal documents i

n a public archive. Among them...is a memo from...Philip Morris - the world's la rgest tobacco company. The title is "Arise 1994-95 Activities and Funding". This showed that in the previous financial year Arise had received $373,400: ...over 99% - from Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, RJ Reynolds and Rothmans. T he memo suggests Arise was run not by eminent scientists but by eminent tobacco companies. How much more science is being published in academic journals with un declared interests like these? How many more media campaigns...have been secretl y funded and steered by corporations? Note: If you want to understand how corporate interests secretly manipulate both scientific results and public perception, this excellent article is well worth reading.

GM: New study shows unborn babies could be harmed 2006-01-06, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article337253.ece Women who eat GM [genetically modified] foods while pregnant risk endangering th eir unborn babies, startling new research suggests. The study...found that more than half of the offspring of rats fed on modified soya died in the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers with normal diets. Six times as many were also severely underweight. The research - which is being pre pared for publication - is just one of a clutch of recent studies that are reviv ing fears that GM food damages human health. Italian research has found that mod ified soya affected the liver and pancreas of mice. Australia had to abandon a d ecade-long attempt to develop modified peas when an official study found they ca used lung damage. The World Trade Organisation is expected next month to support a bid by the Bush administration to force European countries to accept GM foods . The Monsanto soya is widely eaten by Americans. Note: Though the European press provides good coverage, the US media is amazingl y quiet on the issue of GMOs, which is so vital to our health. For an excellent overview: http://www.wanttoknow.info/deception10pg

DuPont Stuck With Big Teflon Fine 2005-12-14, CBS/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/14/business/main1124537.shtml DuPont Co. has agreed to pay $10.25 million in fines and $6.25 million for envir onmental projects in a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency over the company's alleged failure to report the dangers of a toxic chemical used to make Teflon. EPA officials said the settlement represents the largest civil admi nistrative penalty the agency has ever obtained under any federal environmental statute. The EPA alleged that DuPont withheld information for more than 20 years about the health effects of PFOA. DuPont faced a potential fine of more than $3 00 million for not reporting that the chemical posed a substantial risk of injur y to health or the environment. "The settlement allows us to put this matter beh ind us and move forward," said [DuPont general counsel Stacey] Mobley, who noted that the company has cut PFOA emissions from U.S. plant sites by 98 percent and hopes to reduce emissions even further by 2007. DuPont...still faces a federal criminal investigation of its actions concerning PFOA. In a draft report release d in June, the majority of members on a scientific advisory board that reviewed the EPA's draft risk assessment concluded that the chemical is "likely" to be ca rcinogenic to humans.

Experts dismiss scare over bird flu 2005-11-01, Gainesville Sun http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051101/LOCAL/51101021... [Gary] Butcher has been an extension veterinarian at the University of Florida's College of Veterinary Medicine since 1988. He was trained as a veterinarian spe cializing in avian diseases, and has a Ph.D. in poultry virology. Butcher begins his presentation with a slide that shows a "news flash" from the British press agency Reuters reporting that avian flu "poses the single biggest threat to the world right now." So far, however...no one has yet been proven to have given avi an influenza to someone else. "The emphasis of all my work has changed to dealin g with this madness," Butcher said Friday. "Realistically, avian influenza is no t a threat to people, but everywhere you go, it has turned into a circus." Milli ons of chickens and waterfowl have been slaughtered in Asia...but Butcher said t hat of the billions of people who have probably been exposed, only about 120 hav e been reported to have fallen ill with avian flu. They were people who worked c losely with chickens and came into contact with the birds' blood and feces. Not all health officials are sounding a warning about avian influenza, either. Dr. M arc Siegel, a practicing internist and associate professor of medicine at the Ne w York University School of Medicine...isn't buying into the scare scenario. "If anything is contagious right now, it's judgment clouded by fear," Siegel said. [Butcher] said that although there is a potential that the virus could mutate, a s it exists, it could not become an important disease in humans. "For it to beco me dangerous to humans, it has to go through a pretty significant genetic change . If you put this in perspective, it's not going to happen. Note: When major corruption threatens to be exposed, those threatened know that by creating massive fear (such as a global pandemic), they can divert attention and keep money flowing into corrupt coffers. For more on this, click here and he re.

Bush lifts wage rules for Katrina 2005-09-09, CNN/Reuters http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/08/news/economy/katrina_wages.reut President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors r ebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage . In a notice to Congress, Bush said the hurricane had caused "a national emerge ncy" that permits him to take such action. Bush's action came as the federal gov ernment moved to provide billions of dollars in aid. The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately try ing to rebuild their lives and their communities.

Merck CEO Resigns as Drug Probe Continues 2005-05-06, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/05/AR20050505011... Merck & Co.'s longtime leader Raymond V. Gilmartin abruptly resigned yesterday o n the same day congressional investigators released a slew of documents detailin g how the company continued to aggressively promote its arthritis drug Vioxx aft er it knew of potentially serious safety concerns. The documents...showed that M erck directed its 3,000-person Vioxx sales force to avoid discussions with docto rs about the cardiovascular risks identified in a major clinical trial of the dr ug in 2000. Sales representatives were told instead to rely on a "Cardiovascular Card" that said Vioxx was protecting the heart rather than potentially harming

it. They were [also] trained how to smile, speak and position themselves most ef fectively when talking with doctors, and were exhorted to sell Vioxx and other M erck drugs using the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Viox x was withdrawn from the market last September after another clinical trial foun d that people who had taken the drug for 18 months were five times more likely t o have heart attacks and strokes than those on a placebo. Merck was sharply crit icized in a hearing into how the company and the Food and Drug Administration ha d handled the safety concerns surrounding Vioxx.

EPA Mercury Rule Omits Conflicting Data 2005-03-22, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55268-2005Mar21.html When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a rule last week to limit merc ury emissions from U.S. power plants, officials emphasized that the controls cou ld not be more aggressive because the cost to industry already far exceeded the public health payoff. What they did not reveal is that a Harvard University stud y paid for by the EPA, co-authored by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists had reached the opposite conclusion. That analysis estimate d health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA did, but top agency officials or dered the finding stripped from public documents.

Silver Bullet: Depleted Uranium 2000-02-07, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - Canada's PBS) http://web.archive.org/web/20000903222100/http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgmin... Jerry Wheat and the other Gulf vets were never told of the risks of being expose d to a DU campaign. Awarded a Purple Heart after being wounded in combat, Wheat came home with pieces of shrapnel embedded in his body and with mysterious body pains. A year after war's end, Wheat got startling evidence from his father -- a technician at the famous Los Alamos Nuclear Research Centre, who just out of cu riosity tested the shrapnel that came from his son's body and gear. The shrapnel was radioactive. Today, eight years after the Gulf War, that shrapnel still lig hts up a Geiger counter. Jerry's great fear is that whatever he brought back wit h him from the Gulf is now afflicting his family. His older son Joe was hospital ized with breathing problems the day after Wheat dragged his contaminated gear i nto the house. Derrick, his youngest son, who was born after the war, suffers st range blisters on his hands. His wife suffered a miscarriage. Jerry himself rece ntly had a tumour removed from his shoulder. He now worries continually about ca ncer. Jerry says the military has never shown any interest in his shrapnel. The military said Jerry's health problems are due to post traumatic stress. If the l essons from past eras are anything to go by, there is often great ignorance abou t the path being charted when new weapons come along. For example when atomic te sting was all the rage in the '50s, or when Agent Orange was used in Vietnam. Wh en revolutionary new technology is introduced on the battlefield, no one at the time has any real idea of the consequences. Note: BBC has a webpage listing 10 of their articles both pro and con regarding depleted uranium at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/europe/2001/depleted_ura nium/default.stm

Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics 2009-12-12, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/health/12medicaid.html

New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times hig her than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid childre n are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their mid dle-class counterparts, the data shows. Those findings, by a team from Rutgers a nd Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too man y children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because the y actually need them but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effect ive way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-clas s children? The questions go beyond the psychological impact on Medicaid childre n, serious as that may be. Antipsychotic drugs can also have severe physical sid e effects, causing drastic weight gain and metabolic changes resulting in lifelo ng physical problems. Part of the reason is insurance reimbursements, as Medicai d often pays much less for counseling and therapy than private insurers do. Stud ies have found that children in low-income families may have a higher rate of me ntal health problems perhaps two to one compared with children in better-off fam ilies. But that still does not explain the four-to-one disparity in prescribing antipsychotics. Note: For many important health reports from reliable sources, click here.

Monsanto guilty in 'false ad' row 2009-10-15, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8308903.stm France's highest court has ruled that US agrochemical giant Monsanto had not tol d the truth about the safety of its best-selling weed-killer, Roundup. The court confirmed an earlier judgment that Monsanto had falsely advertised its herbicid e as "biodegradable" and claimed it "left the soil clean". The company was fined 15,000 euros (13,800; $22,400). Roundup is the world's best-selling herbicide. M onsanto also sells crops genetically-engineered to be tolerant to Roundup. Frenc h environmental groups had brought the case in 2001 on the basis that glyphosate , Roundup's main ingredient, is classed as "dangerous for the environment" by th e European Union. Earlier this month, Monsanto reported a fourth quarter loss of $233m (147m), driven mostly by a drop in sales of its Roundup brand. Note: For an article on the dangers of Monsanto's RoundUp, click here.

Open Letter To New York State Over Mandatory Vaccination 2009-09-30, CBS News blog http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/30/taking_liberties/entry5353611.shtml As a group of healthcare workers, we are being mandated by a new New York state law to receive the seasonal flu vaccine and H1N1 vaccines. If we do not receive these vaccines by November 30th, that inaction is to be considered our resignati on. We must sign a consent for the vaccines prior to their administration. The m anufacturers have been granted immunity by the government; they cannot be sued f or untoward effects. We do not want to receive these vaccines. Our educated stud ies of risks versus benefits conclude that the risks of the vaccine are greater than the possible benefits. All health care workers with direct patient care are mandated to receive the vaccine, so the coercion is real -- we cannot just go f ind a job "somewhere else." And the job market of 2009 does not offer opportunit y in a different arena where we could still feed our families. We understand the fear that swine flu and influenza has generated. While our sources of informati on indicate that swine flu is not a pandemic, we know that the slanted research

fed by the media offers results intended to frighten the public. We do not have the power to stop the fear that mass hype is able to generate. We hear the hype you are fed. We do not want to bring you harm, but we should not be forced into harm's way ourselves. Note: For more on mandatory flu vaccinations, click here.

VeriChip shares jump after H1N1 patent license win 2009-09-21, Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/hotStocksNews/idUSTRE58K4BZ20090921 Shares of VeriChip Corp tripled after the company said it had been granted an ex clusive license to two patents, which will help it to develop implantable virus detection systems in humans. The patents, held by VeriChip partner Receptors LLC , relate to biosensors that can detect the H1N1 and other viruses. The technolog y will combine with VeriChip's implantable radio frequency identification device s to develop virus triage detection systems. The triage system will provide mult iple levels of identification -- the first will identify the agent as virus or n on-virus, the second level will classify the virus and alert the user to the pre sence of pandemic threat viruses and the third level will identify the precise p athogen, VeriChip said in a white paper published May 7, 2009. Shares of VeriChi p were up 186 percent. Note: Beware of efforts to scare you into getting microchipped for your own safe ty. Click here for more on this. For more on pharmaceutical corporation profitee ring from swine flu vaccines, click here.

Pfizer Pays $2.3 Billion to Settle Marketing Case 2009-09-03, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/business/03health.html The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion to settle civil and c riminal allegations that it had illegally marketed its painkiller Bextra, which has been withdrawn. It was the largest health care fraud settlement and the larg est criminal fine of any kind ever. The settlement had been expected. Pfizer, wh ich is acquiring a rival, Wyeth, reported in January that it had taken a $2.3 bi llion charge to resolve claims involving Bextra and other drugs. It was Pfizer s f ourth settlement over illegal marketing activities since 2002. The government ch arged that executives and sales representatives throughout Pfizer s ranks planned and executed schemes to illegally market not only Bextra but also Geodon, an ant ipsychotic; Zyvox, an antibiotic; and Lyrica, which treats nerve pain. While the government said the fine was a record sum, the $2.3 billion fine amounts to les s than three weeks of Pfizer s sales. Much of the activities cited Wednesday occur red while Pfizer was in the midst of resolving allegations that it illegally mar keted Neurontin, an epilepsy drug for which the company in 2004 paid a $430 mill ion fine and signed a corporate integrity agreement a companywide promise to beh ave. John Kopchinski, a former Pfizer sales representative whose complaint helpe d prompt the government s Bextra case, said that company managers told him and oth ers to dismiss concerns about the Neurontin case while pushing them to undertake similar illegal efforts on behalf of Bextra. The whole culture of Pfizer is driv en by sales, and if you didn t sell drugs illegally, you were not seen as a team p layer, said Mr. Kopchinski. Note: For lots more on corporate corruption, click here. For a powerful article on the immense political power of pharmaceutical companies by one of the top MDs in the U.S., click here.

Oil, Ecuador and its people 2009-08-28, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-chevron28-2009aug28,0,6949161.story Chevron Corp., California's largest company and one of the world's largest oil p roducers, will soon face a day of reckoning. After 16 years of litigation, a cas e the company inherited in a merger, Aguinda vs. Texaco Inc., is nearing an end. The legal battle that began in the United States in 1993 and resumed in Ecuador in 2003 has pitted the multinational against an unlikely adversary, a coalition of indigenous tribes and communities. A verdict is expected early next year. Th e plaintiffs are poised to prevail, and Chevron acknowledges that it is likely t o lose. The case is historic by several measures. Never before have indigenous p eoples brought a multinational oil corporation to trial in their own country. Mo reover, a victory would mark a turning point in the relations between native pop ulations around the world and the foreign corporations that do business in their homelands. And the potential damages are staggering: A court-appointed expert h as determined that they could run to $27 billion, almost 10 times that initially awarded to plaintiffs after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Today, a swath of the E cuadorean Amazon the size of Rhode Island remains contaminated beyond imagining. At one site after another, oil hangs in the air, slides on the water's surface and saturates the land. Pipelines and waste pits left behind years ago still dri p and ooze. Advocates for the plaintiffs have called the former Texaco concessio n area the "Amazon Chernobyl." Were it in the United States, it would easily qua lify as a Superfund site. Neither side in the case disputes the devastation, onl y who should pay for it. Note: For the inspiring story of the courageous Ecuadorian lawyer behind this Da vid vs. Goliath lawsuit, click here. A smear campaign by Chevron against the jud ge in this case has more recently swayed opinion in favor of Chevron again. Cont act your political and media representatives at this link to express your opinio n.

Thimerosal and the Swine Flu Vaccine 2009-07-29, ABC News blogs http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/07/thimerosal-and-the-swine-flu-... Today at the CDC in Atlanta, health officials are huddled, trying to game plan t he best way to dole out a vaccine for swine flu. But what about the vaccine pres ervative thimerosal? Here is what the CDC says about Thimerosal: "There is no co nvincing evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, exc ept for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site." Thimer osal is no longer used in all child vaccines made in the US except for the flu v accine. Here is the CDC on Thimerosal and flu shots: "Yes, the majority of influ enza vaccines distributed in the United States currently contain Thimerosal as a preservative. However, some contain only trace amounts of Thimerosal and are co nsidered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be preservative-free." It would seem likely that the new Swine Flu vaccine therefore would contain some am ount of Thimerosal. It would also seem likely that will give some parents pause. Note: For a powerful article on a major cover-up around thimerosal written by Ro bert F. Kennedy, Jr., click here. For many powerful reports from reliable source s on the dangers of vaccines, click here.

Swine flu tally halted as school year fears loom 2009-07-17, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31962005/ns/health-swine_flu Worldwide cases of the new H1N1 swine flu virus are spreading so fast that overw helmed global health officials have stopped counting and officials with the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say they'll soon follow suit. "We don 't know the extent of the challenges that we'll face in the weeks and months ahe ad," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for the Immunizatio n and Respiratory Diseases. Schuchat did not elaborate on how the CDC would info rm the public about the extent of the outbreak, which has been confirmed in more than 40,600 people and implicated in 263 deaths in the United States. WHO had r eported nearly 95,000 cases including 429 deaths worldwide. Earlier Friday, WHO officials said tracking individual swine flu cases is too overwhelming for count ries where the virus is spreading widely. WHO will no longer issue global totals of swine flu cases, although it will continue to track the global epidemic. Note: Why would they stop counting cases? The numbers have always at best been e stimates. Millions died in the 1918 flu epidemic and they have counted and repor ted those numbers extenstively. Could it be someone or some group does't want us to know how few are actually dying? For several other revealing articles which suggest an dangerous agenda with the swine flu vaccine, click here.

Health care's enigma in chief 2009-05-15, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/14/EDMF17KIVP.DTL The most stunning and least reported news about President Obama's press conferen ce with health industry executives this week wasn't those executives' willingnes s to negotiate with a Democrat. It was that Democrat's eagerness to involve thos e executives in a discussion about health care reform even as they revealed thei r previous plans to pilfer $2 trillion from Americans. That was the little-notic ed message from the made-for-TV spectacle administration officials called a heal th care "game changer": In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year from the country's medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, health care companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fle ece consumers, and have been fleecing them for years. With that acknowledgment c ame the tacit admission that the industry's business is based not on respectable returns but on grotesque profiteering and waste - the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins. Chief among the profiteers at the Whi te House event were insurance companies, which have raised premiums by 119 perce nt since 1999, and one obvious question is why - why would Obama engage those pa rticular thieves? It's a difficult query to answer, because Obama is a health ca re mystery, struggling to muster consistent positions on the issue. Listening to a 2003 Obama speech, it's hard to believe he has become such an enigma. Back th en, he declared himself "a proponent of a single-payer universal health care pro gram" - i.e., one eliminating private insurers and their overhead costs by havin g government finance health care. Note: For lots more on health issues from reliable sources, click here.

Scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild 2009-04-30, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-swine-reality30-2009apr30,0,360... As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wedne

sday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U .S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics. In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexi co late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu ou tbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare. "Let's not lose track of th e fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that k ills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands aro und the world," said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies s wine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison . Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could m utate at any point -- becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mou nting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple ma thematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak. "This virus doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to kill l ike the 1918 virus," which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, sa id Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Note: For lots more on bird and swine flu scares, click here.

Reporter's notebook: TED 2009 2009-02-07, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/07/BULG15OVGP.DTL Some ... favorite gee-whiz moments from this year's TED conference: -- UC Berkel ey biologist Robert Full blew everyone's mind by outlining his efforts to create the perfect robotic "distributed foot." He studies the feet and legs of geckos and cockroaches and transfers their design to robots, enabling them to scale wal ls. One such machine, the Spinybot, can climb glass walls. -- P.W. Singer, an ac ademic who studies war, terrified the crowd with a detailed look at modern, robo tic warfare. Something I didn't know: You can sit in a room in New Mexico and pi lot armed drone airplanes in Iraq and kill people. Then you go home and have din ner with your kids. Somewhere, Aldous Huxley weeps. -- Stanford's Catherine Mohr displayed the robotic surgical arm she's working on that could change medicine. Among the amazing possibilities are surgeons in the United States performing ad vanced surgeries in remote parts of the world. These are just a handful of the a mazing innovations and disclosures made at TED this year. In the coming weeks an d months, videos of all of these talks will be made available to the public at w ww.ted.com. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is a 25-yea r-old annual conference attended by many of the world's leading scientists, acad emics and business leaders. The agenda consists of a series of talks, during whi ch big thinkers discuss big ideas. Note: For powerful information on bizarre "non-lethal" weapons developed by the military, click here. For an enlightening NPR interview on artificial war, click here. And for one of the most powerful TED presentations ever, see neuroanatomi st Jill Bolte Taylor's description of her experience having a stroke, available here.

BPA Ruling Flawed, Panel Says 2008-10-29, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/28/AR20081028034... The Food and Drug Administration ignored scientific evidence and used flawed met

hods when it determined that a chemical widely used in baby bottles and in the l ining of cans is not harmful, a scientific advisory panel has found. In a highly critical report ... the panel of scientists from government and academia said t he FDA did not take into consideration scores of studies that have linked bisphe nol A (BPA) to prostate cancer, diabetes and other health problems in animals wh en it completed a draft risk assessment of the chemical last month. The panel sa id the FDA didn't use enough infant formula samples and didn't adequately accoun t for variations among the samples. Taking those studies into consideration, the panel concluded, the FDA's margin of safety is "inadequate". The panel is part of the Science Board, a committee of advisers to the FDA commissioner, and was s et up to review the FDA's risk assessment of BPA. Many of the studies that the p anel said the FDA ignored were reviewed by the National Toxicology Program, whic h concluded in September that it had "some concern" that BPA can affect brain an d behavioral development in infants and small children. Officials at FDA, which regulates the chemical's use in plastic food containers, bottles, tableware and the plastic linings of food cans, accepted some of the criticism in the report. "FDA agrees that due to the uncertainties raised in some studies relating to the potential effects of low doses of bisphenol-A that additional research would be valuable," said spokeswoman Judy Leon. The agency has commissioned new research on BPA. Note: For many important reports on health issues from reliable sources, click h ere.

Gardasil vaccine doubts grow 2008-08-11, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-gardasil11-2008aug11,0,2921629.s... Sandra Levy wants to do everything she can to safeguard the health of her 11-yea r-old daughter -- and that, of course, includes cancer prevention. She has had h er child inoculated with one shot of Gardasil, the human papilloma virus vaccine that may prevent cervical cancer. But now, she says, she has serious reservatio ns about going ahead with the next two injections of the course. Though most med ical organizations strongly advocate using the HPV vaccine, some doctors and par ents, like Levy, are asking whether the vaccine's benefits really outweigh its c osts. A report released in June stirred up more doubts. Although cause and effec t were not proved, the report listed serious events -- such as seizures, spontan eous abortions and even deaths -- among teens, preteens and young women who had earlier had Gardasil shots. [The] analysis, released June 30 by the Washington, D.C.-based public interest group Judicial Watch, [has] raised [these] red flags. Judicial Watch obtained records from the FDA's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a voluntary system used by doctors, patients and drug companies to report side effects with vaccines to the federal agency. The report revealed that since the vaccine's 2006 approval, when girls began getting it, nearly 9,00 0 had bad health events after receiving Gardasil. The incidents included 10 misc arriages, 78 severe outbreaks of genital warts and six cases of Guillain-Barr syn drome, an autoimmune disorder that can result in paralysis. There were also 18 r eported deaths. Note: For many key reports on the problems with vaccines from reliable sources, click here.

California medical schools earn A's in conflict grading 2008-06-04, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/04/BUV3112O9V.DTL

Drug companies shower medical school faculty members with pens, pricey dinners, free samples and other inducements to influence their prescribing patterns, an o rganization of U.S. medical students says. The med students are now trying to er ase that pattern by grading their teachers. The American Medical Student Associa tion issued its second annual report card ... on the conflict-of-interest polici es maintained at 150 universities that grant a medical degree. California domina ted the honor roll. UC Davis, UCSF and UCLA captured three of the seven A grades across the country. But only 15 percent of U.S. medical schools made the top of the class with a grade of A or B, based on their adoption of rules such as barr ing drug companies from distributing lavish gifts to physicians. Sixty of the sc hools, or 40 percent, got an F on the student association's 2008 PharmFree Score card. The American Medical Student Association started its PharmFree campaign in 2002 after members shared their concerns about interactions they observed betwe en their medical professors and drug industry representatives. The Association o f American Medical Colleges in April proposed that all med schools adopt policie s to prevent drug marketing efforts from distorting the educational environment. The proposed rules would restrict industry funding of seminars, forbid companie s from selecting the recipients of scholarships they fund and strongly discourag e medical school faculty members from participating in industry-sponsored speake rs' bureaus. Note: For a treasure trove of important reports on health issues from reliable s ources, click here.

Nanoparticles scrutinized for health effects 2008-05-12, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/12/BU4P10BB88.DTL Windows cleaned by raindrops, white sofas immune to red wine spills, tiles prote cted from limescale buildup -- new products created from minute substances calle d nanoparticles are making such domestic dreams come true. Based on tiny particl es 10,000 times thinner than a strand of hair, ... nanoparticles are showing up in everything from fabric coatings to socks to plush teddy bears. But some scien tists are concerned that these seemingly magical materials are hitting the marke t before their effects on human health and the environment have been sufficientl y studied. The few scientific reports available suggest that nanoparticles can p ose a threat to human health and to the environment. For example, fish swimming in water containing modest amounts of fullerenes, soccer-ball-shaped nanoparticl es made out of 60 carbon atoms, showed a large increase in brain damage. These a re the same types of fullerenes being used in various skin products. From the sk in, they can travel through the lymphatic duct system to lymph nodes and eventua lly end up in organs such as the liver, kidney and spleen. When inhaled, nanopar ticles will go deeper into the lungs than larger particles and reach more sensit ive parts. Because of that, scientists are particularly concerned about nanopart icles being used in spray products. "We have research showing that as a material shrinks in size, it becomes more harmful to the lungs. Nanoparticles tend to be more inflammatory to the lung, and it seems as if the lung has to work harder t o get rid of them," said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser at the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies in Washington. Note: For a treasure trove of health reports from major media, click here.

FDA warns Merck to fix vaccine plant problems 2008-04-30, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/04/30/financial/f084419...

The Food and Drug Administration has ordered Merck & Co. to correct numerous man ufacturing deficiencies at its main vaccine plant. The agency ... released a war ning letter sent to Merck's chief executive, Richard T. Clark, that states FDA i nspectors determined manufacturing rules are not being followed at the plant in West Point, Pa., just outside Philadelphia. The plant, which recalled two vaccin es in December over sterility problems, makes a number of children's vaccines an d four for adults. The nine-page letter states FDA found "significant objectiona ble conditions" in the manufacture of vaccines and drug ingredients during repea ted inspections from Nov. 26 to Jan. 17. According to the heavily redacted warni ng letter, Merck officials didn't thoroughly investigate when vaccine batches in explicably failed to meet specifications, even if batches had been distributed, and some combination measles-mumps-rubella shots that failed "visual inspection for critical defects" were distributed anyway. Production of two vaccines made a t West Point PedvaxHIB, to prevent Haemophilus influenza type B, and Comvax, a c ombination vaccine for Haemophilus B and hepatitis B stopped last year and 1.2 m illion doses of them were recalled after a sterility problem was discovered in O ctober. The plant also makes ProQuad, which protects children against measles, m umps, rubella and chickenpox; hepatitis A, hepatitis B and meningitis vaccines f or children and adults; and Gardasil, to protect young women against cervical ca ncer. Note: For further revelations from reliable sources on the dangers of vaccines, click here.

Practicing Patients 2008-03-23, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/magazine/23patients-t.html?ex=1363924800&en... Todd Small was stuck in quicksand again. His brain was sending an electrical pul se saying walk, but as the signal streaked from his cerebellum and down his spinal cord, it snagged on scar tissue where the myelin layer insulating his nerve fib ers had broken down. The message wasn t getting to his hip flexors or his hamstrin gs or his left foot. That connection had been severed by his multiple sclerosis. And once again, Small was left with the feeling that, as he described it, I m up t o my waist in quicksand. Small would have continued just as he was had he not log ged on last June to a Web site called PatientsLikeMe. He expected the sort of on line community he d tried and abandoned several times before one abundant in sympa thy and stories but thin on practical information. But he found something altoge ther different: data. There are a little more than 7,000 Todd Smalls at Patients LikeMe, congregating around diseases like Parkinson s, multiple sclerosis (M.S.) a nd AIDS, all of them contributing their experiences and tweaking their treatment s. The members of PatientsLikeMe don t just share their experiences anecdotally; t hey quantify them, breaking down their symptoms and treatments into hard data. T hey note what hurts, where and for how long. They list their drugs and dosages a nd score how well they alleviate their symptoms. All this gets compiled over tim e, aggregated and crunched into tidy bar graphs and progress curves by the softw are behind the site. And it s all open for comparison and analysis. By telling so much, the members of PatientsLikeMe are creating a rich database of disease trea tment and patient experience. Note: For a treasure trove of revealing reports on health issues from reliable s ources, click here.

FDA to Back Food From Cloned Animals 2008-01-05, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/04/AR20080104036...

The Food and Drug Administration is set to announce as early as next week that m eat and milk from cloned farm animals and their offspring can start making their way toward supermarket shelves. The decision would be a notable act of defiance against Congress, which last month passed appropriations legislation recommendi ng that any such approval be delayed pending further studies. Moreover, the Sena te version of the Farm bill ... contains stronger, binding language that would b lock FDA action on cloned food, probably for years. The FDA has hinted strongly in the past year that it is ready to lift its "voluntary moratorium" on the mark eting of milk and meat from clones and their offspring, saying that the science led them to that decision. But public opinion has been negative on the issue, wi th some saying that not enough safety studies have been conducted and others con cerned about the health of the clones, which are far more likely than ordinary f arm animals to die early in life. A handful of U.S. companies have pushed for ma rketing approval. Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advoc acy group, said she had read the entire 678-page draft risk assessment and found it to be "long on assumptions and short on data, and especially short on the da ta that are directly relevant to food consumption safety." Of particular concern , she said, was that even though the vast majority of clones die either before b irth or soon after, those that survive are deemed normal. She said the FDA shoul d withhold approval at least until it has a regulatory plan in place that will g ive it an ability to track food from clones and watch for human health impacts. Others have called for mandatory labeling so consumers can avoid products from c lones. The FDA has said that lacking any safety concerns, it will not demand suc h labels. The Agriculture Department has also declared that meat from clones can not be deemed organic. Note: For lots more reliable information on how big business takes huge risks wi th the food we eat, click here.

Panel: Kids Shouldn't Use Cold Medicines 2007-10-20, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/10/18/national/w000553D... The medicines long used by parents to treat their children's coughs and colds do n't work and shouldn't be used in those younger than 6, federal health advisers recommended. "The data that we have now is they don't seem to work," said Sean H ennessy, a University of Pennsylvania epidemiologist. The recommendation applies to medicines containing one or more of the following ingredients: decongestants , antihistamines and antitussives. In two separate votes ... the panelists said the medicines shouldn't be used in children younger than 2 or in those younger t han 6. A third vote, to recommend against use in children 6 to 11, failed. The p anel's advice dovetails with a petition filed by pediatricians that argued the o ver-the-counter medicines shouldn't be given to children younger than 6, an age group they called the most vulnerable to potential ill effects. The American Aca demy of Pediatrics and other groups back the petition. But FDA officials and pan elists agreed there's no evidence they work in older children, either. Still, pa nelists held off from recommending against use in those 6 and older. And some sa id they feared such a prohibition wouldn't eliminate use of the medicines by par ents. "They will administer adult products to their children because they work f or them or feel they work for them," said the panel's patient and family represe which include Wyeth's Dim ntative, Amy Celento of Nutley, N.J. Some of the drugs etapp and Robitussin, Johnson & Johnson's Pediacare and Novartis AG's Triaminic products have never been tested in children, something flagged as long ago as 19 72 by a previous FDA panel. An FDA review found just 11 studies of children publ ished over the last half-century. Those studies did not establish that the medic ines worked in those cases, according to the agency.

Note: For a powerful expos of corporate and government corruption in the health i ndustry, click here.

A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech 2007-07-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/business/yourmoney/01frame.html?ex=13409424... The $73.5 billion global biotech business may soon have to grapple with a discov ery that calls into question the scientific principles on which it was founded. Last month, a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the tra ditional view of how genes function. The exhaustive four-year effort was organiz ed by the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by 35 gr oups from 80 organizations around the world. To their surprise, researchers foun d that the human genome might not be a tidy collection of independent genes after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, such as a predisposi tion to diabetes or heart disease. Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. According to the institute, these findings will challenge scientists to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and wha t they do. Biologists have recorded these network effects for many years in other organisms. But in the world of science, discoveries often do not become part of mainstream thought until they are linked to humans. With that link now in place , the report is likely to have repercussions far beyond the laboratory. The pres umption that genes operate independently has been institutionalized since 1976, when the first biotech company was founded. In fact, it is the economic and regu latory foundation on which the entire biotechnology industry is built. The princ iple that gave rise to the biotech industry promised benefits that were equally compelling. Known as the Central Dogma of molecular biology, it stated that each gene in living organisms, from humans to bacteria, carries the information need ed to construct one protein.

Let children be children 2007-06-03, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/06/03/... We've just finished test time again in the schools of California. The mad frenzy of testing infects everyone from second grade through high school. Because of t he rigors and threats of No Child Left Behind, schools are desperate to increase their scores. As the requirements become more stringent, we have completely los t sight of the children taking these tests. For 30 years as a teacher of primary kids, I have operated on the Any Fool Can See principle. And any fool can see t hat the spread between what is developmentally appropriate for 7- and 8-year-old children and what is demanded of them on these tests is widening. A lot of what used to be in the first-grade curriculum is now taught in kindergarten. Is your 5-year-old stressed out? Perhaps this is why. Currently, 2 1/2 uninterrupted ho urs are supposed to be devoted to language arts and reading every morning. I ask you, what adult could sustain an interest in one subject for that long? The res ult of this has been a decline in math scores at our school. The teaching of art is all but a subversive activity. Teachers whisper, "I taught art today!" as if they would be reported to the Reading Police for stealing time from the reading curriculum. The present emphasis on testing and test scores is sucking the soul out of the primary school experience for both teachers and children. So much ti me is spent on testing and measuring reading speed that the children are losing the joy that comes but once in their lifetime. The teachers around them, under c onstant pressure to raise those test scores, radiate urgency and pressure. They are not enjoying their jobs. The great unspoken secret of primary school is that

a lot of what is going on is arrant nonsense, and it's getting worse. Any fool can see.

Michael Moore blasts Bush over federal probe 2007-05-11, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18615496 Filmmaker Michael Moore has asked the Bush administration to call off an investi gation of his trip to Cuba to get treatment for ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers f or a segment in his upcoming health-care expose, Sicko. Moore, who made the hit do cumentary Fahrenheit 9/11 ... said in a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Pa ulson on Friday that the White House may have opened the investigation for polit ical reasons. For five and a half years, the Bush administration has ignored and neglected the heroes of the 9/11 community, Moore said in the letter. I understand why the Bush administration is coming after me I have tried to help the very pe ople they refuse to help, but until George W. Bush outlaws helping your fellow m an, I have broken no laws and I have nothing to hide. Harvey Weinstein, whose Wei nstein Co. is releasing Sicko, told The Associated Press the movie is a healing fil m that could bring opponents together over the ills of America s health-care system . This time, we didn t want the fight, because the movie unites both sides, Weinstei n said. We ve shown the movie to Republicans. Both sides of the bench love the film ." Moore won an Academy Award for best documentary with his 2002 gun-control fil m Bowling for Columbine and scolded Bush in his Oscar acceptance speech as the war in Iraq was just getting under way. The investigation has given master promoter Moore another jolt of publicity just before the release of one of his films. Note: WantToKnow.info founder Fred Burks was hit with a $7,500 fine for a 10-day vacation to Cuba in 1999. For some strange reason, his was the first Cuba trave l case prosecuted. He has taken it to court, where the case is still undecided. For more, including a link to a Los Angeles Times article on his case, click her e.

UK radiation jump blamed on Iraq shells 2006-02-19, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2047373,00.html Radiation detectors in Britain recorded a fourfold increase in uranium levels in the atmosphere after the shock and awe bombing campaign against Iraq. Environment al scientists who uncovered the figures through freedom of information laws say it is evidence that depleted uranium from the shells was carried by wind current s to Britain. Government officials, however, say the sharp rise in uranium detec ted by radiation monitors in Berkshire was a coincidence and probably came from local sources. Each detector recorded a significant rise in uranium levels durin g the Gulf war bombing campaign in March 2003. The reading from a park in Readin g was high enough for the Environment Agency to be alerted. This research shows t hat rather than remaining near the target as claimed by the military, depleted u ranium weapons contaminate both locals and whole populations hundreds to thousan ds of miles away, [Liverpool University's Chris Busby] said. Busby s report shows t hat within nine days of the start of the Iraq war on March 19, 2003, higher leve ls of uranium were picked up on five sites in Berkshire. On two occasions, level s exceeded the threshold at which the Environment Agency must be informed, thoug h within safety limits. The report says weather conditions over the war period s howed a consistent flow of air from Iraq northwards. Note: For more on the depleted uranium cover-up: http://www.WantToKnow.info/0504 05depleteduranium

Hunt for New Flu: Looking for Bugs in All the Wrong Places 2005-11-08, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/science/08flu.html?ex=1289106000&en=8c0ba3f... Researchers...scratch their heads over the weird genetic sequence of the 1918 fl u virus. Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, a molecular pathologist at the Armed Forces I nstitute of Technology [said that] the 1918 virus appears to be a bird flu virus . But if it is from a bird, it is not a bird anyone has studied before. It is no t like the A(H5N1) strain of bird flus in Asia, which has sickened at least 116 people, and killed 60. It is not like the influenza viruses that infect fowl in North America. Yet many researchers believe that the 1918 virus, which caused th e worst infectious disease epidemic in human history, is a bird flu virus. And i f so, it is the only one that has ever been known to cause a human pandemic. Tha t, Dr. Taubenberger said, gives rise to a question. Are scientists looking for t he next pandemic flu virus in all the wrong places? Birds, Dr. Slemons said, do not have much of an immune response to influenza, and so there is no particular pressure for the virus to mutate. He said birds are chronically infected with lo ts of flu viruses at once, and all the viruses coexist peacefully. Some experts like Dr. Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York say the A(H5N1) flu viruses are a false alarm. He notes that studies of serum collected in 1992 from people in rural China indicated that millions of people there had a ntibodies to the A(H5N1) strain. That means they had been infected with an H5N1 bird virus and recovered. Despite that, and the fact that those viruses have bee n circulating in China more than a dozen years, almost no human-to-human spread has occurred. "The virus has been around for more than a dozen years, but it has n't jumped into the human population," Dr. Palese said. "I don't think it has th e capability of doing it."

Selling Sickness to the Well 2005-08-02, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8789159/site/newsweek/ A new book looks at how pharmaceutical companies are using aggressive marketing campaigns to turn more people into patients. In their new book, Selling Sickness: How the World s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients , Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels examine how the drug industry has transformed the way we think about physical and mental health and turned more and more of us ea ch year into customers. Moynihan...a regular contributor to the British Medical Journal [discusses] how -- and why -- drug makers have begun targeting people wh o aren t sick. The so-called preventives are where the big money are: like the bon e-density drugs or the cholesterol [-lowering] drugs. Increasingly we re seeing th e marketing shift to those types of drugs. People talk about the "worried well." There are many ways in which the drug companies target those people. There s an i nformal alliance between the drug companies and aspects of the medical professio n and aspects of the patient advocacy world who all seem to have interests in de fining more and more people as ill. Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world s population but the U.S. makes up...half of total spending on drugs.

US regulator suppresses vital data on prescription drugs on sale in Britain 2005-06-12, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=646243 Despite calls for more transparency after revelations about the side effects of

ibuprofen, the FDA has withheld 28 pages of information on a new wave of painkil lers. Vital data on prescription medicines found in millions of British homes ha s been suppressed by the powerful US drug regulators, even though the informatio n could potentially save lives. An investigation by The Independent on Sunday sh ows that, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, the American Food and Drug Administration routinely conceals information it considers commercially se nsitive, leaving medical specialists unable to assess the true risks. Dr Peter J uni, one of the team of Swiss investigators who helped to expose the risk of the new-generation drugs, claims his efforts were obstructed by the FDA. "Too often the FDA saw and continues to see the pharmaceutical industry as its customers, a vital source of funding for its activities, and not as a sector of society in need of strong regulation."

Fighting for the future of food 2004-11-07, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/07/LVG709K7MV1.DTL "Just about everybody is pretty serious about their chow," says Deborah Koons Ga rcia, enjoying the understatement. No matter how serious they are, though, Garci a knows most people don't realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the American food supply, mostly from corn and canola. The y're in an estimated 60 percent of all processed foods. "We are at a crossroads, " says Garcia. She's spent the last three years ... making "The Future of Food," a documentary about GMO (genetically modified organism) foods. "Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn't challenged and if this corpo ratization of our whole food system isn't stopped, at some point it will be too late," says Garcia. "It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue .. . And it was really clear that there hadn't been a really good film that told th e whole story from the cellular, from the microscopic level, all the way up to t he global," Garcia says. Her 90-minute documentary ... expresses a strong point of view against letting new life forms loose on the land without long-term testi ng of the health effects and real government controls, especially labeling of fo ods. Garcia threads a clear path through the history, science and politics of GM O foods to a clear call for action. Note: To view this highly educational film, which may encourage you to change yo ur eating habits, click here.

Ancient remedy 'shrinks cancer' 2004-08-11, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3555566.stm An ancient native American treatment for cancer has been shown to have a benefic ial effect despite scepticism from the medical establishment. Chaparral, an ever green desert shrub, has long been used by native Americans to treat cancer, cold s, wounds, bronchitis, warts, and ringworm. But experts dismissed its worth, and warned it could be dangerous. Now researchers at the Medical University of Sout h Carolina have shown an extract may shrink some tumours. Chaparral tea was wide ly used in the US as an alternative anti-cancer agent from the late 1950s to the 1970s. However, the American Cancer Society said there was no proof that it was an effective treatment for cancer - or any other disease. And the US Food and D rug Administration warned against its use after research showed it could damage the liver and the kidneys. However, initial results from the latest study show t hat an extract of the shrub appears not only to be safe, but to have a positive effect. The researchers tested a refined extract taken from chaparral called M4N . They injected it into the tumours of eight patients with advanced head and nec

k cancer that had not responded to other forms of treatment. The results were en couraging - patients seemed to tolerate it well, and there was no evidence of th e serious liver damage previously associated with chaparral use. The study also produced some evidence that the extract had begun to shrink the tumours. Note: Some believe that because cancer treatment brings huge profits, viable tre atments which are inexpensive are strongly suppressed. For reliable evidence on this, click here and here.

Mousepox 'Superbug' Test Riles 2003-11-01, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/01/attack/main581311.shtml A research team backed by a federal grant has created a genetically engineered m ousepox virus designed to evade vaccines, underscoring biotechnology's deadly po tential and stirring debate over whether such research plays into the hands of t errorists. The team at Saint Louis University, led by Mark Buller, created the s uperbug to figure out how to defeat it. Buller spliced a gene known to suppress the immune system into the mousepox virus, then injected the combined strand int o vaccinated mice. All of them died. The research highlights a contentious discu ssion among scientists and security experts: Does publication of such work help or hinder the biodefense effort? Should such studies be conducted at all? When B uller presented his results last week at an international biodefense conference, it prompted debate. Some feared that publication of such information, regardles s of whether scientists' intentions are altruistic, could help terrorists create biological weapons laced with genetically modified superbugs. Such germs are cr eated by splicing drug-resistant genes in viruses normally defeated by vaccines. Alibek, a director of George Mason University's National Center for Biodefense, believes Buller's work and similar research should be confidential to impede te rrorists and rogue nations from acquiring knowledge about genetically engineered bioweapons. Buller counters that publicizing such work will deter terrorists by showing that scientists can build defenses against souped-up bioweapons. Buller also believes scientists must genetically engineer pathogens to understand how to defeat them.

No ducking land mine treaty, Mr. President 2009-12-06, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/05/ED451AT7MU.DTL This country hasn't used land mines in nearly 20 years. It no longer makes the i ndiscriminate killers nor provides them to allies. Why then is President Obama off to Oslo this week to collect a Nobel Peace Prize - refusing to sign an inte rnational treaty to ban the shrapnel-spewing buried bombs? His refusal is ... sh ameful. The devices, which maim and kill for years after a conflict ends, caused more than 5,000 casualties last year in the world's poorest places such as Camb odia, Angola and Central America. Obama's stance puts him in line with President s George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who both ducked a chance to put this country in line with more than 150 nations that have signed the treaty. Other notable no n-signers: China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Cuba. Is this the company we want to keep? Sticking with land mines is a puzzler. The United States has a reported stockpile of 10 million devices, though it hasn't deployed any since the 1991 G ulf War. By signing the agreement, the Pentagon would hardly be giving up a main stay weapon. It's time for Obama to go in a new direction. He should sign, not e quivocate, on a treaty that Washington has avoided for over a decade. Here's a t hought while typing up your Peace Prize acceptance speech, Mr. President: It's t ime to ban land mines.

Note: The refusal to sign the worldwide landmine ban treaty seems to be a puzzle r, until you realize the US government is protecting the rights to profit of US arms corporations. For a retired Marine general's analysis of the profiteering t hat is the principal purpose for war, "War is a Racket,"click here.

Drugmakers' Payments Draw Heat 2009-11-04, BusinessWeek magazine http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/nov2009/db2009114_700374.htm A $112 million settlement involving alleged drug kickbacks that the Justice Dept . announced with the nation's largest nursing home pharmacy and a generic drug m anufacturer on Nov. 3 is part of a wide-ranging investigation of suspected Medic aid fraud by the pharmaceutical industry. Critics say the continuing probe, whic h involves ... major drugmakers, highlights what they describe as an industry pr actice of paying money to outfits that provide drugs to consumers, in return for preferential treatment. Because those alleged payoffs have the effect of compro mising patient care and driving up costs for government and private health insur ers, cases like the settlement unsealed with Omnicare (OCR) in Covington, Ky., a nd IVAX Pharmaceuticals in Weston, Fla., could bolster opposition to the controv ersial deal the Obama Administration reached with the pharmaceutical industry to win its support for health-reform legislation. Many Democrats say the Administr ation should have asked for much bigger cost savings from drugmakers. Patrick Bu rns, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, a nonprofit Washington group that promotes whistleblower suits, says the Justice Dept. is backed up with pharmaceu tical fraud cases. Since drugmakers offer so many similar products, he contends, they rely on kickbacks to give their products a market edge. "In the pharmaceut ical industry, the business isn't selling the best drug, it's the best scheme of kickbacks to the prescriber." Note: For lots more from reliable sources on corporate corruption, click here.

Key drug facts left off labels, experts say 2009-10-21, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33419377/ns/health-more_health_news Did you know that Lunesta will help you fall asleep just 15 minutes faster? Or t hat a higher dose of the osteoporosis drug Zometa could damage a cancer patient s kidneys and raise their risk of death? Chances are you didn t, and neither did you r doctor. Much of what the Food and Drug Administration knows about a drug s safet y and effectiveness is not included on the label, say two drug safety experts wh o are calling on the agency to make that information more accessible. In ... the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers ... argue that drug labels don t ref lect the nuanced decisions the FDA makes when deciding to approve a drug. The ed itorial from Drs. Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin recommends easy-to-read fact boxes to help patients weigh the benefits and risks of medications. If drug lab els sometimes exaggerate benefits and play down drug risks, the authors say ther e s a very good reason: they are written by drugmakers. While FDA must approve the final labeling, the actual language is drafted by the manufacturer, with input from FDA scientists. The labeling is based on results from company studies, whic h generally compare results for patients taking the drug versus those taking pla cebo. If FDA decides the drug s ability to treat or prevent a disease outweighs it s side effects, the agency is obligated to approve it. But Schwartz and Woloshin point out that benefits may be slim and potential harms may not be fully unders tood. The take home point is that just because a drug is approved doesn t mean it w orks very well, said Schwartz, in an interview with the Associated Press. You real

ly need to know more to see whether it s worth the cost. Schwartz and Woloshin say FDA labeling frequently fails to provide a full picture of a drug s effects. Note: For a powerful summary of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.

Glaxo profits soar as drug firm charges NHS 6 for swine flu vaccine that costs 1 t o make 2009-07-23, Daily Mail (One of the UK's largest-circulation newspapers) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1201450/GlaxoSmithKline-accused-profi... Drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline was accused of cashing in on swine flu after it reve aled its profits have risen 10 per cent since the virus was identified. It annou nced profits yesterday of 2.1billion in the past three months. Sales of vaccines and antiviral drugs could push the figure up even higher. GSK chief executive An drew Witty admitted the swine flu crisis would be a 'significant financial event for the company'. Sales of the company's Relenza inhaler, an alternative to Tam iflu used by pregnant women among others, are expected to top 600million. And thi s figure could be boosted by up to 2billion once deliveries of the swine flu vacc ine begin in September. But Mr Witty denied Europe's biggest drugs company was g earing up to cash in. He admitted it was planning to charge the UK 6 a jab, but v ociferously denied reports it cost a pound to manufacture. Liberal Democrat heal th spokesman Norman Lamb said: 'This is clearly a bonanza for the company. This is a staggeringly substantial return. I will write to the National Audit Office to determine whether we got the best deal for the taxpayer.' Susi Squire of the TaxPayers' Alliance said: 'We need an assurance from the Government that they ha ve got the most competitive rate out of GlaxoSmith-Kline.' Geoff Martin of Londo n Health Emergency said: 'It's a scandal that any company could use the swine fl u pandemic as an opportunity to jack up profits. 'The Government should step in and impose a windfall tax on private companies that have hit the jackpot as a re sult of the flu crisis.' Note: For more on profiteering in the vaccination industry, click here.

Inventory Uncovers 9,200 More Pathogens 2009-06-18, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/17/AR20090617032... An inventory of potentially deadly pathogens at Fort Detrick's infectious diseas e laboratory found more than 9,000 vials that had not been accounted for, Army o fficials said yesterday, raising concerns that officials wouldn't know whether d angerous toxins were missing. After four months of searching about 335 freezers and refrigerators at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Dise ases in Frederick, investigators found 9,220 samples that hadn't been included i n a database of about 66,000 items listed as of February, said Col. Mark Kortepe ter, the institute's deputy commander. The vials contained some dangerous pathog ens, among them the Ebola virus, anthrax bacteria and botulinum toxin, and less lethal agents such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and the bacterium tha t causes tularemia. Most of them, forgotten inside freezer drawers, hadn't been used in years or even decades. Officials said some serum samples from hemorrhagi c fever patients dated to the Korean War. The overstock and the previous inaccur acy of the database raised the possibility that someone could have taken a sampl e outside the lab with no way for officials to know something was missing. The i nstitute has been under pressure to tighten security in the wake of the 2001 ant hrax attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17. FBI investigators say th ey think the anthrax strain used in the attacks originated at the Army lab, and

its prime suspect, Bruce E. Ivins, researched anthrax there. Ivins committed sui cide last year during an investigation into his activities. Note: Fort Detrick is the home of the government lab which is suspected to be in volved with the creation of many previously unknown lethal viruses and germs. Fo r lots more, see the excellent work of Dr. Leonard Horowitz at this link and thi s one.

Meet Your New Farmer: Hungry Corporate Giant 2009-06-12, New York Times http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/movies/12food.html Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificia lly buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year , Food, Inc., an informative ... documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multina tional corporate money can buy. You ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch. The director Robert Kenner jumps all over the food m ap, from industrial feedlots where millions of cruelly crammed cattle mill about in their own waste until slaughter, to the chains where millions of consumers g obble down industrially produced meat and an occasional serving of E. coli bacte ria. The voice in the opening belongs to the ethical epicurean and locavore cham pion Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore s Dilemma. Mr. Pollan ... is a great strength of Food, Inc., as is one of its co-producers, Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation. [They], together with Mr. Kenner, cha rt how and why the villains not only outnumber the heroes in contemporary food p roduction, but also how and why they outbluff, outmuscle and outspend their oppo nents by billions of often government-subsidized dollars. The movie takes a look at the animal abuse in industrial food production including clandestine images of sick and crippled cows being prodded to join the rest of the ill-fated herd b ut its main focus is on the human cost. It s a cost visible in the rounded bodies of a poor family that eats cheap if filling fast-food burgers for breakfast and in the obscured faces of farmers too frightened to go on record about Monsanto, the agricultural biotech giant. Note: For another excellent review of this important film, click here.

Can Positive Thoughts Help Heal Another Person? 2009-05-21, NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104351710 Ninety percent of Americans say they pray for their health, or their love life o r their final exams. But does prayer do any good? For decades, scientists have t ried to test the power of prayer and positive thinking, with mixed results. Now some scientists are fording new and controversial territory. When I first meet S heri Kaplan, she is perched on a plastic chair at a Miami clinic, holding out he r arm as a researcher draws several vials of blood. "I'm quite excited about my blood work this time," she says. "I've got no stress and I'm proud of it." Kapla n is tanned and freckled, with wavy red hair and a cocky laugh. She is defiantly healthy for a person who has lived with HIV for the past 15 years. "God didn't want me to die or even get sick," she asserts. "I've never had any opportunistic infections, because I had no time to be down." Kaplan's faith is unorthodox, bu t it's central to her life. She was raised Jewish, and although she claims no fo rmal religion now, she prays and meditates every day. She believes God is keepin g the virus at bay and that her faith is the reason she's alive today. "Everythi

ng starts from a thought, and then the thought creates a reaction," she says. "A nd I have the power to control my mind, before it gets to a physical level or an emotional level." Kaplan has never taken medicine, yet the disease has not prog ressed to AIDS (and she is not part of the population that has a mutation in the CCR5 gene that prevents progression of HIV to AIDS).

Paying a Price for Loving Red Meat 2009-04-28, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/health/28brod.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&page... There was a time when red meat was a luxury for ordinary Americans, or was at le ast something special: cooking a roast for Sunday dinner, ordering a steak at a restaurant. Not anymore. Meat consumption has more than doubled in the United St ates in the last 50 years. Now a new study of more than 500,000 Americans has pr ovided the best evidence yet that our affinity for red meat has exacted a hefty price on our health and limited our longevity. The study found that, other thing s being equal, the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat we re likely to die sooner, especially from one of our two leading killers, heart d isease and cancer, than people who consumed much smaller amounts of these foods. The number of excess deaths that could be attributed to high meat consumption i s quite large given the size of the American population. Extrapolated to all Ame ricans in the age group studied, the new findings suggest that over the course o f a decade, the deaths of one million men and perhaps half a million women could be prevented just by eating less red and processed meats, according to estimate s prepared by Dr. Barry Popkin, who wrote an editorial accompanying the report. In place of red meat, nonvegetarians might consider poultry and fish. In the stu dy, the largest consumers of white meat from poultry and fish had a slight surviva l advantage. Likewise, those who ate the most fruits and vegetables also tended to live longer. Note: For many excellent reports on health issues, click here.

Surviving Recession: Medical research seen as lure in hard times 2009-03-13, Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, CA's leading newspaper) http://www.sacbee.com/273/story/1696087.html Retirement slammed Carole Jacko. Raising two grandchildren, she's too young for Medicare and too strapped to pay $600 a month for health insurance. So when a tr ip to the emergency room ended with a diagnosis of diabetes, Jacko found a creat ive solution. She became a medical guinea pig, offering herself to science in ex change for free medication, free doctor's visits and even a modest payment. With the economy careening and millions uninsured, some doctors and researchers beli eve the lure of volunteering for medical research is growing and so are potentia l ethical pitfalls. "Sometimes desperation leads people to be poor shoppers," to gloss over risks or grasp at imagined benefits, said Kevin Weinfurt, a Duke Uni versity professor who focuses on medical decision-making and ethics. No regulati ons limit how much a person can be paid to take part in medical research. Resear chers do not agree on how much money it takes to cross the line and exert "undue influence" or coercion to get someone to enroll in a study. That's something fe deral regulations do forbid. "This is the most complicated issue in research eth ics, and it's still an unsettled question," Weinfurt said. It has lingered for m ore than 100 years, since an Army surgeon named Walter Reed paid volunteers at a Cuban outpost $100 in gold to risk being infected with yellow fever. The men go t another $100 if they contracted the disease, payable to themselves or any desi gnated survivor.

Note: For many reports on corruption in the pharmaceutical and medical industrie s from major media sources, click here.

Carcinogen worries stick to food packaging 2008-07-30, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-fi-lazarus30-2008jul30,0,7080309.co... The next time you make some microwave popcorn or cook a frozen pizza, consider t his: The packaging of many of these products contains a chemical that the Enviro nmental Protection Agency considers potentially carcinogenic and wants businesse s to voluntarily stop using by 2015. Studies show that this chemical -- perfluor ooctanoic acid, or PFOA -- is present in 98% of Americans' blood and 100% of new borns. It doesn't break down and thus accumulates in the system over time. PFOA ... is used to make Teflon pans, Gore-Tex clothing and to prevent food from stic king to paper packaging. The industry says that while the EPA's carcinogen conce rns are based on animal tests, there's no evidence that PFOA is harmful to human s. Public-health advocates counter that the industry is being disingenuous. "The re's never been a chemical found that affects animals but has no effect on human s," said Bill Walker, vice president of the Environmental Working Group. PFOA is part of a broader constellation of substances known as perfluorinated chemicals , or PFCs. When PFCs are heated, they break down into compounds that can be abso rbed into food and make it into the bloodstream. Federal investigators determine d in 2005 that PFOA is a "likely carcinogen" and called for expanded testing to study its potential to cause liver, breast, testicular and pancreatic cancer. Wa lker at the Environmental Working Group said the voluntary phaseout supported by the EPA was insufficient. It wouldn't apply to Chinese companies, which are amo ng the leading manufacturers of food packaging. Note: For many important reports on health issues from reliable sources, click h ere.

Monsanto s Harvest of Fear 2008-05-01, Vanity Fair magazine http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805 Gary Rinehart clearly remembers the summer day in 2002 when the stranger walked in and issued his threat. Rinehart was behind the counter of the Square Deal, hi s old-time country store, as he calls it, on the fading town square of Eagleville, Missouri, a tiny farm community 100 miles north of Kansas City. As Rinehart wou ld recall, the man began verbally attacking him, saying he had proof that Rineha rt had planted Monsanto s genetically modified (G.M.) soybeans in violation of the company s patent. Better come clean and settle with Monsanto, Rinehart says the m an told him or face the consequences. But Rinehart wasn t a farmer. He wasn t a seed d ealer. He hadn t planted any seeds or sold any seeds. He owned a small a really smal l country store in a town of 350 people. On the way out the man kept making threat s. Rinehart says he can t remember the exact words, but they were to the effect of : Monsanto is big. You can t win. We will get you. You will pay. Scenes like this ar e playing out in many parts of rural America these days as Monsanto goes after f armers, farmers co-ops, seed dealers anyone it suspects may have infringed its pate nts of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents re veal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in t he American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store own ers, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from info rmants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend t o be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them t

o sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Note: For a revealing summary on the health impacts of genetically modified food , click here.

Congress Examines Role Of Industry in Regulation 2008-04-27, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/04/26/ST2008042602242... Despite more than 100 published studies by government scientists and university laboratories that have raised health concerns about a chemical compound that is central to the multibillion-dollar plastics industry, the Food and Drug Administ ration has deemed it safe largely because of two studies, both funded by an indu stry trade group. The compound, bisphenol A (BPA), has been linked to breast and prostate cancer, behavioral disorders and reproductive health problems in labor atory animals. The FDA's position on the compound was called into question earli er this month when a National Institutes of Health panel issued a draft report l inking BPA to health concerns. As part of his investigation, Rep. John D. Dingel l (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wants to exami ne the role played by the Weinberg Group, a Washington firm that employs scienti sts, lawyers and public relations specialists to defend products from legal and regulatory action. The firm has worked on Agent Orange, tobacco and Teflon, amon g other products linked to health hazards, and congressional investigators say i t was hired by Sunoco, a BPA manufacturer. From 1997 to 2005, 116 studies of the compound were published, many of them focused on its effects in low doses. Of t hose funded by government, 90 percent showed a health effect linked to BPA. None of the industry-funded studies found an effect; all of them said BPA is safe. T here is a clear bias in studies funded by industry, said [David] Michaels, who . .. runs the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy at George Washingt on University and wrote the book Doubt is Their Product, which details how vario us industries have used science to stave off regulation. Note: For many powerful reports on corporate corruption, click here.

Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation 2008-03-23, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/23health.html?ex=1363924800&en=ba91823f2... New government research has found large and growing disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades. Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and th is, in turn, has caused a widening gap. One of the researchers, Gopal K. Singh, a demographer at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the growing in equalities in life expectancy mirrored trends in infant mortality and in death fr om heart disease and certain cancers [and] that federal officials had found widen ing socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy at birth and at every age level . He and another researcher, Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, developed an index to measure social and econ omic conditions in every county, using census data on education, income, poverty , housing and other factors. In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affl uent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprive d group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, h e said. After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that life expectancy was higher for the mo

st affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000. If you look at the extremes in 2000, Dr. Singh said, men in the most deprived counties had 10 years s horter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years vers us 81.3 years). The difference between poor black men and affluent white women wa s more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years). Note: For a powerful summary of corruption in the government regulation of the h ealth care industry, click here.

Ozone Rules Weakened at Bush's Behest 2008-03-14, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/13/AR20080313041... The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smogforming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, accor ding to documents released by the EPA. EPA officials initially tried to set a lo wer seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency t o increase the limit, according to the documents. "It is unprecedented and an un lawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific ju dgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense C ouncil. The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the har m caused by ozone. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration offic ials ... that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme C ourt, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, adm inistration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened s tandard. The dispute involved one of two distinct parts of the EPA's ozone restr ictions: the "public welfare" standard, which is designed to protect against lon g-term harm from high ozone levels. The other part is known as the "public healt h" standard, which sets a legal limit on how high ozone levels can be at any one time. The two standards were set at the same level Wednesday, but until Bush as ked for a change, the EPA had planned to set the "public welfare" standard at a lower level. Note: For a treasure trove of reports from reliable, verifiable sources on gover nment corruption, click here.

Bay Area has first major U.S. study of Morgellons disease 2008-01-17, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/17/BA0EUGEBK.DTL Bay Area researchers are beginning the first major U.S. study into a mystery dis ease known for its frightening symptoms - among them, open sores and unidentifia ble objects poking out of the skin - that doctors have long suspected is all in patients' heads. The study into Morgellons will start immediately. The research will be funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [and condu cted by Kaiser Permanente]. Researchers are hoping to come up with a more specif ic definition of Morgellons and how prevalent it is in the Bay Area, which has o ne of the largest concentrations of ... cases of the disease in the country. The CDC is not yet agreeing that Morgellons is a medical condition. Many doctors be lieve that Morgellons is actually a psychiatric condition called delusional para sitosis. They say the filaments that patients report growing out of their skin a re actually lint or threads from clothing, and the open sores are caused by pati ents scratching at skin when they perceive a crawling sensation. San Francisco r

esident Pat Miller has been to more than a dozen doctors since he first develope d symptoms several years ago. He's been diagnosed with a wide variety of skin co nditions, as well as delusional parasitosis, and few doctors have been willing t o consider Morgellons. "I've developed this lack of love for doctors and health care systems. You pretty much have to become your own doctor." The nonprofit Mor gellons Research Foundation says that more than 10,000 families in the United St ates have registered with the Web site, claiming at least one family member has the disease. About 24 percent of registered families are in California, and the Bay Area is one of several hot spots in the country. The research foundation est imates that 150 to 500 people in Northern California have Morgellons. Note: Though mainstream science initially claimed Morgellons disease was purely psychological, much information is challenging this stance. For many revealing h ealth stories from reliable sources, click here.

Caution: Killing Germs May Be Hazardous to Your Health 2007-10-29, Newsweek http://www.newsweek.com/id/57368 Our war on microbes has toughened them. Now, new science tells us we should embr ace bacteria. Any part of your body that comes into contact with the outside wor ld ... is home to bacteria, fungi and protozoa. There are thousands of different species ... says Stanford biologist David Relman, who is investigating the comp lex web of interactions microbes maintain with our digestive, immune and nervous systems. Relman is a leader in rethinking our relationship to bacteria, which f or most of the last century was dominated by the paradigm of Total Warfare. He s ays, "people still think the only good microbe is a dead one." The body's natura l microbial flora aren't just an incidental fact of our biology, but crucial com ponents of our health. Our microbes ... regulate our immune systems and even our serotonin levels: germs, it seems, can make us happy. What we need is more expo sure to the good microbes. "Modern sanitation is a good thing, and pavement is a good thing," says [science writer Jessica] Sachs, "but they keep kids at a dist ance from microbes." The effect is to tip the immune system in the direction of overreaction, either to outside stimuli or even to the body's own cells. If the former, the result is allergies or asthma. Sachs writes that "children who recei ve antibiotics in the first year of life have more than double the rate of aller gies and asthma in later childhood." But if the immune system turns on the body itself, you see irritable bowel syndrome, lupus or multiple sclerosis, among the many autoimmune diseases that were virtually unknown to our ancestors but are i ncreasingly common in the developed world. Note: For many powerful articles on health from reliable sources, click here.

Politics reportedly stifled health report 2007-07-29, San Francisco Chronicle/Washington Post http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/29/MNG48R95UC1.DTL A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle globa l health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee wi thout any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments. The repo rt described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and call ed on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. Its publication was blocked by William Steiger, a specialist in educat ion and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to Presid

ent Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services. Richard Carmona, who commissioned the "Call to Action on Global Health" while serving a s surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, recently cited its suppression as an exampl e of the Bush administration's frequent efforts during his tenure to give scient ific documents a political twist. Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to r elease the document, he was "called in and again admonished ... via a senior off icial who said, 'You don't get it. This will be a political document, or it will not be released.' " A few days before the end of his term as the nation's senio r medical officer, he was abruptly told he would not be reappointed.

We spend far more, but our health care is falling behind 2007-07-10, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/10/MNGNUQTQJB1.DTL These days, fewer Americans are buying the claim that the United States has the best medical system in the world. Consumers are buying lower-cost online drugs f rom foreign sources, and some even become "medical tourists" to obtain affordabl e treatment in other countries. Studies show Americans aren't healthier, nor are they living longer than people in industrialized nations that spend half per ca pita of what we do on care. A 2007 ... study that compared the United States wit h five other nations -- Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United K ingdom -- ranked the U.S. health system last. And a 2000 report by the World Hea lth Organization ... put the United States 37th out of 190 nations in health car e services -- between Costa Rica and Slovenia. France was rated No. 1. In a New York Times/CBS poll conducted in March, health care ranked as the top domestic c oncern. We spend far more, but our health care is falling behind, studies say. " We, unlike any other country, have 46 million people who are uninsured, and that raises a whole host of health and financial issues," said Ken Thorpe, professor of health policy at Emory University. "Ours is really is a sick-care system." T horpe said. He argues ... that it is far more cost-effective to prevent people f rom getting sick or at least catch illnesses early through better monitoring. Ka ren Davis, president of .... a nonprofit foundation that supports health care re search said, "We tend to have more medical errors than other countries, in part because of this highly specialized, fragmented system. More things can go wrong and do go wrong." Note: For many highly informative major media articles on the U.S. health crisis , click here.

Care in need of a cure 2007-06-18, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-global18jun18,1,1444274.story The knee-jerk attitude that the U.S. is the best place on earth to be sick, fuel ed by the reputations of great institutions like the Mayo Clinic and by America' s leadership in drug and technology development, is beginning to be challenged b y rigorous international comparisons. There is increasing evidence that, despite justified pride in individual institutions and medical breakthroughs, the world 's biggest medical spender isn't buying its citizens the longest, healthiest liv es in the world. It's not just moviemakers and comics saying so. The dire messag e that the U.S. healthcare system is, by some measures, an also-ran on the world wide stage is being delivered by doctors, researchers even insurance industry gi ants. On screen, slamming U.S. medical care is coming of age with Michael Moore' s documentary "Sicko." Through the eyes of people who have faced healthcare cata strophes, he tells graphic stories of the problems with America's system. Consid

erably more sobering are the warnings from an official at the National Institute s of Health, who declared in the May 16 issue of the Journal of the American Med ical Assn. that the U.S. healthcare system is "a dysfunctional mess." Amid stack s of reports, all with ... measures of access, equity, efficiency and medical ou tcomes, two statistics stand out. The U.S. spends more on medical care than any other nation, and gets far less for it than many countries. The U.S. spends an a nnual $6,102 per person more than any other country and more than twice the aver age of $2,571. Yet Americans have the 22nd highest life expectancy among those n ations at 77.2 years. People in Japan, the world leader in longevity, live an av erage of 81.8 years.

Chickens engineered to make cancer drugs 2007-01-15, MSNBC News/Reuters http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16640055 A team at the institute that cloned Dolly the sheep have made a genetically engi neered chicken that produces cancer drugs in its eggs. The chickens produce the cancer drugs in their egg whites, the team at the Roslin Biocentre in Edinburgh reported. The drugs include a monoclonal antibody themselves lab-engineered immu ne system proteins and a human immune system protein used to treat cancer and ot her conditions. Scientists have been trying to find good ways to turn animals in to factories. Cattle, sheep and goats all have been genetically engineered to pr oduce human proteins in their milk, including insulin and drugs to treat cystic fibrosis, but the Roslin team thought chickens, with their shorter life cycles a nd egg-laying prowess, also might be useful. They used a virus to infect very ea rly chicken embryos. The virus inserted the genetic material into the DNA of chi ck embryos in newly laid eggs. The researchers hatched these chicks and found th e male chicks who had indeed incorporated the new DNA in their semen. These cock erels were then bred with normal hens and they screened the resulting chicks to see which ones still carried the two new genes. The researchers have now bred se veral hundred chickens that can produce the desired proteins. Other companies ha ve created animals and plants that produce human and animal proteins, as well as vaccines. Note: It's a brave new world. For more on genetically modified organisms, click here.

Rats fed GM corn due for sale in Britain developed abnormalities in blood and ki dneys 2005-05-22, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=640430 Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health coul d be affected by eating GM food. Details of secret research carried out by Monsa nto, the GM food giant...shows that rats fed the modified corn had smaller kidne ys and variations in the composition of their blood. According to the confidenti al 1,139-page report, these health problems were absent from another batch of ro dents fed non-GM food. Although Monsanto last night dismissed the abnormalities in rats as meaningless and due to chance...a senior British government source sa id ministers were so worried by the findings that they had called for further in formation. The full details of the rat research are included in the main report, which Monsanto refuses to release on the grounds that "it contains confidential business information which could be of commercial use to our competitors". Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on this vital topic, see ou

r summary of Seeds of Deception.

The doctor many believe can cure cancer 2004-08-09, MSN of Australia http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/stories/1744.asp Over a period of 30 years, highly qualified Perth-based surgeon Dr John Holt has had some startling successes with a radio-wave therapy treatment for cancer pat ients. Dr Holt's controversial treatment works, in layperson's terms, by giving the patient an injection of a glucose-blocking agent. He then shines "radio wave s" into the body at a specific frequency. Dr Holt doesn't guarantee it will cure every cancer, but it's not expensive and there's no quackery about it. Born in Bristol 80 years ago and a member of the Royal Colleges, Dr Holt has 26 medical letters after his name. For more than a decade he was in charge of Western Austr alia's main cancer institute, until the late '70s, when he was blacklisted by hi s medical colleagues and politicians. The polarisation of the medical and scient ific community in Perth over Dr Holt's treatment has been evident since the mid'70s. While the medical community continues to argue the merits of Dr Holt's uno rthodox measures, the families of his successes feel they owe everything to this gentle man. After two brain tumours and a tumour on her spine, Sophia Rosa was sent by pre-eminent brain surgeon Dr Charlie Teo for the radical treatment. Two years later, the only sign Sophia had cancer are the side-effects from the massi ve doses of chemotherapy given in Sydney. Note: If the above link fails, click here. For more on Dr. Holt's work, click he re. For the story of Royal Rife, another famed scientist who suffered dearly for finding a cure for cancer, click here.

California v. New York 1931-05-25, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,787713.html Dr. Walter Bernard Coffey of San Francisco was again asking the State of New Yor k's Department of Social Welfare permission to open a cancer research laboratory and clinic at Huntington, L. I. His cohorts surrounded him. Opposed were Dr. Jo hn Augustus Hartwell, president of the New York Academy of Medicine, spokesman f or organized Medicine, and his cohorts. The simple question was: Should the Stat e authorize the cancer clinic? But in the train of that simple question came a m ost extraordinary range of considerations the nature and cause of cancer; the natu re and authenticity of the Coffey-Humber cancer treatment; medical ethics, human nature, public policy, money, fame, and even national politics. Dr. Coffey ... is chief surgeon of Southern Pacific Co. He has 600 doctors working under him. T hey care for 70,000 railroad men and their families. Dr. John Augustus Hartwell, 61, president of the New York Academy of Medicine ... and most of his associate s want Drs. Coffey & Humber and their cancer extract kept away from New York. Th ey fear that the hope of a Coffey-Humber cancer cure will persuade the cancerous to abandon the orthodox treatment of surgery, X-rays and radium. Very quickly a fter a sufferer gets a Coffey-Humber injection, his pain quiets, and in 71% of t he cases disappears. In most of the cases who do not die (Drs. Coffey & Humber w ill treat only the moribund, cases rejected as hopeless by at least two reputabl e doctors), the cancer becomes necrotic, ceases to smell, and sloughs off leavin g a clean hole. That undeniably happens. Why that happens is debatable. Note: To read how permission for the innovative cancer clinic was eventually ref used, click here. If you want to understand how politics and big money prevented the legitimate study of promising cancer cures back in the 1930s, this article

is a highly revealing "must read."

Rich NYC Mayor: Drug CEOs Don't Make Much Money 2009-08-28, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=8382748 Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies and their chief executives on Friday, declaring that they "don't make a lot of money" and shouldn't be scapegoats in the health care debate. The mayor and wealthiest person in New York City with a fortune estimated at $16.5 billio n made the comments on his radio show Friday. "You know, last time I checked, ph armaceutical companies don't make a lot of money, their executives don't make a lot of money," Bloomberg said. Pharmaceutical CEOs are known to make millions, w ith generous salaries, stock options and other perks. Abbott Laboratories Inc. C hairman and Chief Executive Miles White's compensation was $25.3 million in 2008 . The North Chicago, Ill.-based company saw profit rising 35 percent to $4.88 bi llion. Merck & Co.'s chief executive, Richard T. Clark, received a $17.3 million compensation package for 2008. The company's profit more than doubled to $7.8 b illion. The mayor ... often battles criticism that he is out of touch with regul ar people. Earlier this year he declared "we love the rich people" while arguing against raising taxes on the wealthy. It was clear that Bloomberg or one of his aides realized his gaffe while he was still on the air Friday. The mayor, who h as sought to cast himself as a financial and business expert, came back from a b reak and said he had looked up the pay of some pharmaceutical executives. "Some of them are making a decent amount, more than a decent amount of money," he said .

Swine flu resembles feared 1918 flu, study finds 2009-07-13, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31889365/ns/health-swine_flu The new H1N1 influenza virus bears a disturbing resemblance to the virus strain that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, with a greater ability to infect the lungs th an common seasonal flu viruses, researchers reported on Monday. Separately, a to p official at the World Health Organization said Monday a fully licensed swine f lu vaccine might not be available until the end of the year. The report could af fect many countries' vaccination plans. But countries could use emergency provis ions to get the vaccines out quicker if they decide their populations need them. The swine flu viruses currently being used to develop a vaccine aren't producin g enough of the ingredient needed for the vaccine, and WHO has asked its laborat ory network to produce a new set of viruses as soon as possible. Other tests sho wed the virus could be controlled by the antiviral drugs Relenza, made by GlaxoS mithKline, and Tamiflu, made by Roche AG, the researchers said. The World Health Organization said on Monday that vaccine makers should start making immunizatio ns against H1N1 and that healthcare workers should be first in line to get them. The WHO has previously estimated that the world could have as many as 4.9 billi on doses of H1N1 swine flu vaccine ready for the next flu season but this assume s people only need one shot and production yields are similar to seasonal vaccin e. Note: Who's making the big bucks here? Why is the WHO so strongly promoting bill ions of doses of vaccines for a disease in which the vast majority of the relati vely few people who have died had underlying causes. For more on the blatant cor ruption of our health industry from reliable sources, click here and here.

MIA may be a quarantine site in pandemic 2009-06-10, Miami Herald (Miami's leading newspaper) http://www.miamiherald.com/business/story/1089929.html Miami International Airport [MIA] and 18 other major American airports have been lined up to handle a future pandemic that could require them to quarantine inte rnational flights. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has set u p stand-by quarantine/screening facilities at the 19 airports to which all fligh ts from affected countries would be diverted. Nationally, airline and airport lo bbyists predict chaos, saying there is no way the air-traffic system can handle such extensive rerouting. Now, new proposals are emerging in Washington, includi ng one that would designate Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood, Orlando International and four other major airports as potential second-tier quarantine sites. Local offi cials say they understand the CDC will approve the new designations only if the airports pay for the quarantine facilities themselves. The CDC would pay for the quarantine stations at the 19 primary airports. The facilities are not cheap. A 2008 study by the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that setting aside space for health screenings and a quarantine of up to 200 people could cost $15, 000 a month, with costs of an actual quarantine running into the hundreds of tho usands of dollars. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood officials began developing a plan t o handle quarantined passengers and flights several years ago during the bird fl u scare. It calls for erecting air-conditioned tents on the runway ramps to scre en or quarantine passengers before they enter the terminal. Quarantined passenge rs might have to remain for days to show they are not infectious.

U.S. falls behind other developed countries in infant mortality 2008-10-16, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-mortality16-2008oct16,0... After a century of declines, the U.S. infant mortality rate barely budged betwee n 2000 and 2005, causing the United States to slip further behind other develope d countries despite spending more on healthcare, according to a report released Wednesday. The rate was 6.86 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2005, virtua lly unchanged from 6.89 in 2000. In 1900, the rate was 100 deaths per 1,000 live births. The United States dropped to 29th in the world in infant mortality in 2 004, the latest year for which data are available from all countries, tying with Poland and Slovakia. The year before, it was 27th. In 1960, it was 12th. The re port from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed the leveling off in mortality to a 9% increase in premature births over the same period and to stalled progress in saving the earliest preterm infants. Premature birth and low birth weight are by far the biggest causes of infant death. Infant mortality rates vary by race and ethnicity, from a high of 13.63 per 1,000 births for Afr ican American women to a low of 4.42 for Cuban Americans, according to the CDC r eport. Differences in socioeconomic status and access to medical care did not en tirely explain the gap, the report said. Premature births are increasing, possib ly tied to rising rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension. What those condit ions have in common is that they are preventable, and that ... is where the Unit ed States falls behind other developed countries. Note: For a treasure trove of reports on health issues from reliable sources cli ck here.

Cancer risk in mobile phones: Official 2008-10-06, The Sun http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1814931.ece

Mobile phones DO increase the risk of brain cancer, scientists claimed yesterday . The chances of developing a malignant tumour are "significantly increased" for people who use a mobile for ten years. The shock finding is the result of the b iggest ever study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of th e World Health Organisation. Scientists found a type of brain tumour called glio ma is more likely in long-term mobile users. French experts analysed data from 1 3 countries, including Britain. They cross-referenced various types of tumours w ith mobile use. Researchers admit the cause is unknown, but it is thought radiat ion from handsets could be the trigger. Study chief Professor Elisabeth Cardis s aid: "To underestimate the risk would be a complete disaster." Last night a Brit ish expert insisted mobiles are not dangerous. Professor Patricia McKinney of th e University of Leeds said: "Reasonable use is unlikely to increase the risk of tumours." Note: For a treasure trove of key health articles from major media sources, clic k here.

Psychedelic Study Shows Positive Results 2008-07-01, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/01/tech/main4221948.shtml In 2002, at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a business consultant named D ede Osborn took a psychedelic drug as part of a research project. She felt like she was taking off. She saw colors. Then it felt like her heart was ripping open . But she called the experience joyful as well as painful, and says that it has helped her to this day. "I feel more centered in who I am and what I'm doing," s aid Osborn, now 66, of Providence, R.I. "I don't seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have. I feel much more grounded (and feel that) we are all connec ted." Scientists reported ... that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better becau se of the experience. Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they'd ever had. The drug, psi locybin, is found in so-called "magic mushrooms." It's illegal, but it has been used in religious ceremonies for centuries. The project made headlines in 2006 w hen researchers published their report on how the volunteers felt just two month s after taking the drug. The new study followed them up [to] a year after that. Fourteen months after taking the drug, 64 percent of the volunteers said they st ill felt at least a moderate increase in well-being or life satisfaction, in ter ms of things like feeling more creative, self-confident, flexible and optimistic . The questionnaire answers indicated lasting gains in traits like being more se nsitive, tolerant, loving and compassionate. Note: For lots of exciting reports on new health research, click here.

FDA Faulted for Approving Studies of Artificial Blood 2008-04-29, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/28/AR20080428010... A new analysis concludes that the Food and Drug Administration approved experime nts with artificial blood substitutes even after studies showed that the controv ersial products posed a clear risk of causing heart attacks and death. The revie w of combined data from more than 3,711 patients who participated in 16 studies testing five different types of artificial blood, released yesterday, found that the products nearly tripled the risk of heart attacks and boosted the chances o f dying by 30 percent. Based on the findings, the researchers questioned why the

FDA allowed additional testing of the products to go forward and why the agency is considering letting yet another study proceed. "It's hard to understand," sa id Charles Natanson, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health who led the analysis. "They already had data that these products could cause hea rt attacks and evidence that they could kill." An artificial blood substitute th at has a long shelf life and does not need refrigeration could save untold lives by providing an alternative to trauma patients in emergencies, especially in ru ral areas and in combat settings. But attempts to develop such products have bee n marred by repeated failures and fraught with controversy, in part because some products have been studied under rules allowing researchers to administer them without obtaining consent from individual patients. After the Washington-based c onsumer group Public Citizen sued the FDA to gain access to data submitted to th e agency, Natanson and colleagues at NIH and Public Citizen pooled data from stu dies conducted between 1998 and 2007. Note: For a treasure trove of reports from reliable, verifiable sources on gover nment corruption, click here.

Embracing Alternative Care 2008-01-09, U.S. News and World Report http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/2008/01/09/embracing-alternative-car... "To be blunt, if my wife and I didn't think it was helping him, we wouldn't have continued with it," says Dan Polley. He's talking about Mikey, the Polleys' 2-ye ar-old in the next room, who was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia when he was 6 months old. Chemotherapy, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant have been crucial elements of Mikey's treatment. But the "it" his father speaks of is nothing like these aggressive, costly, and heavily researched exemplars of west ern care - it is a kind of touch therapy. Gentle and benign, "healing touch" is i ntended to rebalance the energy field that its practitioners believe surrounds t he body and flows through it along defined pathways, affecting health when disru pted. Several times a week, therapist Lynne Morrison spends 20 minutes unblockin g and smoothing Mikey's energy field, which energy healers like Morrison say the y can feel and correct. The setting for the unorthodox therapy ... would have be en startling just five or 10 years ago. Morrison is on the staff of Children's M emorial Hospital in Chicago, a ... research-oriented emblem of western medicine. It perennially ranks among America's premier hospitals. And Mikey is only one o f many children there receiving care that not long ago was called alternative me dicine. Now it is more often called CAM, for complementary and alternative medic ine, or integrative medicine, to avoid the loaded "alternative." The message the new labels are meant to convey is that the therapies more often go hand in hand with traditional medicine than substitute for it. Note: For lots of exciting reports on new health research, click here.

Drug makers spend more on marketing than research: study 2008-01-03, CBC News (Canada's equivalent of PBS) http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/01/03/drugs.html U.S. drug companies spend almost twice as much on marketing and promoting medica tions [as] on research and development, a new Canadian study says. "These number s clearly show how promotion predominates over R&D in the pharmaceutical industr y, contrary to the industry's claim," the authors write in this week's peer-revi ewed journal Public Library of Science Medicine. Using data from two market rese arch companies, the University of Quebec's Marc-Andr Gagnon and York University's Joel Lexchin found U.S. drug companies spent $57.5 billion US on promotional ac

tivities in 2004 compared with $31.5 billion on research and development. Promot ional activities included free samples, visits from drug reps, direct-to-consume r advertising of drugs, meetings with doctors to promote products, e-mail promot ions, direct mail and clinical trials designed to promote the prescribing of new drugs rather than to generate scientific data. The authors say their figure of $57.5 billion US is likely an underestimate, citing other avenues for promotion such as ghostwriting of articles in medical journals by drug company employees, or the off-label promotion of drugs. Drug companies have long argued they are dr iven primarily by research, while critics charge that marketing and profits are their primary concerns. There were extensive U.S. government reviews of the phar macy business in the 1950s and '60s and again in the 1980s. But there hasn't bee n a comprehensive study of drug industry profits and spending in more than a dec ade. Note: For a powerful overview of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, clic k here.

Docs often write off patient side-effect concerns 2007-08-28, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20479490 When patients feel they might be having an adverse drug effect, doctors will ver y often dismiss their concerns, a new study shows. In a survey of 650 patients t aking cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, who reported having adverse dru g reactions, many said their physicians denied that the drug could be connected to their symptoms, Dr. Beatrice A. Golomb of the University of California at San Diego ... found. Physicians seem to commonly dismiss the possibility of a connec tion, Golomb [said]. This seems to occur even for the best-supported adverse effec ts of the most widely prescribed class of drugs. Clearly there is a need for bet ter physician education about adverse effects, and there is a strong need for pa tient involvement in adverse event reporting. The best-known side effects of stat ins ... are liver damage and muscle problems, although statins have also been ti ed to changes in memory, concentration and mood. Physician reaction to a potenti al side effect is crucial because the muscle problems can progress to a rare but potentially fatal condition called rhabdomyolysis if the drug isn t discontinued. The researchers investigated the response of doctors to statin patients who bel ieved they were having adverse drug reactions. In the great majority of cases, t he patient, not the doctor, initiated the discussion. Forty-seven percent of pat ients with muscle problems or cognitive problems said their doctors dismissed th e possibility that their symptoms were statin-related, while 51 percent of patie nts with peripheral neuropathy, a type of nerve pain affecting the extremities, said their doctors denied a possible connection with statins. Note: For a hard-hitting overview of medical corruption, click here.

Surgeon General Sees 4-Year Term as Compromised 2007-07-10, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/washington/11surgeon.html?ex=1341806400&en=... Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday tha t top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress impor tant public health reports because of political considerations. The administrati on, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem c ells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global healt h issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to water down a landmark repor t on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that ev

en brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm. Dr. Carmona sai d he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his spee ches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings. Dr. Carmona is one of a growing l ist of present and former administration officials to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan government health and scientific agencies. On issue after issue, Dr. Carmona said, the admi nistration made decisions about important public health issues based solely on p olitical considerations, not scientific ones. I was told to stay away from those because we ve already decided which way we want to go, Dr. Carmona said. He describ ed attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming w as discussed. The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause an d dismissed it, he said.

Study suggests cancer risk from depleted uranium 2007-05-08, The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2074419,00.html Depleted uranium, which is used in armour-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the meta l's effects on human lung cells. The study adds to growing evidence that DU caus es health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased. DU is a b yproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power. It is much less radioactive th an other uranium isotopes, and its high density - twice that of lead - makes it useful for armour and armour piercing shells. It has been used in conflicts incl uding Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defence was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and b irth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons. Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explo sion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers a nd people returning after the conflict. Once they are lodged in the lung even lo w levels of radioactivity would damage DNA in cells close by. "The real question is whether the level of exposure is sufficient to cause health effects. The ans wer to that question is still unclear," he said, adding that there has as yet be en little research on the effects of DU on civilians in combat zones. "Funding f or DU studies is very sparse and so defining the disadvantages is hard," he adde d. Note: We suspect a major cover-up of the dangers of DU, on which the media have reported little. How convenient that this pesky waste product from nuclear power plants which is radioactive for thousands of years could be sold to the militar y for weapons. For lots more on this vital topic, click here.

New fears over additives in children's food 2007-05-08, The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2074349,00.html Food safety experts have advised parents to eliminate a series of additives from their children's diet while they await the publication of a new study that is u nderstood to link these ingredients to behaviour problems in youngsters. The lat est scientific research into the effect of food additives on children's behaviou r is thought to raise fresh doubts about the safety of controversial food colour ings and a preservative widely used in sweets, drinks and processed foods. It wi ll be several months before the results are published, despite the importance of the findings for children's health. Researchers at Southampton University have

tested combinations of synthetic colourings and preservative that an average chi ld might consume in a day to measure what effect they had on behaviour. A source at the university [said] their results supported findings first made seven year s ago that linked the additives to behavioural problems, such as temper tantrums , poor concentration and hyperactivity, and to allergic reactions. Independent e xperts say that consumers should consider removing these additives from their ch ildren's diets now. Dr Alex Richardson, the director of Food and Behaviour Resea rch and senior research scientist at Oxford University, said: "There are well-do cumented potential risks from these additives. In my view the researchers had do ne an excellent piece of work first time round and there was enough evidence to act. If this new study essentially replicates that, what more evidence do they n eed to remove these additives from children's food and drink?" Note: For how drug companies collude with government to suppress this kind of in formation, click here.

Florida Man Invents Machine To Cure Cancer 2007-02-27, WPFB-TV (ABC affiliate in Palm Beach, FL) http://www.wpbf.com/health/11125485/detail.html A Florida man with no medical training has invented a machine that he believes m ay lead to a cure for cancer. John Kanzius ... wondered if his background in phy sics and radio could come in handy in treating the disease from which he suffers himself. After 24 rounds of chemotherapy, the former broadcaster decided that h e did not want to see others suffer trying to cure the disease. Kanzius said it was watching kids being treated that affected him the most. "Particularly, young children walk in with smiles, and then you'd see them three weeks later and the ir smiles had disappeared. I said to myself, 'We're in a barbaric type of medici ne." Kanzius said his machine basically makes cells act like antennae to pick up a signal and self-destruct. Unlike current cancer treatment, Kanzius' machine d oes not use radiation, and unlike today's radio-frequency treatments, it's nonin vasive. Now, some of the nation's most prominent doctors and scientists are usin g Kanzius' machines in their research. In January, researchers said they perform ed a breakthrough at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "The complete killing of pancreatic cells in laboratory conditions is encouraging," Dr. Steve Curley said. Kanzius explained that his machine uses a solution filled with nano particles, which measure no more than one-billionth of a meter. A test subject w ould be injected with either gold or carbon nanoparticles, which would make thei r way through the body and attach to the cancerous cells. The test subject would then enter the machine and receive a dose of radio frequency waves, theoretical ly heating and killing the cancerous cells in moments and leaving nearby cells u ntouched. Note: For more on this exciting machine and the man behind it, click here. For o ther major media articles relating potential cancer cures, click here.

Nicotine boost was deliberate, study says 2007-01-18, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/01/18/nicotine_boost_was_delib... Data supplied by tobacco companies strongly suggest that in recent years manufac turers deliberately boosted nicotine levels in cigarettes to more effectively ho ok smokers, Harvard researchers conclude in a study being released today. The co mpanies increasingly used tobacco richer in nicotine and made design changes to give smokers more puffs per cigarette, according to the analysis from the Harvar d School of Public Health. The report expands on a landmark Massachusetts Depart

ment of Public Health study issued last August showing that the amount of nicoti ne that could be inhaled from cigarettes increased an average of 10 percent from 1998 through 2004. A 1996 state law required cigarette makers to test the nicot ine that could be inhaled from their products, and the state ordered the use of machines that simulate a typical smoker's puffing. The Harvard researchers, who corroborated the basic findings of the state study, wanted to determine why ciga rettes were delivering more nicotine. "Industry says it's changed," said Greg Co nnolly, an author of the Harvard study. "They've changed -- maybe for the worse. " The Harvard study relies on information supplied by the industry. "It was syst ematic, it was pervasive, it involved all the manufacturers, and it was by desig n," said Dr. Howard Koh, an associate dean at the Harvard School of Public Healt h and an author of the study. Another author said that the likelihood that the n icotine increase happened by chance was less than 1 in 1,000.

FDA May Clear Cloned Food, But Public Has Little Appetite 2006-12-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/24/AR20061224005... Consumer advocates and others have complained bitterly in recent years that the Food and Drug Administration has veered from its scientific roots. Later this we ek, the agency is expected to release a formal recommendation that milk and meat from cloned animals should be allowed on grocery store shelves. The long-awaite d decision comes as polling data to be released this week show that the public c ontinues to have little appetite for such food, with many people saying the FDA should keep it off the market. That raises the issue: Should decisions such as t his one be based solely on science, or should officials take into account public sensitivities, which may be unscientific but are undeniably real? "There is mor e to this issue than just food safety," said Susan Ruland of the International D airy Foods Association, which represents such major companies as Kraft Foods and Dannon. The organization's member companies are concerned that sales of U.S. da iry products could drop by 15 percent or more if the FDA allows the sale of meat and milk from clones. Relatively few cloned farm animals exist; there are an es timated 150 clones out of the nation's 9 million dairy cows. But biotechnology c ompanies are gearing up to clone farmers' tastiest cattle and pigs and most prod uctive dairy cows. In the University of Maryland survey, nearly half of those po lled asserted that it was not yet possible to clone farm animals for food. For t he most part, people don't know this is a reality yet.

Team finds hope for diabetes cure 2006-12-15, Toronto Star (One of Canada's leading newspapers) http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Articl... A Toronto-led team of researchers has discovered a trigger for Type 1 diabetes, a breakthrough that has long evaded scientists and could lead the way to prevent ing the disease. The team found that abnormal nerve endings in the insulin-produ cing cells of the pancreas initiated a chain of events that caused Type 1 diabet es in mice. When they removed the nerve cells, the mice did not develop the diso rder. That means diabetes may be a disease of the nervous system, not just an au toimmune disease, said Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, a senior scientist at the Hospita l for Sick Children and the study's main investigator. In a reversal of what the a chemical secreted y expected, the researchers also found injecting substance P by nerve cells into mice whose islet cells were inflamed and on the way to bein g destroyed not only eliminated the inflammation but reversed it. "The blood glu cose normalizes overnight and it stays low for weeks to months this is with a si ngle shot," Dosch said. "We now have 4-month-old mice that are non-diabetic that used to be diabetic" a period equivalent to six to eight years in humans. Exper

ts say the findings, reported yesterday in the journal Cell, will change the way scientists think about diabetes. "It really is a breakthrough for the diabetes community," said Pam Ohashi, a professor of immunology at the University of Toro nto. Dosch has immediate plans to move his research from mice to humans. He is l aunching a clinical trial in January to figure out if patients who have a high r isk of Type 1 diabetes have the same sensory nerve abnormalities. "If they do, t hen we have fantastic new therapeutic strategies," said Dosch, who is also a pro fessor of pediatrics and immunology at U of T. Note: The pharmaceutical industry makes huge profits from diabetics. Big profits have been known to prevent cures from making it to market. Click here for more. Let's hope this important research moves forward.

Why do some with HIV not get sick? 2006-08-17, MSNBC News http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14392345/ As many as one in 300 HIV patients never get sick and never suffer damage to the ir immune systems and AIDS experts said on Wednesday they want to know why. Most have gone unnoticed by the top researchers, because they are well, do not need treatment and do not want attention, said Dr. Bruce Walker of Harvard Medical Sc hool. But Walker and colleagues want to study these so-called "elite" patients i n the hope that their cases can help in the search for a vaccine or treatments. So far Walker and colleagues have not been able to find out why certain people c an live for 15 years and longer with the virus and never get ill. The AIDS virus usually kills patients within two years if they are not treated. Walker has tra cked down 200 elite patients and has now joined up with other prominent AIDS res earchers to find at least 1,000 "elites" in North America and as many as possibl e globally.

Donations tie drug firms and nonprofits 2006-05-28, Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia's leading newspaper) http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/health/14687073.htm The American Diabetes Association...privately enlisted an Eli Lilly & Co. execut ive to chart its growth strategy. The National Alliance on Mental Illness...lobb ies for treatment programs that also benefit its drug-company donors. The Nation al Gaucher Foundation...gets nearly all its revenue from one drugmaker, Genzyme Corp. Many patient groups and drug companies maintain close, multimillion-dollar relationships while disclosing limited or no details about the ties. An Inquire r examination of six groups, each a leading advocate for patients in a disease a rea, found that the groups rarely disclose such ties when commenting or lobbying about donors' drugs. Combined, the six received at least $29 million from drug companies last year. The amount ranged from 2 percent to 7 percent of revenue at the Arthritis Foundation, to 89 percent to 91 percent at the much smaller Natio nal Gaucher Foundation. The funding usually comes from the companies' marketing or sales divisions, not charity offices. Grants often rise with promotional spen ding as a drug hits the market and fall when sales ebb. Donations from Merck and Pfizer Inc. to the Arthritis Foundation more than doubled, to at least $1.65 mi llion combined, in 2000 as they launched Vioxx and Celebrex. Merck explicitly wo ve the foundation into sales strategies. In 2000-2001, the American Diabetes Ass ociation did not disclose an unusual gift from Lilly: a lent executive, Emerson "Randy" Hall Jr., who moved into its Alexandria, Va., headquarters and coached i t on growth strategies, all paid by Lilly. Note: If you want to understand how the huge pharmaceutical industry influences

what you know about their drugs, this article is a must read. You may first want to read a riveting two-page summary of an expos by the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, who details major collusion and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry at http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

The healing power of placebos 2006-05-01, Ode Magazine http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4294 A sugar pill, a salt solution, a doctor in a white jacket -- these all have the power to cure as long as the patient believes in their healing qualities. That s eems impossible. So what does science say about the elusive placebo effect? Very little research has been done in this area of medicine. The pharmaceutical indu stry can t profit; after all, they can t make money from sugar pills. It is often fo rgotten that the effect could help people and shave billions off spiralling heal th-care costs. If researchers could gain more insight into how the effect works, it would stand as one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in history. Some peo ple are convinced that the effect proves that strength of mind is sufficient to heal the body. Placebos have...proven successful in treating depression, anxiety , stress, warts and ulcers -- sometimes in as many as 60 to 70 percent of the ca ses. There are...objective effects everyone can measure. Placebo treatments have been shown to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels as well as improve re action speeds, pulse rates and immune-system activity. Ultimately, the placebo p henomenon points to a strange paradox in modern medical science. As soon as an a lternative-health treatment proves successful, it is dismissed as the placebo ef fect. It works only because people believe in it. Yet this explanation appears t o contradict one of the foundations of medical science, which stresses that the mind and body are separate, therefore ruling out the possibility of healing thro ugh belief. Note: For ideas on why the placebo effect has rarely been studied, see our two-p age health cover-up summary at http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Researchers Shed More Light on Bird Flu 2006-03-23, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/22/AR20060322020... Two research teams have independently discovered explanations for the chief feat ures of the H5N1 bird flu virus -- its difficulty infecting humans, and the dead ly effects when it does. Unlike influenza viruses that are passed easily between people, H5N1 has a hard time attaching to cells in the nose, throat and upper a irways. But it readily attaches to cells deep in the lungs. This suggests that p eople need close and heavy exposure to the H5N1 virus for it to get into the lun gs. Note: Yet governments have already spent many millions of dollars stockpiling Ta miflu believing that avian flu will mutate and cause a pandemic killing millions . And top government officials have already made many millions of dollars on sto cks related to Tamiflu--the drug designed to combat a deadly virus which hasn't even mutated yet to know if the drug works! Remember that generating fear in the public is one of the best ways to make a profit. For lots more, click here.

Chiron Gets Contract for Bird Flu Vaccine 2005-10-27, ABC/Associated Press

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=1256959 A second manufacturer is beginning mass production of a vaccine to protect again st bird flu, and the Senate moved Thursday to invest far more -- $8 billion -- o n preparations in case the influenza strain ever sparks a worldwide epidemic. Be fore the Senate acted, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt awarded a $62.5 million contract to Emeryville, Calif.-based Chiron Corp. to manufacture bird flu vaccine. Sanofi-Aventis of Paris began manufacturing $100 million wort h of a similar vaccine last month. The Bush administration is putting the final touches on its plan for how to fight the next super-flu...amid growing concern t hat the H5N1 influenza strain spreading among birds from Asia to Europe could tr igger a pandemic if it mutates into a form easily spread from person to person. The massive out-of-budget expenditure...would increase stockpiles of the antivir al drugs Tamiflu and Relenza, thought to be effective against current strains of bird flu. "The money that we spend now will not be wasted even if this particul ar strain of the virus, H5N1, ends up not becoming a pandemic flu," said Sen. Ba rack Obama, D-Ill. "We know that over the next two, three decades there will be a pandemic flu. That's almost certain." Note: If the above link fails, click here. Isn't is interesting that over $60 mi llion dollars (potentially $8 billion!) has been "awarded" for a vaccine against a bird flu that hasn't even mutated yet? How are these people so certain that i t will mutate and kill millions of people? How do we know these vaccines will wo rk when it hasn't even mutated? Note also that the pharmaceutical industry, whic h manufactures vaccines, has the largest lobby in all Washington and is raking i n huge profits. For lots more on this, don't miss the vital information in our H ealth Information Center.

A Serious Drug Problem 2005-05-06, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/06/opinion/06krugman.html Note: The following is the New York Times website's abstract of this article, wh ich is a very good summary. 2003 Medicare bill is object lesson in how special interests hold America's heal th care system hostage; says law subsidizes private health plans, which have rep eatedly failed to deliver promised cost savings, and creates unnecessary layer o f middlemen by requiring that drug benefit be administered by private insurers; says it specifically prohibits Medicare from using its purchasing power to negot iate lower drug prices; notes that Rep Billy Tauzin, who shepherded drug bill th rough Congress, now heads all-powerful drug-industry lobbying group, and Thomas Scully, former Medicare administrator, negotiated for future health industry lob bying job at same time he was pushing drug bill; calls Medicare bill corrupt dea l created by corrupt system.

Cold virus may be skin cancer cure 2004-01-07, CNN News http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/01/07/australia.skincancer Researchers at an Australian university believe they have developed a breakthrou gh showing skin cancer can be stopped by the common cold virus. Skin cancer, or melanoma, is the fifth most common form of cancer. Australia has the highest rat e of melanoma in the world, with one out of every two people likely to develop s ome form of the disease during their lifetime. A team led by Professor Darren Sh afren at the University of Newcastle, about 150 kilometers north of Sydney, have

established that malignant melanoma cells can be destroyed by infecting them wi th coxsackievirus, the common cold virus. "We believe this is a significant brea kthrough in the development of the treatment of melanoma," Dr Shafren said in a statement released by the university Wednesday. He said the results achieved so far using human cells and in animal studies had been "very exciting". "If we can replicate that success in human trials, the treatment of this often fatal disea se could be available within the next few years," he said. According to the univ ersity researchers, the projected process begins by injecting the common cold vi rus into a melanoma. The virus replicates itself and then, according to the proj ection, begins killing off the melanoma. Within weeks, there is a reduction in t he size of the melanoma and it eventually disappears. Dr Shafren noted that the coxsackievirus was not a manufactured drug or a genetically altered virus. Inste ad, it was a virus that occurred in the community. Note: Why wasn't this exciting development put on the fast track and lots of mon ey pored in to develop it quickly. Could it be that this cancer treatment would negatively impact the huge profits of the drug companies? For more reliable info rmation on this, click here.

Food Stamp Use Soars, and Stigma Fades 2009-11-29, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/us/29foodstamps.html With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once sco rned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use in conspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs. Vir tually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclect ic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They includ e single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor , longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slend er wages leave pantries bare. There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps, according to an analy sis of local data collected by The New York Times. In more than 750 counties, th e program helps feed one in three blacks. In more than 800 counties, it helps fe ed one in three children. In the Mississippi River cities of St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, half of the children or more receive food stamps. Even in Peori a, Ill. Everytown, U.S.A. nearly 40 percent of children receive aid. While use i s greatest where poverty runs deep, the growth has been especially swift in once -prosperous places hit by the housing bust. Note: For more from reliable sources on the impacts and realities of the Wall St reet financial crisis, click here.

GlaxoSmithKline pulls swine flu vaccines in Canada 2009-11-24, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-11-24-glaxo-flu-vaccine-pull_N.htm Drug company GlaxoSmithKline has told Canadian doctors to stop using one lot of its H1N1 vaccine until an investigation into a higher-than-expected number of se vere allergic reactions is completed. The U.S. vaccine will not be identical to Arepanrix, the GSK H1N1 vaccine used in Canada. Arepanrix contains an adjuvant, a substance designed to boost the immune response, but adjuvants have never been approved for use in U.S. flu vaccines. Almost all of the 172,000 doses in quest

ion, distributed the week of Nov. 2 to six Canadian provinces, already have been administered, said Geoffrey Matthews, a spokeswoman for the Public Health Agenc y of Canada, which, with GSK and Health Canada, is investigating cases of anaphy laxis. Symptoms of anaphylaxis include trouble breathing, chest tightness and sw elling of the mouth and throat. Six cases have been reported, Matthews says. In the USA, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System said that as of Nov. 13 it h ad received 116 reports of serious health events related to the vaccine, includi ng eight deaths similar to the number in previous years after a similar number o f seasonal flu vaccine doses had been shipped. Note: For lots more on the risks of swine flu vaccines, click here.

LSD's long, strange trip back into the lab 2009-09-27, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/27/MNEN19SNGD.DTL LSD, the drug that launched the psychedelic era and became one of the resounding symbols of the counterculture movement of the '60s, is back in the labs. Nearly 40 years after widespread fear over recreational abuse of LSD and other halluci nogens forced dozens of scientists to abandon their work, researchers at a handf ul of major institutions - including UCSF and Harvard University - are reignitin g studies. The study at UCSF ... is looking into the mechanisms of LSD and how i t works in the brain. The hope is that such research might support further studi es into medical applications of LSD - for chronic headaches, for example - or ps ychiatric uses. "Psychedelics are in labs all over the world and there's a lot o f promise," said Rick Doblin, director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in Santa Cruz. Stanislav Grof was one of the last scientists to abandon hallucinogenic research when he shut down several projects at the Ma ryland Psychiatric Research Center in 1973 after his funding dried up. He moved to California to work at a research institute in Big Sur, where he turned to stu dies about how to re-create the effects of those drugs through meditation and br eathing techniques. He's pleased to see some of the stigma falling away from dru gs like LSD, but it bothers him that the scientific community lost decades of re search. "I thought psychiatry and psychology really lost a major opportunity bec ause of the abuse that happened with unsupervised research," Grof said. "These a re fascinating substances - and they're very, very powerful, so they should be u sed with great precaution."

WHO: 3BN swine flu vaccine doses available yearly 2009-09-24, Forbes.com/Associated Press http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/09/24/general-un-who-swine-flu_6927291.html Pharmaceutical companies will be able to produce about 3 billion doses of swine flu vaccine a year ... the World Health Organization said. The U.N. agency had p reviously predicted that companies would be able to make up to 5 billion doses e ach year. The World Health Organization admits that not everyone may need vaccin ation. "Most people will do well without the vaccine," WHO vaccine chief Marie-P aule Kieny told reporters. She said most people infected with the pandemic strai n of the H1N1 virus have a mild illness and recover by themselves. Addressing co ncerns about the safety of the pandemic vaccine, WHO said trials to date suggest it is as safe as a regular seasonal flu shot. Kieny said large-scale vaccinatio n programs would probably detect some cases of severe reaction following the vac cination, but that those would likely have occurred anyway without vaccination. The agency is urging countries to monitor the vaccination procedure for possible further side effects. Meanwhile WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan repeated Thursday her recommendation that governments keep up their guard against swine

flu but refrain from closing borders or restricting trade. Note: With the cost of a regular flu vaccine dose ranging from about $20 to $30, do you think the pharmaceutical companies have any vested interest in the publi c being vaccinated? Let's see, 3 billion X $20 = $60 billion. Hmm. For more on t he danger of this vaccine and rampant fear mongering, click here and here.

The Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate 2009-08-29, Time magazine http://www.newsweek.com/id/214254 To the credit of opponents of health-care reform, the lies and exaggerations the y're spreading are not made up out of whole cloth which makes the misinformation t hat much more credible. Instead, because opponents demand that everyone within e arshot (or e-mail range) look, say, "at page 425 of the House bill!," the lies t ake on a patina of credibility. Take the claim in one chain e-mail that the gove rnment will have electronic access to everyone's bank account, implying that the Feds will rob you blind. The 1,017-page bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee does call for electronic fund transfers but from insurers to doctors an d other providers. There is zero provision to include patients in any such syste m. Five other myths that won't die: [1] You'll have no choice in what health ben efits you receive. [2] No chemo for older Medicare patients. A related myth is t hat health-care reform will be financed through $500 billion in Medicare cuts. T his refers to proposed decreases in Medicare increases. [3] Illegal immigrants w ill get free health insurance. [4] Death panels will decide who lives. [5] The g overnment will set doctors' wages. To be sure, there are also honest and princip led objections to health-care reform. Some oppose a requirement that everyone ha ve health insurance as an erosion of individual liberty. And many are simply sca red out of their wits about what health-care reform will mean for them. But when fear and loathing hijack the brain, anything becomes believable. Note: For lots more on health issues from major media sources, click here.

Pandemic flu shows need for pharma incentives: WHO 2009-07-14, Reuters News http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE56D1XM20090714 Pharmaceutical firms need incentives, including lucrative patents, to keep creat ing drugs and vaccines against emergent threats such as the H1N1 influenza pande mic, the World Health Organization's head said on Tuesday. "Progress in public h ealth depends on innovation. Some of the greatest strides forward for health hav e followed the development and introduction of new medicines and vaccines," said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said. Chan, who last month declared a full p andemic underway from the H1N1 virus, said that patents can help ensure that com panies develop medicines to "stay ahead of the development of drug resistance" i n diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. The discovery of isolated H1N1 infecti ons that resist the anti-viral Tamiflu, made by Roche and Gilead, and the global scramble to secure flu vaccines have shown the importance of robust research an d development, Chan said. "Innovation is needed to keep pace with the emergence of new diseases, including pandemic influenza caused by the new H1N1 virus," she told a meeting on intellectual property and health, a contentious issue that ha s divided rich and poor nations. Note: How much more blatant can it get? The WHO is telling us to pump money into the corrupt pharmaceutical corporations, who make huge profits from fear monger ing and health disasters. When profit drives the health industry, which do you t

hink comes first, money or public health? For lots more revealing, reliable info rmation on the fear-mongering around swine flu, click here and here.

Panel Criticizes U.S. Effort on Nanomaterial Risks 2008-12-11, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/science/11nano.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pag... In a sweeping critique ... an expert panel of the National Research Council said the federal government was not doing enough to identify potential health and en vironmental risks from engineered nanomaterials. Nanomaterials are engineered on the scale of a billionth of a meter, perhaps 1/10,000 the width of a human hair . They are turning up in a range of items including consumer products like tooth paste and tennis rackets and industrial products like degreasers or adhesives. B ut some experts say they may pose health or environmental risks. For example, re searchers in Scotland reported this year that carbon nanotubes may pose the same health risks as asbestos. Industry wants to run with it, said Andrew D. Maynard, chief science adviser to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, who was the chairman of the panel. But he added, one of the bi g barriers at the moment is understanding how to use it safely. The panel analyze d the risk research strategy of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the prog ram to coordinate federal efforts in nanotechnology research and development. It s report concluded that the initiative s strategy does not present a vision, contai n a clear set of goals, have a plan of action for how the goals are to be achiev ed, or describe mechanisms to review and evaluate funded research and assess whe ther progress has been achieved. An informal coalition of environmental and busin ess organizations praised the report, saying that for three years they had been urging the federal government to do more to assess potential health and environm ental effects of nanomaterials. Note: For many important articles on health issues from reliable sources, click here.

That Plastic Baby Bottle 2008-09-06, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/opinion/06sat4.html?partner=rssuserland&emc... What do you do when one arm of the government says everything is O.K. and anothe r tells you to watch out? That is what is happening with bisphenol-A a chemical used in many plastics and epoxy resins now found in baby bottles and liners for canned goods. The answer is a truism in every family rulebook when in doubt, esp ecially when it comes to children, err on the side of caution. That means it is a good idea to keep the young away from bisphenol-A, or BPA. Then this week, the National Toxicology Program, the federal agency for toxicological research, rep orted that their research shows some concern about the effects of BPA on the brain development and behavior of fetuses and young children. A new study by the Yale School of Medicine is cause for even more concern. In tests on primates, resear chers found that BPA causes the loss of connections between brain cells that could cause memory or learning problems and depression. John Bucher, the associate dir ector of the toxicology program, said ... "We have concluded that the possibilit y that BPA may affect human development cannot be dismissed. Note: For many key reports on health issues from reliable sources, click here.

Alzheimer 'Breakthrough' Tempts Families to Improvise

2008-07-31, ABC News http://www.abcnews.go.com/Health/ActiveAging/story?id=5483365 What would you do if had an incurable disease and heard that something simple an d common may help -- a chemical found at a pet store, or in an allergy drug, or a breakthrough injection a man in California developed? It's the sort of dilemma Alan Romantowski, a former airline pilot, faces with each news story about Alzh eimer's disease treatments. "It is tempting; I'm taking ginseng, fish oil, ginkg o and all the over-the-counter things that the doctors say don't have any proof that it helps, but it doesn't hurt," said Romantowski, 55, who is suffering from the early stages of the disease. Whether scientifically sound or wacky, any new s about potential Alzheimer's treatments can fill a doctor's voicemail with call s from desperate families. And a new potential treatment announced Tuesday may b e no exception. Discussed at the annual Alzheimer's Association Meeting in Chica go, a drug called Rember sparked hope among researchers and within the Alzheimer community. Rember has completed a phase II trial, which means it's a long way o ff from meeting FDA approval as a legal therapy. But, thus far the data has show n promise -- double the improvement in cognition than a placebo gives for patien ts with moderate Alzheimer's disease. "There was an article about that in our pa per this morning," said Josie Romantowski. "I actually even called my husband ab out it... as far as trying [a drug], what is there to lose really, at this point ?" Note: For many promising reports on health issues from reliable sources, click h ere.

The Worms Crawl In 2008-07-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/health/research/01prof.html?partner=rssuser... While carrying out field work in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s, [Dr. David Pritchard] noticed that Papuans infected with the Necator americanus hookworm, a parasite that lives in the human gut, did not suffer much from an assortment of autoimmune-related illnesses, including hay fever and asthma. Over the years, D r. Pritchard has developed a theory to explain the phenomenon. "The allergic res ponse evolved to help expel parasites, and we think the worms have found a way o f switching off the immune system in order to survive," he said. "That's why inf ected people have fewer allergic symptoms." To test his theory, and to see wheth er he can translate it into therapeutic pay dirt, Dr. Pritchard is recruiting cl inical trial participants willing to be infected with 10 hookworms each in hopes of banishing their allergies and asthma. Never one to sidestep his own experime ntal cures, Dr. Pritchard initially used himself as a subject. After Dr. Pritcha rd's self-infection experiment, the National Health Services ethics committee le t him conduct a study in 2006 with 30 participants, 15 of whom received 10 hookw orms each. Tests showed that after six weeks, the T-cells of the 15 worm recipie nts began to produce lower levels of chemicals associated with inflammatory resp onse, indicating that their immune systems were more suppressed than those of th e 15 placebo recipients. Despite playing host to small numbers of parasites, wor m recipients reported little discomfort. Trial participants raved about their al lergy symptoms disappearing. Note: For lots of exciting reports on new health research, click here.

New Skin Cancer Treatment Saves Man 2008-06-18, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/18/health/main4193276.shtml

A man who had been given less than a year to live had a complete remission of ad vanced deadly skin cancer after an experimental treatment that revved up his imm une system to fight the tumors. The 52-year-old patient's dramatic turnaround wa s the only success in a small study, leading doctors to be cautious in their ent husiasm. However, the treatment reported in ... The New England Journal of Medic ine is being counted as the latest in a small series of successes involving immu ne-priming treatments against deadly skin cancers. "Immunotherapy has become the most promising approach" to late-stage, death-sentence skin cancers, said Dr. D arrell Rigel, a dermatology researcher at the New York University Cancer Institu te in New York. About 20 years ago, some scientists discovered that immune cells could latch onto and attack skin cancers. "There's a long history behind all of this," said Dr. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute. In recent ex periments, Rosenberg and other researchers have focused on souping up a certain kind of immune system cell - the "killer T cells" that envelop and kill foreign agents. Scientists focused ... on specific helper T cells that are adept at lock ing onto a cancer cell and guiding the killer cells to their target. The researc hers drew blood from patients, located the special helper cells and then grew mo re of them in the laboratory. They then infused roughly 5 billion of the cells b ack into the patients without chemotherapy or the other harsh drugs. "It's a sim pler and less toxic approach to melanoma than had been previously employed," sai d Dr. Louis Weiner, director of the cancer center at Georgetown University. Note: For many hopeful reports on potential new cancer cures, click here.

Expect new drugs to treat aging, researchers say 2008-06-03, Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Cox News Service http://www.ajc.com/services/content/health/stories/2008/06/03/anti_aging_drug... Is 90 the new 50? Not yet, aging researchers say, but medical breakthroughs to s ignificantly extend life and ease the ailments of getting older are closer than many people think. "The general public has no idea what's coming," said David Si nclair, a Harvard Medical School professor who has made headlines with research into the health benefits of a substance found in red wine called resveratrol. He said scientists can greatly increase longevity and improve health in lab animal s like mice, and that drugs to benefit people are on the way. "It's not an if, b ut a when." Sinclair said treatments could be a few years or a decade away, but they're "really close. It's not something (from) science fiction and it's not so mething for the next generation." Robert Butler, a pioneer of aging research who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for the book Why Survive? Being Old in America, [said] that "people live longer and better by having a sense of purpose." He sai d that while medicine and biology are important for longevity, having friendship s and close relationships also have a big impact. Richard Weindruch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin ... studies how extremely low-calorie diets affe ct aging. Sinclair said that based on Weindruch's work, he set out a decade ago to find the genes involved in caloric restriction and find a pill that can provi de the benefits "without you feeling hungry all the time." He described how his research found that mice given large doses of resveratrol "live longer, they're almost immune to the effects of obesity. They don't get diabetes, cancer, Alzhei mer's as frequently. We delay the diseases of aging."

360 post-9/11 workers have died, including 80 of cancer 2008-05-08, New York Daily News http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008/05/08/2008-05-08_360_post911_workers_hav... More than 360 workers who dealt with the aftermath of the World Trade Center dis

aster have died, state health officials said Wednesday. Officials have determine d the cause of death of 154 of the responders and volunteers who toiled at Groun d Zero, the blocks nearby and at the Fresh Kills landfill, where debris from the site was taken. Of those, 80 died of cancer. "It's the tip of the iceberg," sai d David Worby, who is representing 10,000 workers - 600 with cancer - who say th ey got sick after working on rescue and recovery efforts. "These statistics bear out how toxic that site was," Worby said. Most of the deadly tumors were in the lungs and digestive system, according to the tally from the state's World Trade Center Responder Fatality Investigation Program. Other deaths were traced to bl ood cancers and heart and circulatory diseases. Five ex-workers committed suicid e, said Kitty Gelberg, who is tracking the deaths for the program. Gelberg said ... there is an overall undercount of workers who have died. Last year, the head of Mount Sinai Medical Center's monitoring and treatment program, Dr. Robin Her bert, predicted a "third wave" of 9/11-related deaths from cancer. Cathy Murray, whose husband, Fire Lt. John Murray, died of colon cancer April 30, "absolutely " connects his disease to his work at Ground Zero. He was diagnosed in June and was 52 when he died, she said. "He was perfectly healthy," said Cathy Murray, 53 , of Staten Island. "He never smoked a day in his life, and neither did I. It ha ppened so quick and so aggressive. He was responding at first, but then he wasn' t," she added. "And now he's gone." Note: For a powerful summary of reports from major media sources questioning the official story of what happened on 9/11, click here.

Why Hospitals Want Your Credit Report 2008-03-18, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120580305267343947.html In a development that consumer groups say raises privacy issues, a growing numbe r of hospitals are mining patients' personal financial information to figure out how likely they are to pay their bills. Some hospitals are peering into patient s' credit reports, which contain information on people's lines of credit, debts and payment histories. Other hospitals are contracting with outside services tha t predict a patient's income and whether he or she is likely to walk away from a medical bill. Hospitals often use these services when patients are uninsured or have big out-of-pocket costs despite having health insurance. Consumer advocate s say the practice creates the potential for hospitals to misuse the information by denying or cutting back on patients' care if they can't pay. What's more, ho spitals could scour a patient's financial records for credit lines and encourage the patient to tap them, despite high interest rates or other costs. "It has th e potential to put people at risk financially," says Mark Rukavina, executive di rector of the Access Project, a research and advocacy group that focuses on medi cal debt. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or Hipaa, a f ederal law that has patient-privacy provisions, doesn't bar hospitals from provi ding patient payment histories to consumer reporting agencies. It's unclear how much latitude hospitals have to legally check a patient's financial information. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, hospitals are allowed to obtain patients' credit reports if they get their permission, says Rebecca Kuehn, an assistant di rector in the Federal Trade Commission's division of privacy and identity protec tion. Note: For many other revelations of privacy abuses from reliable, verifiable sou rces, click here.

Macrophage activation may suppress breast cancer metastasis 2008-02-20, Reuters Health

http://cancer.med.upenn.edu/resources/article.cfm?c=3&s=8&ss=23&id=15053&mont... Vitamin D-binding protein-derived macrophage activating factor (GcMAF) appears t o be an effective immunotherapeutic agent in patients with metastatic breast can cer, according to US and Japanese researchers. "Serum vitamin D-binding protein -- known as Gc protein -- is the precursor of the principal macrophage activatin g factor," lead investigator Dr. Nobuto Yamamoto told Reuters Health. "Treatment of purified Gc protein with beta-galactosidase and sialidase generates GcMAF," he added, "the most potent macrophage activating factor ever discovered, which p roduces no side effect in humans." Dr. Yamamoto of the Socrates Institute for Th erapeutic Immunology, Philadelphia and colleagues note that in vitro studies sho w that macrophages treated with GcMAF have a highly tumoricidal effect in mammar y adenocarcinomas. To investigate whether the approach can be effective in human s, the researchers studied 16 non-anemic breast cancer patients who were given " a minute amount -- 100 nanograms per week -- of GcMAF," Dr. Yamamoto said. The r esearchers found that after 16 to 22 GcMAF doses, initially elevated nagalase le vels, which reflect the tumor burden, fell to those found in healthy controls. F ollow-up over 4 years showed that the level remained low and that there was no t umor recurrence, they report in the January 15th issue of The International Jour nal of Cancer. The findings, the team concludes, clearly demonstrate "the import ance of focusing cancer immunotherapy on macrophage activation." Note: Another article from the National Institutes of Health website covers an e xperiment with colorectal cancer patients using this amazing discovery. It state s that "all colorectal cancer patients exhibited healthy control levels of the s erum Nagalase activity, indicating eradication of metastatic tumor cells." Why i sn't this getting more major press coverage?

Food Allergies Stir a Mother to Action 2008-01-09, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/dining/09alle.html?ex=1357534800&en=5584637... [Robyn O Brien's] story is one of several in a new book, Healthy Child, Healthy Wo rld. About two years ago, she fed her youngest child scrambled eggs. The baby s fa ce quickly swelled into a grotesque mask. Little Tory had a severe food allergy, and Ms. O Brien s journey had begun. Her theory that the food supply is being manip ulated with additives, genetic modification, hormones and herbicides, causing in creases in allergies, autism and other disorders in children is not supported by leading researchers or the largest allergy advocacy groups. [But] record number s of parents are heading to doctors concerned that their children are allergic t o a long list of foods. States are passing laws requiring schools to have polici es protecting children with food allergies. No one knows why the number of aller gies seems to be on the rise. Ms. O Brien and leading allergy researchers agree th at few reliable studies on food allergies exist. The best estimates suggest that 4 to 8 percent of young children suffer from them. Many health professionals, t hough, agree that something is changing. The hygiene hypothesis intrigues many r esearchers. It holds that children are being exposed to fewer micro-organisms an d, as a result, have weaker immune systems. But this alone cannot account for the massive relative increase in food allergy compared with other allergic disease such as asthma, said Dr. Marc E. Rothenberg, the director of allergy and immunolo gy at Cincinnati Children s Hospital Medical Center. [Ms. O'Brien] chides top alle rgy doctors who are connected to Monsanto, the producer of herbicides and geneti cally modified seeds. She asserts that the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, the nation s leading food allergy advocacy group, is tainted by the money it rece ives from food manufacturers and peanut growers. Note: Visit Robyn O'Brien's website, AllergyKids.com. For many other powerful re ports on health issues, click here.

HHS Toned Down Breast-Feeding Ads 2007-08-31, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/30/AR20070830021... In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, fed eral health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if t hey did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and ast hma inhalers topped with rubber nipples. Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lo bby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department pol itical appointees toned down the campaign. The ads ran instead with more friendl y images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how brea st-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter (pdf), the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were "grateful" for his staff's intervention to stop health officials from "scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding," and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads. The formula industry's intervention -- which did not block the ads b ut helped change their content -- is being scrutinized by Congress in the wake o f last month's testimony by former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona that the B ush administration repeatedly allowed political considerations to interfere with his efforts to promote public health. "This is a credible allegation of politic al interference that [may] have had serious public health consequences," said [R ep. Henry] Waxman, a California Democrat. The milder campaign HHS eventually use d had no discernible impact on the nation's breast-feeding rate, which lags behi nd the rate in many European countries.

F.D.A. Panel Votes to Keep Diabetes Drug on Market 2007-07-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/health/30cnd-avandia.html?ex=1343448000&en=... A federal drug advisory committee voted 20 to 3 late this afternoon that Avandia , a controversial diabetes drug made by GlaxoSmithKline, raises the risks of hea rt attacks, but it then voted 22 to 1 that the drug should nonetheless remain on the market. Dr. Clifford J. Rosen, chairman of the committee [said] there was en ough concern on the advisory committee that virtually everybody felt there was r isk of heart attacks from taking Avandia. Patients who have congestive heart fail ure or a history of cardiovascular disease, or those taking insulin or nitrates should not be given Avandia, Dr. Rosen said. The votes came after an extraordina ry meeting in which officials from the Food and Drug Administration, which broug ht the committee together, openly disagreed with one another about the right cou rse to take. Dr. David Graham, a drug safety officer at the F.D.A., called for t he drug s withdrawal and estimated that its toxic effects on the heart had caused as many as 205,000 heart attacks, strokes and death from 1999 to 2006. For every month that Avandia is sold, he said, another 1,600 to 2,200 patients are likely to suffer from heart attacks and strokes, some of them fatal. Dr. Robert Meyer, director of the office within the F.D.A. that approved Avandia s initial applicat ion, immediately disagreed with Dr. Graham. Dr. Douglas C. Throckmorton, a deput y director of the F.D.A. s center for drugs, explained at a news conference after the meeting that the split within the agency resulted from the complexity of the i ssue. The open disagreement within the F.D.A. reflects a fierce debate that has occurred among diabetes experts across the country since The New England Journal of Medicine published a study in May suggesting that Avandia increases the risk s of heart attacks.

Note: To read a succinct, powerful summary of how drug companies control the reg ulation of their own industry, click here.

China corners vitamin market 2007-06-03, Seattle Times (One of Seattle's two leading newspapers) http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003732744_vitamins03.html If you pop a vitamin C tablet in your mouth, it's a good bet it came from China. Indeed, many of the world's vitamins are now made in China. In less than a deca de, China has captured 90 percent of the U.S. market for vitamin C, driving almo st everyone else out of business. Chinese pharmaceutical companies also have tak en over much of the world market in the production of antibiotics, analgesics, e nzymes and primary amino acids. According to an industry group, China makes 70 p ercent of the world's penicillin, 50 percent of its aspirin and 35 percent of it s [Tylenol], as well as the bulk of vitamins A, B12, C and E. In the wake of a p et-food scandal, in which adulterated wheat gluten from China led to the deaths of thousands of pets in North America, and other instances of food and toothpast e tampering, China's vitamin producers are reaching out to reassure U.S. consume rs that their vitamins are safe. Whether that's true isn't clear, however. Forei gn food-safety experts say China's larger companies have reputations to protect. The question is how they maintain quality control. Since U.S. laws don't requir e food and drug sellers to label products with the country of origin of ingredie nts, it's impossible for consumers to know where food or supplements are coming from, not to mention what factory produced them.

U.S. Issues Guidelines in Case of Flu Pandemic 2007-02-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/health/01cnd-flu.html?ex=1327986000&en=0815... Cities should close schools for up to three months in the event of a severe flu outbreak, ball games and movies should be canceled ... the federal government ad vised today in issuing new pandemic flu guidelines to states and cities. Health officials acknowledged that such measures would hugely disrupt public life, but they argued that these measure would buy the time needed to produce vaccines and would save lives. We have to be prepared for a Category 5 pandemic, said Dr. Mart in Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the Centers for Disea se Control and Prevention. It s not easy. The only thing that s harder is facing the consequences. The new guidelines also advocate having sick people and all their f amilies' even apparently healthy members stay home for 7 to 10 days. Any pandemi c is expected to move faster than a new vaccine can be produced. Current experim ental vaccines against H5N1 avian flu are in short supply and based on strains i solated in 2004 or 2005. Although the government is creating a $4 billion stockp ile of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, it is only useful when taken within the first 48 hours, and Tamiflu-resistant flu strains have already been found. The histor ian John Barry, author of The Great Influenza, a history of the 1918 flu, question ed an idea underpinning the study s conclusions. There is evidence, he said, that some cities with low sickness and death rates in 1918 ... were hit by a milder s pring wave of the virus. That would have, in effect, inoculated their citizens a gainst the more severe fall wave and might have been more important than their p ublic health measures. Note: Why is it that government officials seem to want us to be afraid? Could it be that when we live in fear, we are more willing to give up our freedoms and m oney and allow them to be in control? For more, click here. And why would the go vernment spend billions on stockpiling drugs of questionable use? For an answer,

click here.

Eli Lilly accused of shaping drug guidelines 2006-10-18, MSNBC/Associated Press http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15320680/ Several government doctors say drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. subtly orchestrated me dical guidelines for treatment of an often lethal blood infection, hoping to boo st sales of a drug whose value is being debated. This company is trying to insinu ate its drug into many aspects of patient care that industry really shouldn t be i nvolved in, said Dr. Naomi O Grady, a critical care specialist at the National Inst itutes of Health. Three of her NIH colleagues claim in Thursday s New England Jour nal of Medicine that Lilly worked through medical societies to influence standar ds for treating the blood infection, sepsis. Ultimately, Xigris was incorporated into the guidelines. Both the guidelines committee and a larger information cam paign on sepsis were heavily funded by [Lilly]. Dr. Phil Dellinger, who helped l ead the guidelines committee, said... We ve been catching grief because we ve been tak ing a lot of Lilly money and we re appreciative of Lilly giving it. The U.S. Food a nd Drug Administration approved Xigris in 2001, despite an evenly split vote by its advisory committee. The lead author of Thursday s journal article, Dr. Peter Q . Eichacker, voted against approval. Some critics are unhappy that the drug, whi ch works only for the sickest patients, was approved on the basis of a single ex periment. Academic officials acknowledged in the published guidelines that Lilly gave more than 90 percent of $861,000 in grants for the campaign and medical re commendations. O Grady, of NIH, said a panel of disease experts that she headed re fused to endorse the sepsis guidelines largely because Lilly convened the whole p anel. Note: For lots more on how the powerful pharmaceutical industry endangers our li ves, click here.

A Windfall From Shifts to Medicare 2006-07-18, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/business/18place.html?ex=1310875200&en=64d0... The pharmaceutical industry is beginning to reap a windfall from a surprisingly lucrative niche market: drugs for poor people. The windfall, which by some estim ates could be $2 billion or more this year, is a result of the transfer of milli ons of low-income people into the new Medicare Part D drug program that went int o effect in January. Under that program...the prices paid by insurers, and event ually the taxpayer, for the medications given to those transferred are likely to be higher than what was paid under the federal-state Medicaid programs. Analyst s expect it to generate hundreds of millions of additional dollars this year for the drug companies. Drugs tend to be cheaper under the Medicaid programs becaus e the states are the buyers and by law they receive the lowest available prices for drugs. But in creating the federal Part D program, Congress -- in what criti cs saw as a sop to the drug industry -- barred the government from having a nego tiating role. The windfall for the drug makers was made possible by a provision of the 2003 Medicare law that exempts Part D drugs from "best price" rebates tha t the drug makers have been required to give to the state Medicaid programs. Tho se rebates are meant to make sure that state Medicaid agencies pay no more than the best prices drug companies offer to any big commercial insurer. Now, under P art D, all sorts of price deals will be negotiated by dozens of Medicare drug pl ans. The prices will be reported to Medicare, but under a provision of the law p ushed by industry lobbyists, they will otherwise be kept secret.

Judge Slams Ex-EPA Chief Over Sept. 11 2006-02-02, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1574465 A federal judge blasted former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine T odd Whitman on Thursday for reassuring New Yorkers soon after the Sept. 11 attac ks that it was safe to return to their homes and offices while toxic dust was po lluting the neighborhood. U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts refused to grant Whitman immunity against a class-action lawsuit brought in 2004 by residents, st udents and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn who said they were exposed to hazardous materials from the destruction of the World Trade Center. "No reasona ble person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-ter m health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," the judge said. She called Whitman's actions "conscience-shocking," saying the EPA chief knew that the collapse of the twin towers released tons of hazardous m aterials into the air. In her ruling, Batts noted that the EPA and Whitman said repeatedly beginning just two days after the attack that the air appeared safe t o breathe. The EPA's internal watchdog later found that the agency, at the urgin g of White House officials, gave misleading assurances.

A new spin on the placebo effect 2005-11-28, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10242034/ Research is showing the power of expectations, that they have physical -- not ju st psychological -- effects on your health. Your expectations can have profound i mpacts on your brain and your health, says Columbia University neuroscientist Tor Wager. Doctors have long thought the placebo effect was psychological. Now scie ntists are amassing the first direct evidence that the placebo effect actually i s physical, and that expecting benefit can trigger the same neurological pathway s of healing as real medication does. University of Michigan scientists injected the jaws of healthy young men with salt water to cause painful pressure, while PET scans measured the impact in their brains. During one scan, the men were tol d they were getting a pain reliever, actually a placebo. Their brains immediatel y released more endorphins -- chemicals that act as natural painkillers -- and t he men felt better.

Meditation Research is Coming of Age 2005-11-21, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2005/11/21/the_power... Meditation seems to energize the sleep-deprived. It seems to help with concentra tion. It even seems to bolster the very structure of the brain as we age. Enthus iasts have long touted the health benefits of meditative practices such as chant ing, yoga, and prayer. Now, using the latest high-tech tools of neuroscience and biochemistry, they are teasing out how those benefits work. And increasingly, t hey are focusing on how meditation may help not only the body but the brain. "As time goes on, we're understanding this phenomenon in ever more advanced scienti fic terms," said Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institut e and a Harvard Medical School associate professor who has studied the body's "r elaxation response" for nearly 40 years. "And why it's so important today is bec ause over 60 percent of visits to the doctor are in the stress-related realm." W hile some of the most striking studies have involved monks who were experts at m

editation, the new research also backs up claims that garden-variety meditation can bring scientifically demonstrable benefits. Serious research on meditation n ow includes hundreds of studies examining its possible ... benefits, from liftin g depression to relieving pain to fighting flu. Benefits can come from a spectru m of repetitive, mind-clearing practices that elicit the so-called relaxation re sponse -- from swaying in prayer to saying the rosary to knitting. Note: At the end of this article is a simple how-to guide for meditation that ma y be useful for those who have little to no experience. For lots of exciting rep orts on new health research, click here.

Despite Vow, Drug Makers Still Withhold Data 2005-05-31, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/business/31trials.html?ex=1275192000&en=43d... When the drug industry came under fire last summer for failing to disclose poor results from studies of antidepressants, major drug makers promised to provide m ore information about their research on new medicines. But nearly a year later, crucial facts about many clinical trials remain hidden. Eli Lilly and some other companies have posted hundreds of trial results on the Web and pledged to discl ose all results for all drugs they sell. But other drug makers, including Merck and Pfizer, release less information and are reluctant to add more, citing compe titive pressures. As a result, doctors and patients lack critical information ab out important drugs ... and the companies can hide negative trial results by ref using to publish studies, or by cherry-picking and highlighting the most favorab le data. GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle a suit ... allegin g that Glaxo had hidden results from trials showing that its antidepressant Paxi l might increase suicidal thoughts in children and teenagers. Federal laws requi re the disclosure of all trials and trial results to the F.D.A. But companies ar e not required to disclose trial results to scientists or the public. Under pres sure from the editors of medical journals, the major drug companies in January a greed to expand the number of trials registered on clinicaltrials.gov. Three com panies have filed only vague descriptions of many studies, often failing even to name the drugs under investigation. For example, Merck describes one trial as a "one-year study of an investigational drug in obese patients."

The Age of Autism: The Amish anomaly 2005-04-18, Washington Times http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Science/2005/03/21/the_age_of_autism_the_amish_a... Where are the autistic Amish? Here in Lancaster County, heart of Pennsylvania Du tch country, there should be well over 100 with some form of the disorder. I hav e come here to find them, but so far my mission has failed, and the very few I h ave identified raise some very interesting questions about some widely held view s on autism. The Amish have a religious exemption from vaccination. So far, ther e is evidence of only three, all of them children, the oldest age 9 or 10. Julia is one of them. She...is adopted from China. She had most of her vaccines given to her in the United States before we got her. [Of the other one definitely had a vaccine, and the other's vaccine status is unknown.] The mainstream scientifi c consensus says autism is a complex genetic disorder, one that has been around for millennia at roughly the same prevalence. That prevalence is now considered to be 1 in every 166 children born in the United States. Note: For part two of this two-part article, click here. If the above link fails , click here.

Dr. Ecstasy 2005-01-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/magazine/30ECSTASY.html?ex=1264914000&en=0b... By [Alexander] Shulgin's own count, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compou nds, among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, ''empathogens,'' [and] co nvulsants. And in 1976, Shulgin fished an obscure chemical called MDMA out of th e depths of the chemical literature and introduced it to the wider world, where it came to be known as Ecstasy. Most of the scientific community considers Shulg in at best a curiosity and at worst a menace. Now, however, near the end of his career, his faith in the potential of psychedelics has at least a chance at vind ication. A little more than a month ago, the [FDA] approved a Harvard Medical Sc hool study looking at whether MDMA can alleviate the fear and anxiety of termina l cancer patients. And next month will mark a year since [the start of a] study of Ecstasy-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. Shulgin's knack for befriending the right people hasn't hurt. A week after I visited him, he was headed to Sonoma County for the annual ''summer encampment'' of the Bohemian Cl ub, an exclusive, secretive San Francisco-based men's club that has counted ever y Republican president since Herbert Hoover among its members. For a long time, though, Shulgin's most helpful relationship was with the D.E.A. itself. The head of the D.E.A.'s Western Laboratory, Bob Sager, was one of his closest friends. In his office, Shulgin has several plaques awarded to him by the agency for his service. Shulgin has been credited with jump-starting today's therapeutic resear ch. Note: The sentence about the Bohemian Club is a very rare revelation in the majo r media on the influence of this secret society. For lots more reliable, verifia ble information on secret societies, click here.

Smallpox vaccine 'triggered Aids virus' 1987-05-11, WantToKnow.info/London Times http://www.WantToKnow.info/870511vaccineaids The Aids epidemic may have been triggered by the mass vaccination campaign which eradicated smallpox. The World Health Organization, which masterminded the 13-y ear campaign, is studying new scientific evidence suggesting that immunization w ith the smallpox vaccine Vaccinia awakened the unsuspected, dormant human immuno defence virus infection (HIV). Doctors who accept the connection between the an ti-smallpox campaign and the Aids epidemic now see answers to questions which ha d baffled them. How, for instance, the Aids organism, previously regarded by sci entists as 'weak, slow and vulnerable,' began to behave like a type capable of c reating a plague. The smallpox vaccine theory would account for the position of each of the seven Central African states which top the league table of most-affe cted countries; why Brazil became the most afflicted Latin American country; and how Haiti became the route for the spread of Aids to the US. The greatest sprea d of HIV infection coincides with the most intense immunization programmes. Alth ough detailed figures of Aids cases in Africa are difficult to collect, the more than two million carriers, and 50,000 deaths...are concentrated in the Countrie s where the smallpox immunization programme was most intensive. Brazil, the only South American country covered in the eradication campaign, has the highest inc idence of Aids in that region.

Cancer Crusade 1931-03-23, Time Magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,741262,00.html Drs. Coffey & Humber ... last year cautiously announced that they were alleviati ng hopeless cases of cancer by means of adrenal cortex extract derived from shee p. The Hearst press recognized the kernel of news in this announcement and puffe d it so that thousands of cancer victims abandoned the orthodox treatment of sur gery, X-rays and radium, rushed for the sure-cure. The two doctors were amazed, but nonetheless swam with the tide of publicity and patients. They opened auxili ary clinics at Los Angeles and Long Beach. They went before a Senate committee t o argue for Government aid for cancer research. They gained a patent for their e xtract. Mrs. Grace Hammond Conners ... gave Drs. Coffey & Humber her $1,000,000 estate, "The Monastery," at Huntington, L. I. Although Dr. Hartwell & friends wh o last week opposed opening "The Monastery" as a clinic "do not for a minute que stion the sincerity of Drs. Coffey and Humber in believing they have something o f value," the critics "do question the way they have handled their work." The Ne w York men are certain that their San Francisco colleagues have had no training to qualify for research in "the most complex field that exists" in medicine. The y do not believe that adrenal cortex extract will cure cancer or that it has val ue in cancer treatment. They fear that the Californians will experiment on New Y ork humans, hence want them (or at least their methods; excluded, to remain in C alifornia where patients are "abundantly available." This was obviously a campai gn to ostracize Drs. Coffey & Humber from Manhattan's vicinity. It was conducted ... "by persons who had their own methods, hospitals and funds." Note: The doctors eventually not only were denied permission to open a cancer cl inic for their promising work, they were stripped of the $1 million dollar estat e donated to them (worth about $15 million in current U.S. dollars). For the ful l, fascinating story, click here.

Scientists issue warning on chemical 2007-08-03, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-plastic3aug03,0,1828523.... In an unusual effort targeting a single chemical, several dozen scientists on Th ursday issued a strongly worded consensus statement warning that an estrogen-lik e compound in plastic is likely causing an array of serious reproductive disorde rs in people. The compound, bisphenol A or BPA, is one of the highest-volume che micals in the world and has found its way into the bodies of most human beings. Used to make hard plastic, BPA can seep from beverage containers and other mater ials. It is used in all polycarbonate plastic baby bottles as well as ... large water cooler containers, sports bottles and microwave oven dishes, along with ca nned food liners and some dental sealants for children. The scientists including four from federal health agencies reviewed about 700 studies before concluding that people are exposed to levels of the chemical exceeding those that harm lab animals. Infants and fetuses are most vulnerable, they said. The statement, publ ished online by the journal Reproductive Toxicology, was accompanied by a new st udy from researchers from the National Institutes of Health that found uterine d amage in newborn animals exposed to BPA. That damage is a possible predictor of reproductive diseases in women, including fibroids, endometriosis, cystic ovarie s and cancers. It is the first time BPA has been linked to disorders of the fema le reproductive tract, although earlier studies have found early-stage prostate and breast cancer and decreased sperm counts in animals exposed to low doses. Th e scientists' statement and the new study accompanied by five scientific reviews summarizing the 700 studies intensify a contentious debate over whether the pla stic compound poses a public threat. So far no government agency here or abroad has restricted its use.

Attack of the mutant rice 2007-07-02, Fortune magazine http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/07/09/100122123/i... In the spring of 2001, a ... rice farmer named Jacko Garrett watched a fleet of 18-wheelers haul away truckloads of rice that he had grown with great care. "It just bothers me so bad," Garrett said. "I'm sitting here trying to find food to feed people, and I've got to bury five million pounds of rice." Garrett's rice w as genetically modified, part of an experiment that was brought to an abrupt hal t by its sponsor, a ... biotechnology company called Aventis Crop Science. The c ompany had contracted with a handful of farmers to grow the rice, which was know n as Liberty Link because its genes had been altered to resist a weed killer cal led Liberty, also made by Aventis. In January 2006, small amounts of genetically engineered rice turned up in a shipment that was tested ... by a French custome r of Riceland Foods. Because no transgenic rice is grown commercially in the U.S ., the people at Riceland were stunned. Then came another shock. Testing reveale d that the genetically modified rice contained a strain of Liberty Link that had not been approved for human consumption. What's more, trace amounts of the Libe rty Link had mysteriously made their way into the commercial rice supply in all five of the Southern states where long-grain rice is grown. The tainted rice was everywhere. If in the past year or so you or your family ate Uncle Ben's, Rice Krispies, or Gerber's, or drank a Budweiser ... you probably ingested a little b it of Liberty Link, with the unapproved gene. Last November, over the howls of a nti-GMO activists, the USDA retroactively approved the Liberty Link rice, known as LL601. The department said the genes that it approved are similar to those in serted for years into canola and corn, with no apparent ill effects. Note: To read a ten-page summary of Seeds of Deception, a ground-breaking expos o f the dangers of the genetic engineering of foods, click here.

Senators who weakened drug bill got millions from industry 2007-05-16, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-10-senators-drug-bill_N.htm Senators who raised millions of dollars in campaign donations from pharmaceutica l interests secured industry-friendly changes to a landmark drug-safety bill. Th e bill, which passed 93-1, grants the Food and Drug Administration broad new aut hority to monitor the safety of drugs after they are approved. It addressed some shortcomings that allowed the painkiller Vioxx to stay on the market for years after initial signs that it could cause heart attacks. However, the powers grant ed to the FDA in the bill's original version were pared back during private meet ings. And efforts to curb conflicts of interest among FDA advisers and allow con sumers to buy cheaper drugs from other countries were defeated in close votes. A measure that blocked an effort to allow drug importation passed, 49-40. The 49 senators who voted against drug importation received about $5 million from indus try executives and political action committees since 2001 nearly three quarters of the industry donations to current members of the Senate. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. [was] the lone vote against the bill. "You have a culture in which big mo ney has significant influence. Big money gains you access, access gives you the time to influence people." The pharmaceutical companies spend more money on lobb ying than any other single industry $855 million from 1998 to 2006. The biggest drug trade group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, praised the bill after it passed. The group's spokesman, Ken Johnson, said its critics " never point out that a great deal of this money is spent trying to defeat bills that are designed to cripple this industry." Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on drug company manipulatio

ns, click here.

Doctors Make Progress With Mysterious Disease 2006-05-23, KTVU (San Francisco FOX affiliate) http://www.ktvu.com/news/9264350/detail.html A horrifying ... disease is affecting thousands of people in the Bay Area, along the Gulf Coast and in Florida. Though some doctors have claimed the malady is p sychosomatic, other scientists are making headway unraveling the mystery of Morg ellons Disease. Former Oakland A's pitcher Billy Koch has it. And so do his wife and their three children. It started in Oakland four years ago. Koch saved 44 g ames and was the top reliever in the major leagues. Within two years -- at age 2 9 -- Billy Koch was out of baseball, partly because of the uncontrollable muscle twitching that went on for months at a time and often kept up him up all night. The disease is characterized by slow-healing skin lesions that often extrude sm all, dark filaments, especially after bathing. More than 3,000 families nationwi de [report] these same unexplained symptoms. Oklahoma State University Professor Randy Wymore was the first scientist to conduct research on this disconcerting disease. He says it's the biggest mystery he's ever been involved in. The UC Dav is-trained physiologist is leading a medical team at Oklahoma State University i n Tulsa. With cooperation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, W ymore's team is studying Bay Area patients and others from around the country. H is first finding disputes the frequent diagnosis of delusions. He says the filam ents are not an external contamination. Instead, they are a substance that mater ializes somehow inside the body, apparent artifacts of something infectious. Mor e results are expected soon. And Wymore says skin problems are not the worst sym ptoms. He says a neurotoxin or microorganism may disturb muscle control and memo ry. "The neurological effects are the much more severe, life altering and much m ore dangerous of the conditions." Note: To watch an intriguing five-minute video of the above story on KTVU, click here.

Drug firms accused of turning healthy people into patients 2006-04-11, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1751362,00.html According to reports published today...healthy people are being turned into pati ents by drug firms which publicise mental and sexual problems and promote little -known conditions only then to reveal the medicines they say will treat them.The studies, published in a respected medical journal, accuse the pharmaceutical in dustry of "disease mongering" - a practice in which the market for a drug is inf lated by convincing people they are sick and in need of medical treatment. The " corporate-sponsored creation of disease" wastes resources and may even harm peop le because of the medication they turn to, the researchers add. In 11 papers in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine, experts from Britain, the US and elsewhere argue that new diseases are being defined by specialists who are ofte n funded by the drug industry.According to the researchers, the campaigns boost drug sales by medicalising aspects of normal life. Note: For more on how the pharmaceutical companies can negatively impact your he alth and your wallet: http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

NIH Scientist Says He's Paid To Do Nothing 2003-07-04, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6791-2003Jul3 Edward McSweegan ... has an office in Bethesda, a job title -- health scientist administrator -- and an annual salary of about $100,000. What McSweegan says he does not have -- and has not had for the last seven years -- is any real work. H e was hired by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1988 , but says his bosses transferred the research grants he administered to other w orkers eight years later, leaving him with occasional tasks more suitable for a typist or "gofer." McSweegan used to be NIH's program officer for Lyme disease b ut was removed from the post in June 1995 after a dispute over his repeated crit icism of a politically influential support group for sufferers and his allegatio ns that NIH had been too accommodating of the group. He had publicly described t he Lyme Disease Foundation as "wacko" because he disagreed with its theories abo ut the disease. The dispute led to his suspension without pay for two weeks for insubordination. According to NIH, McSweegan is director of the U.S.-Indo Vaccin e Action Program, and has traveled to countries such as Russia representing the agency. He has also "produced reports and other work products." But McSweegan sa id he has never been told he was director of the program. McSweegan said he stru ggles to fill his eight-hour workdays by reading, exercising and writing fiction . He has self-published a bioterrorism thriller and a science fiction novel. But he says his six-page job description is the ultimate work of creative writing a nd describes his position as "a bizarre, surreal situation -- part Orwell, part Kafka and part Dilbert."

Cancer "Cure" 1930-05-26, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,739328,00.html Very cagily did Dr. Edward Sigfrid Sundstroem of the University of California Me dical School at Berkeley report last week that experimentally he had cured labor atory-developed cancer in rats by keeping them for three to six weeks in low pre ssure tanks. The reduced oxygen tension in those tanks simulated atmospheric con ditions on tops of mountains four to five miles high. His hesitancy in making th e report was due to: 1) ordinary scientific cautiousness; 2) the misinterpretati on of the experimental adrenal cortex cancer treatment being tried out by Drs. W alter Bernard Coffey and John Davis Humber in San Francisco. Previous experiment ers have retarded growth of cancer cells by low tension oxygen treatment. Dr. Su ndstroem declared his were the first "cures" by this means. In it one great dang er exists. Minute care must be taken in reducing the atmospheric pressure in the tanks very slowly, else the rats die. Because of this, half of Dr. Sundstroem's test rats died. Of 133 which lived, 83% were definitely freed of their laborato ry cancer. Note: Why wasn't this seriously pursued so that the number who died could be red uced? If 83% of those who survived their cancer were cured, there was clearly gr eat potential there. For a possible answer, click here.

Machine May Offer Novel Approach In Cancer Fight 2008-04-14, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/60minutes/main4006951.shtml The last thing John Kanzius thought he'd ever do was try to cure cancer. A forme r radio and television executive from Pennsylvania, he came to Florida to enjoy his retirement. "I have no business being in the cancer business. It's not somet

hing that a layman like me should be in, it should be left to doctors and resear ch people," he told [CBS] correspondent Lesley Stahl. It was the worst kind of l uck that gave Kanzius the idea to use radio waves to kill cancer cells: six year s ago, he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia and since then has undergone 36 r ounds of toxic chemotherapy. But it wasn't his own condition that motivated him, it was looking into the hollow eyes of sick children on the cancer ward at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "I saw the smiles of youth and saw their spi rits were broken. And you could see that they were ... asking, 'Why can't they d o something for me?'" Kanzius told Stahl. "And I said, 'There's got to be a bett er way to treat cancer.'" It was during one of those sleepless nights that the l ight bulb went off. When he was young, Kanzius was one of those kids who built r adios from scratch, so he knew the hidden power of radio waves. Sick from chemo, he got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started to build a radio wave machi ne. "Started looking in the cupboard and I saw pie pans and I said, 'These are p erfect. I can modify these,'" he recalled. His wife Marianne woke up that night to a lot of banging and clamoring. "I was concerned truthfully that he had lost it," she told Stahl. "She felt sorry for me," Kanzius added. "I did," Marianne K anzius acknowledged. "And I had mentioned to him, 'Honey, the doctors can't-you know, find an answer to cancer. How can you think that you can?'" That's what 60 Minutes wanted to know, so Stahl went to his garage laboratory to find out. Note: This CBS News report was broadcast on 60 Minutes. To watch the video of th e broadcast, click on the link above.

Study Links Chemical BPA to Health Problems 2008-09-17, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/16/AR20080916010... The first large study in humans of a chemical widely used in everyday plastics h as found that people with higher levels of bisphenol A had higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and liver abnormalities. The research, published ... in the J ournal of the American Medical Association by a team of British and American sci entists, compared the health status of 1,455 men and women with the levels of th e chemical, known as BPA, in their urine. The researchers divided the subjects i nto four statistical groupings according to their BPA levels and found that thos e in the quartile with the highest concentrations were nearly three times as lik ely to have cardiovascular disease than those with the lowest levels, and 2.4 ti mes as likely to have diabetes. Higher BPA levels were also associated with abno rmal concentrations of three liver enzymes. "This is the nail in the coffin," Fr ederick vom Saal, a reproductive scientist at the University of Missouri at Colu mbia and one of the first to document evidence of health problems in rodents exp osed to low doses of BPA. "This is a huge deal." More than 100 studies have link ed BPA exposure to health effects in animals. The FDA maintains that BPA is safe largely on the basis of two studies funded by the chemical industry, a fact tha t was repeatedly cited at yesterday's forum. "We're concerned that the FDA is ba sing its conclusion on two studies while downplaying the results of hundreds of other studies," said Amber Wise of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "This appe ars to be a case of cherry-picking data with potentially high cost to human heal th." Note: For many important reports on health issues from reliable sources, click h ere.

Sunlight cuts risk of many cancers 2007-10-21, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3081843.ece

Sunbathing, considered risky by skin cancer experts, may actually reduce the ris k of breast and other cancers, new research has found. Some women who had higher sun exposure had their risk of advanced breast cancer reduced by almost half, a ccording to the scientific study. The researchers from Stanford University, who report their findings in the American Journal of Epidemiology this week, said: " This study supports the idea that sunlight exposure reduces risk of advanced bre ast cancer among women with light skin pigmentation." The Stanford cancer specia lists measured 4,000 women aged 35 to 79, half of them diagnosed with breast can cer, for the effects of long-term sun exposure. Sun exposure may also protect ag ainst a number of other cancers, according to a second research team who studied more than four million people in 11 countries, including 416,000 who had been d iagnosed with skin cancer. These results, reported in the European Journal of Ca ncer, show that the risk of internal cancers ... was lower among people living i n sunny countries. The researchers said: "Vitamin D production in the skin seems to decrease the risk of several solid cancers, especially stomach, colo-rectal, liver and gall- bladder, pancreas, lung, female breast, prostate, bladder and k idney cancers." Sunlight plays a vital role in the production of beneficial vita min D in the body. Although food provides some vitamin D, up to 90 per cent come s from exposure to sunlight. Note: For many reliable, verifiable reports on promising cancer cures, click her e.

Some risk linked to plastic chemical 2007-08-09, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-plastic9aug09,0,4581047.... A federal panel of scientists [has concluded] that an estrogen-like compound in plastic could be posing some risk to the brain development of babies and childre n. Bisphenol A, or BPA, [a component of polycarbonate plastic,] is found in low levels in virtually every human body. The decision by the 12 advisors of the Cen ter for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction ... is the first official, government action related to the chemical. The scientists ranked their concerns about BPA, concluding they had "some concern" about neurological and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children, but "minimal" or "negligible" concern about reproductive effects. The findings put the panel roughly in the middle -between the chemical industry, which has long said there is no evidence of dang er to humans, and the environmental activists and scientists who say it is proba bly harming people. Environmentalists lambasted the panel, saying it had minimiz ed the risks and ignored important research. "Only the chemical industry agrees with the decision that BPA has little or no human health risks. That by itself s hould speak volumes about the corrupted process endorsed by the panel today," sa id Dr. Anila Jacob of the Environmental Working Group. The panel's preliminary r eport on BPA was drafted by a private consulting firm with financial ties to the chemical industry. The National Toxicology Program fired the company but ruled that the report was unbiased. The panel rejected several dozen animal studies th at found reproductive effects. The decision to reject the studies has been contr oversial with toxicologists.

When Fakery Turns Fatal 2007-06-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/business/worldbusiness/05fakes.html?ex=1338... They might be called China s renegade businessmen, small entrepreneurs who are exp erts at counterfeiting and willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make a prof

it. But just how far out of the Chinese mainstream are they? Cutting corners or producing fake goods is not just a legacy of China s initial rush toward the free market three decades ago but [is] still woven into the fabric of the nation s thri ving industrial economy. It is driven by entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of a weak legal system, lax regulations and a business culture where bribery and corruption are rampant. This is cut-throat market capitalism, said Wenran Jiang, a specialist in China who teaches at the University of Alberta. Since this count ry s economic reforms began to take root in the 1980s, businesses have engineered countless ways to produce everything from fake car parts, cosmetics and brand na me bags to counterfeit electrical cables and phony Viagra. Counterfeiting rings are broken nearly every week; nonetheless, the government seems to be waging a l osing battle against the operations. Dozens of Chinese cities have risen to prom inence over the last two decades by first specializing in fake goods, like Wenzh ou, which was once known for selling counterfeit Procter & Gamble products, and Kaihua in Zhejiang province, which specialized in fake Philips light bulbs. For a time, people even derided the entire province of Henan as the capital of subst andard or fake goods, like medicines that could make you miraculously grow talle r. Note: The fact that China recently sentenced to death the former head of the Sta te Food and Drug Administration may show that China is trying to address the pro blem, yet corruption is rampant in the drug industries of China, the U.S., and m ost other countries.

Bigger than you think: The story behind the pet food recall 2007-04-03, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/04/03/petscol.DTL The March 16 recall of 91 pet food products manufactured by Menu Foods wasn't bi g news at first. Early coverage reported only 10-15 cats and dogs dying. I'm a c ontributing editor for a nationally syndicated pet feature ... and all of us the re have close ties to the veterinary profession. What we were hearing from veter inarians wasn't matching what we were hearing on the news. Although ... Menu Foo ds started getting complaints as early as December 2006, FDA records state the c ompany received their first report of a food-related pet death on February 20. O ne week later, on February 27, Menu started testing the suspect foods. Three day s later, on March 3, the first cat in the trial died of acute kidney failure. Ne arly one month passed from the date Menu got its first report of a death to the date it issued the recall. At that point, Menu had seen a 35 percent death rate in their test-lab cats. We started a database for people to report their dead or sick pets. As of March 31, the number of deaths alone was at 2,797. Pet owners were encouraged to report deaths and illness to the FDA. But ... there was no pl ace on the agency's Web site to do so. The FDA kept confirming a number it had t o have known was only the tip of the iceberg. It prevented veterinarians from ha ving the information they needed to treat their patients. It allowed the media t o repeat a misleadingly low number ... preventing a lot of people from really gr asping the scope and implication of the problem. An import alert buried on the F DA Web site ... identified the Chinese company that is the source of the contami nated gluten -- gluten that is now known to be sold not only for use in animal f eed, but in human food products, too. Note: If you want to understand how the FDA sometimes works to support big indus try at the expense of our health (and in this case the health of our pets), the entire article is a big eye-opener. Click here for more.

FDA To Make Changes To Boost Drug Safety

2007-01-30, ABC News/Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=2835505 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday it would make organization al changes to improve internal communication about potential risks that emerge a fter a new drug reaches the market. The move is part of the agency's response to an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report that sharply criticized the FDA's drug sa fety oversight and called for more staffing, funding and power to police the dru g industry. The September 2006 report also found a "dysfunctional" FDA structure that hindered the agency's ability to protect public health. The IOM experts sa id they found FDA officials had trouble managing scientific disagreements among staff and downplayed some concerns by safety reviewers who monitor drugs after t hey win approval. On Tuesday, the agency said it was "making specific organizati onal and management changes to increase communications among FDA review staff an d safety staff." The announcement came as lawmakers prepare to debate critical f unding legislation for the agency that could become a vehicle for drug safety re forms. The FDA had requested the IOM report after it came under harsh criticism for its handling of Merck & Co. Inc.'s withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx and other medicines. Merck pulled Vioxx from the market in 2004, five years after its appr oval, because of a link to heart attacks and strokes.

America's masterplan is to force GM food on the world 2006-02-13, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,,1708375,00.html Three judges emerged after years of secret deliberation to rule that Europe had imposed a de facto ban on GM [genetically modified] food imports between 1999 an d 2003, violating WTO rules. The court also ruled that Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Luxembourg had no legal grounds to impose their own unilatera l import bans. Actually, the judges said much more, but in true WTO style no one has been allowed to know what. A few bureaucrats in the US, EU, Argentina and C anada have reportedly seen the full 1,045-page report, and an edited summary of some of its conclusions has been leaked. But no one, it seems, will take respons ibility for the ruling, which may force the EU to pay hundreds of millions of do llars to compensate some of the world's most heavily subsidised farmers, and cou ld change the laws of at least six countries that have imposed GM bans. It is no w clear that the real reason the US took Europe to the WTO court was...to make i t easier for its companies to...open regulatory doors in China, India, south-eas t Asia, Latin America and Africa, where most US exports now go. This is where mi llions of tonnes of US food aid heads, and where US GM companies are desperate t o have access, buying up seed companies and schmoozing presidents. Note: For an excellent summary of the dangers of genetically modified foods that Americans are already eating without their knowledge, see http://www.WantToKnow .info/deception10pg

'What's in that bill?' The risk of deadline votes 2005-12-28, Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1228/p01s03-uspo.html The first session of the 109th Congress is over, but lawmakers and interest grou ps are still sorting out what surprises may have been buried in its final bills. A clause added here or lifted there can shift the fortunes of whole industries and regions. The year ended in a crush of tough negotiations, late-night votes, and hastily printed bills so vast that few lawmakers had time to read them. Earl y in the morning on Dec. 19, lawmakers got their first glimpse of the 774-page f

inal version of a nearly $40 billion spending cut bill. The time? 1:12 a.m. Hous e members had to vote on the measure just four and a half hours later. While the rules say that a conference agreement can't include elements that haven't been voted in either the House or Senate...they are often violated. Senate negotiator s were stunned to learn that GOP House leaders had added a whole campaign-financ e bill to the final conference report on the Defense authorization bill they had already signed. The new language...was added to the bill after the conference h ad closed. Another provision, granting immunity from liability to manufacturers of flu vaccine, was added at the last minute to the FY 2006 Defense Appropriatio ns bill. Note: Few people are aware that in clear violation of Congressional rules, the P atriot Act was passed only hours after significant changes were made to what had been previously agreed upon. No members of Congress had the opportunity to read all of these changes, which eroded significantly more civil rights and libertie s than had been previously agreed. For more on this, click here.

The Age of Autism: 'A pretty big secret' 2005-12-07, Washington Times/UPI http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/20051204-060313-6829r.htm Thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chi cago have at least two things in common with thousands of Amish children in rura l Lancaster: They have never been vaccinated. And they don't have autism. "We ha ve about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who ne ver received vaccines," said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's medical director who founded the practice in 1973. The autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000. Eisenstein, in fact, is author of the book "Don't Vaccinate Befor e You Educate!" Earlier this year Florida pediatrician Dr. Jeff Bradstreet said there is virtually no autism in home-schooling families who decline to vaccinate for religious reasons -- lending credence to Eisenstein's observations. "It's l argely non-existent," said Bradstreet, who treats children with autism from arou nd the country. Thimerosal, which is 49.6 percent ethyl mercury by weight, was p hased out of most U.S. childhood immunizations beginning in 1999, but the CDC re commends flu shots for pregnant women and last year began recommending them for children 6 to 23 months old. Most of those shots contain thimerosal.

Possible Mercury, Autism Connection Found in Study 2005-03-17, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-autism17mar17,1,1770760.story Studying individual school districts in Texas, the epidemiologists found that th ose districts with the highest levels of mercury in the environment also had the highest rates of special education students and autism diagnoses. There was a s trong, direct relationship between mercury and autism levels. The incidence of a utism has grown dramatically over the last two decades, from about one in every 2,000 children to as high as one in every 166. The purported link between autism and mercury has been a subject of intense debate. In the past it has centered p rimarily on the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, which was once widel y used in vaccines. Many parents have argued that thimerosal causes autism becau se their children seemed to develop the neurological disorder shortly after they received childhood vaccinations. Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Debate rages over genetically modified crops 2007-01-19, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/19/BUGBONL8D91.DTL The two sides in the debate over genetically modified crops issued warring repor ts assessing the first decade of the technology this week, as the industry's sun ny view clashed with the darker vision of critics. The world's farmland planted with biotechnology crops reached 252 million acres in 2006, the industry-backed International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications calculate d in a report ... that promotes the products as solutions for hunger and future fuel demand. The report concluded that biotechnology boosts crop yields and bene fits the environment. That view was challenged by Friends of the Earth Internati onal and the Center for Food Safety in a report released Wednesday. The two grou ps argued that engineered plants don't produce larger harvests than conventional varieties, are often more vulnerable to drought and have increased the use of p esticides. The United States and Argentina host about 70 percent of the world's biotech crop acreage, both sides said. But adoption of the technology is growing at a faster rate in developing countries than in industrialized nations, accord ing to the International Service. About 10 million farmers in 22 countries sow g enetically modified crops, it said. The dominant biotech crop is soybeans, with 57 percent of world acreage, followed by maize, cotton and canola. Opponents sai d the crops are mainly a boon to agribusiness and big agricultural chemical comp anies trying to increase sales of seeds, weed-killers and bug sprays. Biotech cr op seeds are often engineered to be resistant to the herbicides or pesticides so ld by the same company. Note: For reliable information showing that you may be eating genetically modifi ed food every day which scientific experiments have repeatedly demonstrated can cause sickness and even death, click here.

Experts Defining Mental Disorders Are Linked to Drug Firms 2006-04-20, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/19/AR20060419025... Every psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria fo r disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses, a new analysis has found. O f the 170 experts in all who contributed to the manual that defines disorders fr om personality problems to drug addiction, more than half had such ties, includi ng 100 percent of the experts who served on work groups on mood disorders and ps ychotic disorders. "I don't think the public is aware of how egregious the finan cial ties are in the field of psychiatry," said Lisa Cosgrove, a clinical psycho logist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The analysis comes at a tim e of growing debate over the rising use of medication as the primary or sole tre atment for many psychiatric disorders, a trend driven in part by definitions of mental disorders in the psychiatric manual. Cosgrove said she began her research after discovering that five of six panel members studying whether certain preme nstrual problems are a psychiatric disorder had ties to Eli Lilly & Co., which w as seeking to market its drug Prozac to treat those symptoms. The process of def ining such disorders is far from scientific, Cosgrove added: "You would be disma yed at how political the process can be."

Signs That Swine Flu Has Peaked 2009-11-20, New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/health/21flu.html Although federal health officials decline to use the word "peaked," the current wave of swine flu appears to have done so in the United States. Flu activity is coming down in all regions of the country, the Centers for Disease Control and P revention said Friday, though it is still rising in Hawaii, Maine and some isola ted areas. The World Health Organization said Friday that there were "early sign s of a peak" in much of the United States. On Wednesday, the American College He alth Association, which surveys over 250 colleges with more than three million s tudents, said new cases of flu had dropped in the week ending Nov. 13. It was th e first drop since school resumed in the fall, and it was significant new cases were down 27 percent from the week before. And on Friday, Quest Diagnostics, the country's largest laboratory, said its tests of 142,000 suspected flu specimens since May showed that the flu peaked in late October. Nonetheless, Dr. Anne Sch uchat, the director of immunization and respiratory diseases at the C.D.C., chos e her words carefully, saying: "I wish I knew if we had hit the peak. Even if a peak has occurred, half the people who are going to get sick haven't gotten sick yet." The drop was clearly not caused by the swine flu vaccine drive, which has not gone as fast as the authorities had hoped. Note: Just like the avian flu scare a few years ago, the swine flu hype has turn ed out to be largely a whimper, yet the pharmaceutical companies are happy, as a gain they have made billions of dollars from the massive amonts of vaccines and drugs purchased by the government with your tax dollars. For more, click here an d here.

Health care alone can't make nation healthier, experts say 2009-08-12, Sacramento Bee/McClatchy News http://www.sacbee.com/273/story/2101966.html Ask around for the healthiest country in the world, and the United States won't come close to topping the list. People live longer in just about every industria lized nation, from Canada to our north, throughout much of Europe, and around th e Pacific in Japan, Australia and New Zealand. New mothers and their babies also face a rockier start here, with U.S. infant and maternal death rates double som e of our industrialized peers. As debate swirls in Washington and at town halls nationwide over health care reform, there is also a more fundamental question what about health? "If you want to see dramatic changes in health, you're not go ing to get there even by doubling the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system," said Dr. Richard Kravitz, a University of California, Davis, prof essor of medicine whose research interests include quality of care. "When you ne ed it, you really need it but in general, the benefits of medical care to populati ons are a little bit overrated," he said. When taken all together, the other fac tors that play a bigger role include education, income, toxins in the environmen t, crime, violence, family structure, stress, obesity, nutritious food and exerc ise. Across large populations, he said, numerous studies suggest that medical ca re contributes only modestly to overall health, perhaps somewhere between 10 per cent and 25 percent. Health care for all would provide a "very large" improvemen t for some deprived populations, Kravitz said, but "a surtax on high fructose co rn syrup would probably be more effective ... than anything we could do for the health care system, just because of obesity." Note: For many highly informative reports on health issues, click here.

Coffee 'may reverse Alzheimer's' 2009-07-05, BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8132122.stm Drinking five cups of coffee a day could reverse memory problems seen in Alzheim er's disease, US scientists say. The Florida research, carried out on mice, also suggested caffeine hampered the production of the protein plaques which are the hallmark of the disease. The 55 mice used in the University of South Florida st udy had been bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. First the research ers used behavioural tests to confirm the mice were exhibiting signs of memory i mpairment when they were aged 18 to 19 months, the equivalent to humans being ab out 70. Then they gave half the mice caffeine in their drinking water. The rest were given plain water. The mice were given the equivalent of five 8 oz (227 gra ms) cups of coffee a day - about 500 milligrams of caffeine. When the mice were tested again after two months, those who were given the caffeine performed much better on tests measuring their memory and thinking skills and performed as well as mice of the same age without dementia. Those drinking plain water continued to do poorly on the tests. In addition, the brains of the mice given caffeine sh owed nearly a 50% reduction in levels of the beta amyloid protein, which forms d estructive clumps in the brains of dementia patients. Dr Gary Arendash, who led the latest study, told the BBC: "The results are particularly exciting in that a reversal of pre-existing memory impairment is more difficult to achieve. They p rovide evidence that caffeine could be a viable 'treatment' for established Alzh eimer's disease and not simply a protective strategy. That's important because c affeine is a safe drug for most people, it easily enters the brain, and it appea rs to directly affect the disease process." Note: For many highly informative health reports from reliable sources, click he re.

Britain's National Health Service: Simple, sensible and civilized 2009-07-05, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/medicine/la-oe-sigal5-2009jul05,0,6570... For the first couple of years I lived in Britain, I was an illegal immigrant fro m the United States, visaless with an expired passport and looking over my shoul der all the time. Even so, from the very first day I arrived at Victoria Station in London, suffering from bronchitis, I was accepted in the NHS -- the national health scheme, we called it -- no questions asked and no ID required. After I'd become a legal resident, I asked my doctor why he had taken me, almost literall y off the boat, with so little fuss. Weren't foreigners a drain on his time and the National Health Service? He shrugged. "If you come here with a contagious di sease, we don't want you infecting the rest of us. So of course we give you medi cal care. Purely selfish on our part." For three decades I used and, being of a hypochondriacal nature, exploited the British medical system without paying a fa rthing except for the taxes taken out of my wages as a working journalist. And t hat single-payer, socialistic, government-run, bureaucratized, heavily used, nat ionalized health system served me -- and 50 million others -- very well. In need , I saw many doctors, with no money ever changing hands. There was nothing to si gn, hardly any papers to shuffle. My primary-care physician ran his "surgery," h is office, with the help of only one receptionist whose job it was to arrange ap pointments. It was all free, including specialists, and I came to believe that h ealthcare is a right, not an entitlement I had paid for. This "free" part someti mes puzzled my visiting American friends. When they got ill in London, I'd send them to my doctor, who would smile bemusedly when offered money.

Purity of Federal 'Organic' Label Is Questioned 2009-07-03, Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR20090702033... Three years ago, U.S. Department of Agriculture employees determined that synthe tic additives in organic baby formula violated federal standards and should be b anned from a product carrying the federal organic label. Today the same additive s, purported to boost brainpower and vision, can be found in 90 percent of organ ic baby formula. The government's turnaround, from prohibition to permission, ca me after a USDA program manager was lobbied by the formula makers and overruled her staff. That decision and others by a handful of USDA employees, along with a n advisory board's approval of a growing list of non-organic ingredients, have h elped numerous companies win a coveted green-and-white "USDA Organic" seal on an array of products. Grated organic cheese, for example, contains wood starch to prevent clumping. Organic beer can be made from non-organic hops. Relaxation of the federal standards, and an explosion of consumer demand, have helped push the organics market into a $23 billion-a-year business, the fastest growing segment of the food industry. Half of the country's adults say they buy organic food of ten or sometimes, according to a survey last year by the Harvard School of Publi c Health. But the USDA program's shortcomings mean that consumers, who at times must pay twice as much for organic products, are not always getting what they ex pect: foods without pesticides and other chemicals, produced in a way that is ge ntle to the environment. "It will unravel everything we've done if the standards can no longer be trusted," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who sponsored th e federal organics legislation. "If we don't protect the brand, the organic labe l, the program is finished. It could disappear overnight." Note: For many revealing reports from major media sources on government corrupti on, click here.

When hope heals 2009-03-20, Ode Magazine http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/61/when-hope-heals Ten years after he was diagnosed HIV-positive, Paul was still alive. This was lo ng before tri-therapy the remarkably effective treatment that keeps AIDS patients alive and everyone asked what he was doing to stave off the illness. He replied th at he was taking natural supplements, watching his diet carefully and exercising regularly. One day at a press conference, a professor of medicine told him, "I' m sorry to say I've had a lot of patients who were doing the same thing and they all died. Unfortunately, I expect that within a year, or at most two, your dise ase will have gotten the upper hand." Indeed, Paul died within two years, his ho pes struck down by that terrible omen. It takes 24 hours for certain voodoo prie sts to bring about the death of a person on whom they've cast an "evil spell." T he grand priests of modern medicine aren't so quick but can sometimes be as dead ly. Cancer seems to develop faster and more aggressively in patients who have le ss control over the inevitable stress of existence, which seems to be one of the reasons support groups prolong survival. Now what could be more stressful than being told there's no hope of a cure? At the University of California, Los Angel es, Assistant Professor Steve Cole demonstrated that among AIDS patients on tritherapy, the treatment benefits those who remain calm facing life's difficulties far more than those who have trouble controlling their stress. To guard against this Western-style voodoo, patients often need to know more than their doctors about what they can do to help themselves beginning by placing more hope in their bodies than medicine is prepared to give them. Note: For many hopeful reports on health issues from major media sources, click here.

Fighting a cold? Every bit of sleep counts 2009-01-17, Los Angeles Times http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/17/science/sci-sleep17 People who sleep less than seven hours a night appear to be almost three times a s likely to catch a cold as those who sleep eight hours or more, a new study has found. Quality of sleep may count even more than quantity. Those who spend as l ittle as 25 minutes a night tossing and turning face more than five times the ri sk of sniffing and sneezing. The age-old advice to get a good night's sleep is w ell-supported by medical research. Sleeping less than seven hours a night has be en shown to increase the risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, weight gain and hardening of the arteries. Studies have also found that serious sleep deprivatio n disrupts the immune system. But those were experimental studies that kept subj ects up for most of the night, then measured their immune responses. One of the surprising findings from the new study, published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, was just how little it took to knock down defenses agains t the common cold. "Very small disruptions in sleep, very small losses in terms of duration of sleep, were associated with pretty big increases in your probabil ity of getting sick if you're exposed to a virus," said Sheldon Cohen, a profess or of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and the first author of the study . "It's not just insomniacs or people being deprived of sleep." Controlling for numerous factors that can influence health -- including age, race, income, educa tion, smoking, exercise and depression -- the study found that the longer and be tter participants slept, the better they were able to resist or fight off infect ion, Cohen said. Note: For another fascinating article on colds, see the Wall Street Journal arti cle available here.

New approach counters diabetes in mice trials 2008-12-11, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/11/MNP614G1OH.DTL When he was just 7 years old, Sacramento native Nate DeFelice was told he had Ty pe 1 diabetes. So when he joined a diabetes research project at Ben-Gurion Unive rsity [in Israel] two years ago, he hoped it would be a meaningful experience. A s it turns out, the project could change his life and those of millions of other diabetics. DeFelice, 27, never dreamed that he would help discover a potential cure for his disease, see the beginning of a Federal Drug Administration-approve d clinical trial in the United States, and co-author a scientific paper along wi th seven other researchers published in October by the National Academy of Scien ces. Type 1 diabetes, usually diagnosed in childhood, is caused by a failure of the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas called "islets." They require daily injections of insulin, which helps break down glucose in the blood. When Ben-Gur ion University biochemistry Professor Dr. Eli Lewis asked for volunteers to part icipate in new research on diabetes, DeFelice jumped at the chance. Lewis, DeFel ice and the other researchers have focused their investigations on islet transpl antation. The Israeli team then opted for a new approach, ... focusing ... on in flammation caused by the transplant itself. Lewis grafted healthy islets into di abetic mice and treated them with an anti-inflammatory drug called alpha-1-antit rypsin, or AAT. Within months, they discovered three encouraging results: AAT en abled the newly grafted islets to survive indefinitely, successfully secreting i nsulin. The researchers stopped administering AAT and the islets continued to fu nction. The mice's immune systems remained intact and were able to reject additi onal grafts while the original transplant continued to function. Note: For many reports on health issues from major media sources, click here.

Fingerprints Can Reveal Drug Use, Medical History 2008-12-10, Discovery Channel http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/12/10/fingerprint-drugs.html A careless touch could be all police or insurance companies need to determine no t only your identity, but also your past drug use, if you've fired a gun or hand led explosives, even specific medical conditions. "A fingerprint is only good to identify a criminal if you already have their fingerprint on file," said David Russell, a professor at the University of East Anglia, who, along with Pompi Haz arika, helped developed [a new analytical] technique. "This will give police new tools to help discover that identity." For decades forensic scientists have dus ted fingerprints with magnetic particles to reveal the hidden swirls and curls t hat differentiate each person on the planet. The iron oxide particles attach the mselves to the tiny bits of water, minerals, and oils that accumulate on the fin gers as they touch various objects and other parts of the body. The new techniqu e attaches the iron oxide particles to antibodies and suspends them both in a li quid solution, which is then drizzled over a fingerprint. If the chemical that a specific antibody targets is present, the molecules latch onto it and glow. So far the scientists can detect five different drugs: THC (marijuana), cocaine, ni cotine, methadone and a derivative of methadone. Other drugs, particularly opium -based drugs like heroine or morphine, should also be detectable, since antibodi es already exist for them as well. Drugs aren't the only chemicals the new tests could detect. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other medical conditions prod uce specific chemicals also secreted in sweat and oil. By tweaking the antibodie s on the particles, forensic scientists could test for a variety of medical cond itions.

US controls bird flu vaccines over bioweapon fears 2008-10-11, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-10-11-3349819523_x.htm Deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a singl e sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of o ther viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism." The rea son: Fear that they will be used for biological warfare. Under this little-known policy, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria and Sudan may not get the vaccines unles s they apply for special export licenses, which would be given or refused accord ing to the discretion and timing of the U.S. Three of those nations -- Iran, Cub a and Sudan -- also are subject to a ban on all human pandemic influenza vaccine s as part of a general U.S. embargo. The regulations, which cover vaccines for e verything from Dengue fever to the Ebola virus, have raised concern within the m edical and scientific communities. Officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they were not even aware of the policies until contacted by The Associated Press ... and privately expressed alarm. They make "no scientific sense," said Peter Pales e, chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Some experts say the idea of using vaccines for bioweapons is far-fetc hed.

Clinical trials test potential of hallucinogenic drugs to help patients with ter minal illnesses 2008-08-12, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/12/medicalresearch.drugs

Scientists are exploring the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to treat a ran ge of ailments from depression to cluster headaches and obsessive compulsive dis order. The first clinical trial using LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland i n June. It aims to use "psychedelic psychotherapy" to help patients with termina l illnesses come to terms with their imminent mortality and so improve their qua lity of life. Another psychedelic substance, psilocybin, has shown promising res ults in trials for treating symptoms of terminal cancer patients. In the Swiss t rial eight subjects will receive a dose of 200 microgrammes of LSD. This is enou gh to induce a powerful psychedelic experience. A further four subjects will rec eive a dose of 20 microgrammes. Every participant will know they have received s ome LSD, but neither the subjects nor the researchers observing them will know f or certain who received the full dose. During the course of therapy researchers will assess the patients' anxiety levels, quality of life and pain levels. Befor e hallucinogenic drugs became popular with the counter culture, they were at the forefront of brain science. They were used to help scientists understand the na ture of consciousness and how the brain works and as treatments for a range of c onditions. Dr Rick Doblin is president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in California, a nonprofit organisation which funds c linical studies into psychedelic drugs, including the Swiss LSD trial. "These dr ugs, these experiences are not for the mystic who wants to sit on the mountain t op and meditate. They are not for the counter-culture rebel. They are for everyb ody," he said.

Homeless people die after bird flu vaccine trial in Poland 2008-07-02, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/2235676/Homeless-peop... Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after a numb er of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bi rd-flu virus. The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagiou s virus. Authorities claim that the alleged victims received 1-2 to be tested wit h what they thought was a conventional flu vaccine but, according to investigato rs, was actually an anti bird-flu drug. The director of a Grudziadz homeless cen tre, Mieczyslaw Waclawski, told a Polish newspaper that last year, 21 people fro m his centre died, a figure well above the average of about eight. Investigators are also probing the possibility that the medical staff may have also have dece ived the pharmaceutical companies that commissioned the trials. The news of the investigation will come as another blow to the reputation of Poland's beleaguere d and poverty-stricken national health service. In 2002, a number of ambulance m edics were found guilty of killing their patients for commissions from funeral c ompanies. Note: For key reports from reliable sources on the bird flu scare, which resulte d in many deaths from vaccines and anti-viral pharmaceutical products, click her e.

Unequal America 2008-07-01, Harvard Magazine http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/07/unequal-america.html Between 1983 and 1999, men s life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counti es, according to a recent study by [Majid] Ezzati, associate professor of intern ational health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues. Fo

r women, the news was even worse: life expectancy decreased in more than 900 cou nties more than a quarter of the total. This means 4 percent of American men and 1 9 percent of American women can expect their lives to be shorter than or, at bes t, the same length as those of people in their home counties two decades ago. Th e United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world s longest life expectancy . It doesn t even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Poor health is not distributed evenly across th e population, but concentrated among the disadvantaged. But in the United States , the gap between the rich and the poor is far wider than in most other develope d democracies, and it is getting wider. That is true both before and after taxes : the United States also does less than most other rich democracies to redistrib ute income from the rich to the poor. Living in a society with wide disparities in health, in wealth, in education is worse for all the society s members, even the we ll off. People at the top of the U.S. income spectrum live a very long time, says Cabot professor of public policy and epidemiology Lisa Berkman, but people at the top in some other countries live a lot longer. Note: For lots more on the increasingly severe impacts of rising income inequali ty, click here.

USDA axes national survey charting pesticide use 2008-05-22, Associated Press http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jOv_zmzZkXkBWLHq5KSkc7WaHZNQD90QJCA80 Consumers and farmers will soon be on their own when it comes to finding out whi ch pesticides are being sprayed on everything from corn to apples. The U.S. Depa rtment of Agriculture said ... it plans to do away with publishing its national survey tracking pesticide use, despite opposition from prominent scientists, the nation's largest farming organizations and environmental groups. "If you don't know what's being used, then you don't know what to look for," said Charles Benb rook, chief scientist at The Organic Center, a nonprofit in Enterprise, Ore. "In the absence of information, people can be lulled into thinking that there are n o problems with the use of pesticides on food in this country." Since 1990, farm ers and consumer advocates have relied on the agency's detailed annual report to learn which states apply the most pesticides and where bug and weed killers are most heavily sprayed to help cotton, grapes and oranges grow. The U.S. [EPA] al so uses the fine-grained data when figuring out how chemicals should be regulate d, and which pesticides pose the greatest risk to public health. Joe Reilly, ... at the National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the program was cut becau se the agency could no longer afford to spend the $8 million the survey sapped f rom its $160 million annual budget. "Unless new funds are made available there's not much that we can do," Reilly said. "What we'll end up doing is understandin g pesticide use through getting accident reports," said Steve Scholl-Buckwald, m anaging director at the San Francisco nonprofit Pesticide Action Network. "And t hat's a lousy way to protect public health." Note: For many important reports on health issues from major media sources, clic k here.

Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby 2008-05-18, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/warn... Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to child ren with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research. A giant stud y, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that using the handsets just

two or three times a day was enough to raise the risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age. And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children themselves used the phones before the age of seven. The results .. . follow warnings against both pregnant women and children using mobiles by the official Russian radiation watchdog body, which believes that the peril they pos e "is not much lower than the risk to children's health from tobacco or alcohol" . The research at the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus, Denmark is to be published in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology. They found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more likely to have children with behavioural problems and that the likelihood increased with the a mount of potential exposure to the radiation. And when the children also later u sed the phones they were, overall, 80 per cent more likely to suffer from diffic ulties with behaviour. They were 25 per cent more at risk from emotional problem s, 34 per cent more likely to suffer from difficulties relating to their peers, 35 per cent more likely to be hyperactive, and 49 per cent more prone to problem s with conduct. Note: For a treasure trove of important reports of health issues from reliable s ources, click here.

EPA official ousted while fighting Dow 2008-05-02, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/green/chi-epa-official-resig... The battle over dioxin contamination in [the Saginaw, Mich.] region had been rag ing for years when a top [EPA] official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical t o clean it up. On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gad e's interactions with Dow, the [Bush] administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office. Gade told the Trib une she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson t ook away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired b y June 1. Gade has been locked in a heated dispute with Dow about long-delayed p lans to clean up dioxin-saturated soil and sediment that extends 50 miles beyond its Midland, Mich., plant into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. Gade, appointed ... regional EPA administrator in September 2006, invoked emergency powers last summ er to order the company to remove three hotspots of dioxin near its Midland head quarters. She demanded more dredging in November, when it was revealed that diox in levels along a park in Saginaw were 1.6 million parts per trillion, the highe st amount ever found in the U.S. Dow then sought to cut a deal on a more compreh ensive cleanup. But Gade ended the negotiations in January, saying Dow was refus ing to take action necessary to protect public health and wildlife. Dow responde d by appealing to officials in Washington, according to heavily redacted letters the Tribune obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. On Thursday, Gade sa id of her resignation: "There's no question this is about Dow. I stand behind wh at I did and what my staff did. I'm proud of what we did." Note: For many powerful reports on government corruption from the major media, c lick here.

New kidney 'changed my whole personality' 2008-03-16, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1581752/New-kidney-'changed-my-whole-p... A woman claims to have undergone a complete "personality transplant" after recei ving a new kidney. Cheryl Johnson, 37, says she has changed completely since rec

eiving the organ in May. She believes that she must have picked up her new chara cteristics from the donor, a 59-year-old man who died from an aneurysm. Now, not only has her personality changed, the single mother also claims that her tastes in literature have taken a dramatic turn. Whereas she only used to read low-bro w novels, Dostoevsky has become her author of choice since the transplant. [Ms] Johnson, from Penwortham, in Preston, Lancs, said: "You pick up your characteris tics from your donor. My son said when I first had the transplant, I went stropp y and snappy - that wasn't me. I have always loved books but I've started to rea d classics like Jane Austen and Dostoevsky. I found myself reading Persuasion."

AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water 2008-03-09, Associated Press http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/10/pharma.water1.ap A vast array of pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood st abilizers and sex hormones have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows. To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. But the presence of so many prescription drugs ... in so much of our drinking water is h eightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health. I n the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been det ected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas from Souther n California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky. Water provi ders rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the A P found. How do the drugs get into the water? People take pills. Their bodies ab sorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed do wn the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs , rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water t reatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all dr ug residue. And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from dec ades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceutic als, recent studies which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public ha ve found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife. "We recognize it is a gro wing concern and we're taking it very seriously," said Benjamin H. Grumbles, ass istant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Note: For many informative reports on health issues, click here.

EPA toxicologist was dismissed after industry complained 2008-02-29, San Francisco Chronicle/Los Angeles Times http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/29/MNK3VB80B.DTL Under pressure from the chemical industry, the Environmental Protection Agency h as dismissed an outspoken scientist who chaired a federal panel responsible for helping the agency determine the dangers of a flame retardant widely used in ele ctronic equipment. Toxicologist Deborah Rice was appointed chair of an EPA scien tific panel reviewing the chemical a year ago. Federal records show that she was removed from the panel in August after the American Chemistry Council, the lobb ying group for chemical manufacturers, complained to a top-ranking EPA official that she was biased. The chemical, a brominated compound known as deca, is [comm only] used in the plastic housings of television sets. Rice, an award-winning fo rmer EPA scientist ... has studied low doses of deca and reported neurological e ffects in lab animals. The EPA is in the process of deciding how much daily expo sure to deca is safe - a decision, expected next month, that could determine whe ther it can still be used in consumer products. The role of the expert panel was

to review and comment on the scientific evidence. Sonya Lunder, a senior analys t at the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group in Washington, said it w as unprecedented for the EPA to remove an expert for expressing concerns about t he potential dangers of a chemical. "It's a scary world if we create a precedent that says scientists involved in decision-making are perceived to be too biased ," she said. In 2004, the EPA gave Rice and four colleagues an award for what it called "exceptionally high-quality research" for a study that linked lead expos ure to premature puberty in girls. Note: For many revealing articles on government corruption, click here.

Pioneering midwife crusades for natural birth 2008-02-23, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-23-childbirth_N.htm Despite living on a commune in rural Tennessee, Ina May Gaskin has had the kind of career success most people only dream about. Gaskin has helped to bring home birth and lay midwifery back from the brink of extinction in the United States. An obstetrical maneuver she learned from the indigenous Mayans of Guatemala has made it into scientific journals and medical textbooks, and her insistence on th e rights of a birthing mother empowered a generation of women to demand changes from doctors and hospitals. In 1975, Gaskin published Spiritual Midwifery, which included birth stories and a primer on delivering babies. Her book has sold aro und 750,000 copies, has been translated into four languages and has inspired a g eneration of women to become midwives. She promoted the idea that a woman's stat e of mind will influence how easy her birth is and encouraged unorthodox ways to improve the woman's experience, like encouraging her to make out with her husba nd during labor. She has tried to widen the reach of her message by airing natur al birth videos ... on television. "The women are so beautiful giving birth," sh e said. TV stations rarely have run them, calling them too graphic. "I started t o think I should put them on YouTube," Gaskin said. Now, Gaskin has a film in th e works that is in keeping with her anti-establishment, freewheeling nature. "We 're doing a movie called The Orgasmic Birth," she said. That's not a metaphor. G askin says that under the right circumstances women experience a sort of birth e cstasy. "I mean, it's not a guarantee," she said, shrugging her shoulders and sm iling, "but it's a possibility. It's the only way I can think to market it to (t his) generation." Note: For many empowering reports on health, click here.

Proposed Ban on Genetically Modified Corn in Europe 2007-11-23, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/business/worldbusiness/23gene.html?ex=13534... European Union environmental officials have determined that two kinds of genetic ally modified corn could harm butterflies, affect food chains and disturb life i n rivers and streams, and they have proposed a ban on the sale of the seeds, whi ch are made by DuPont Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences and Syngenta. The environment co mmissioner, Stavros Dimas, contends that the genetically modified corn, or maize could affect certain butterfly species, specifically the monarch, and other ben eficial insects. For instance, research this year indicates that larvae of the m onarch butterfly exposed to the genetically modified corn behave differently than other larvae. In the decision concerning the corn seeds produced by Dow and Pion eer, Mr. Dimas calls potential damage on the environment irreversible. In the deci sion on Syngenta s corn, he says that the level of risk generated by the cultivatio n of this product for the environment is unacceptable. Barbara Helfferich, a spok

eswoman for Mr. Dimas ... said that the European Union was within its rights to make decisions based on the precautionary principle even when scientists had found no definitive evidence proving products can cause harm. The commission has the a uthority to be a risk manager when it comes to the safety and science of genetic ally modified crops, Ms. Helfferich said. In the decisions, Mr. Dimas cited recen t research showing that consumption of genetically modified corn byproducts reduc ed growth and increased mortality of nontarget stream insects and that these inse cts are important prey for aquatic and riparian predators and that this could have unexpected ecosystem-scale consequences. Note: For a highly informative summary of health risks from genetically modified organisms, click here.

Public health: The hidden menace of mobile phones 2007-10-07, Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3036005.ece Using a mobile phone for more than 10 years increases the risk of getting brain cancer, according to the most comprehensive study of the risks yet published. Th e study which contradicts official pronouncements that there is no danger of get ting the disease found that people who have had the phones for a decade or more are twice as likely to get a malignant tumour on the side of the brain where the y hold the handset. The scientists who conducted the research say using a mobile for just an hour every working day during that period is enough to increase the risk and that the international standard used to protect users from the radiati on emitted is "not safe" and "needs to be revised". They conclude that "caution is needed in the use of mobile phones" and believe children, who are especially vulnerable, should be discouraged from using them at all. Official assurances th at the phones are safe have been based on research that has, at best, included o nly a few people who have been exposed to the radiation for long enough to get t he disease, and are therefore of little or no value in assessing the real risk. The scientists pulled together the results of the 11 studies that have so far in vestigated the occurrence of tumours in people who have used phones for more tha n a decade, drawing on research in Sweden, Denmark Finland, Japan, Germany, the United States and Britain. They found almost all had discovered an increased ris k, especially on the side of the head where people listened to their handsets. [ One of the study's authors] said he uses a mobile phone as little as possible, a nd urges others to use hands-free equipment and make only short calls, reserving longer ones for landlines. He also said that mobiles should not be given to chi ldren, whose thinner skulls and developing nervous systems make them particularl y vulnerable. Note: Evidence has been mounting for some years that cell phones and wireless te chnology (WiFi) have significant health risks. For a recent brief summary by a h ighly respected scientist, click here.

Probe Into Tainted Rice Ends 2007-10-06, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR20071005021... More than 14 months after the Agriculture Department began an investigation into how the U.S. supply of long-grain rice became tainted with an unapproved geneti cally engineered variety -- an event that continues to disrupt U.S. exports -- t he government announced yesterday that it could not figure out how the contamina tion happened. Agency officials said documents from several years ago that might have helped them determine what went wrong had been lost or destroyed. Lacking

clear evidence of who was responsible, they said, the government will not take e nforcement action against any person or entity, including Bayer CropScience, the company whose gene-altered products slipped into the food supply. The widesprea d, low-level contamination with experimental genes that make the rice pesticidetolerant, one of several such events in recent years, prompted countries around the world to cut off imports of U.S. long-grain rice. Rice prices plummeted, and many farmers, scientists and biotechnology activists called for an overhaul of the oversight system for gene-altered crops. While some countries have begun to accept U.S. rice with added testing, the European Union and Russia have not -- a trade loss valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Critics assail ed the report as yet more evidence that the nation's regulatory system for genealtered crops is broken. "This underlines the anxiety people have about more suc h incidents occurring," said Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientist s, a science-based advocacy group that has called for a more rigorous approval p rocess for biotech crops. Note: For important reports from major media sources which reveal the dangers of genetically modified foods and other organisms, click here.

Woman loses 95 pounds, trains for marathons 2007-10-03, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/diet.fitness/10/03/weightloss.kelly.pless/inde... If someone had asked Kelly Pless to describe herself three years ago, the word " fit" would have never crossed her mind. For most of her adult life, the 31-yearold ... has struggled with her weight. She started gaining as a teenager and by the time she graduated from high school, she was carrying 215 pounds on her 5' 2 " frame. At 28, she started having trouble breathing and doctors told her the we ight was to blame. She reached her breaking point. Pless decided to do something . Fortunately she didn't have to look far for inspiration. "My manager at the Ke nnedy Space Center ran marathons, and he was the same age as my father," she sai d. Over the next three to four months, she began walking, without any real goal or expectation. Pless believed that if she just focused on eating less and movin g more, everything would fall into place. "At first, it was hard to start exerci sing because I was worried people would make fun of me," Pless said. "But then I just told myself, if that's the worst that could happen ... I just got out ther e and didn't care." She also adopted an "eat to live" philosophy and satisfied h er cravings for sweets by eating lots of fruit. "After a few months of cutting [ snacks and sweets] out, I focused more on portion control," said Pless. "I prett y much eat when I'm hungry and don't eat when I'm not and really try to pay atte ntion to when those times are. Pless asks herself, "What do I really want to eat ? Or, what does my body really want right now?" All of the hard work and determi nation paid off. Pless has lost 95 pounds and kept it off for 1 years. As a resul t, she says, she's healthier and more confident. Pless runs about 40 miles a wee k while she trains for two marathons she plans to run this winter. "Running has become a constant for me and does so much more for me than maintain my weight, w hich is now about 125 pounds," said Pless.

Investigative Report: U.S. ships unsafe products 2007-09-09, Sacramento Bee (leading newspaper of California's capital) http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/368866.html Ten days ago, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced another in a seri es of well-publicized recalls of Chinese-made goods: children's art sets contain ing crayons, markers, pastels, pencils, water colors -- and lead -- distributed by Toys "R" Us. "Consumers should immediately take the products away from childr

en," warned a news release from the federal government's watchdog for thousands of household items. "The CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families. " But 13 months earlier, in July 2006, the CPSC ... authorized a Los Angeles com pany to export to Venezuela 16,520 art sets that violated the same CPSC standard protecting children from dangerous art supplies. The following month, the agenc y authorized a Miami company to export to Jamaica 5,184 sets of wax crayons that also violated the standard. For decades the federal agency has allowed American -based companies to export products deemed unsafe here. Those products can prese nt an even greater danger in a country that has only a handful of government emp loyees devoted to consumer protection, said R. David Pittle, a former acting CPS C chairman who spent 22 years as a senior vice president for Consumers Union. "I f the United States doesn't have very many inspectors, how many do you think the re are in Honduras or Jamaica or Trinidad or Bulgaria?" Pittle asked. Using the CPSC's database of exports of non-approved products and hundreds of pages of doc uments obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act, The Bee found th at between October 1993 and September 2006, the CPSC received 1,031 requests fro m companies to export products the agency had found unsafe for American consumer s. The CPSC approved 991 of those requests, or 96 percent.

Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned 2007-08-14, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/80fa0a2c-49ef-11dc-9ffe-0000779fd2ac.html The US government is on a burning platform of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the coun try s top government inspector has warned. David Walker, comptroller general of th e US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country s future in a report that lays out what he called chilling long-term simulations . These include dramati c tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign g overnments of holdings of US debt. Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman e mpire, Mr Walker warned there were striking similarities between America s current s ituation and the factors that brought down Rome, including declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. In my view , it s time to learn from history. Mr Walker s views carry weight because he is a non -partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often descri bed as the investigative arm of the US Congress. In an interview with the Financ ial Times, Mr Walker said he had mentioned some of the issues before but now wan ted to turn up the volume . Some of them were too sensitive for others in governmen t to have their name associated with. I m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake -up call, he said. As comptroller general I ve got an ability to look longer-range a nd take on issues that others may be hesitant, and in many cases may not be in a position, to take on."

People in 41 nations are living longer than Americans 2007-08-12, Los Angeles Times/Associated Press http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-life12aug12,1,4455613.story Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other cou ntries. For decades, the United States has been slipping in rankings of life exp ectancy, as other countries improve healthcare, nutrition and lifestyles. Countr ies that surpass the United States include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands. "Something's wrong here when one of the ric hest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on healthcare, is not able to keep up with other countries," said Christopher Murray, head of the Inst

itute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. A baby born in the United States in 2004 is expected to live an average of 77.9 years. That ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier. Andorra, a tiny country bet ween France and Spain, had the longest life expectancy, at 83.5 years, according to the Census Bureau. It was followed by Japan, Macao, San Marino and Singapore . Researchers say several factors have contributed to the United States falling behind other industrialized nations. A major one, they say, is that 47 million p eople in the United States lack health insurance, whereas Canada and many Europe an countries have universal healthcare. But "it's not as simple as saying, 'We d on't have national health insurance,' " said Samuel B. Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal. Among the other factors researchers cite: Adu lts in the United States have one of the world's highest obesity rates. Nearly a third of those 20 or older are obese, according to the National Center for Heal th Statistics. "The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy ," said Paul D. Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory Universit y in Atlanta. Note: For a treasure trove of powerful health articles, click here.

CDC Requests Bay Area Morgellons Study 2007-08-02, KTVU (San Francisco FOX affiliate) http://www.ktvu.com/health/13810037/detail.html The federal Centers for Disease Control has asked Kaiser Permanente to begin the nation s first epidemiologic study of "Morgellons Disease," a mysterious ailment that the government terms an "unexplained and debilitating condition that has em erged as a public health concern." KTVU Health and Science Editor John Fowler wa s the first in the nation to report on this mystery disease as it was called in 20 04. He reported the skin disorder seemed to cause fibers and filaments to emerge from the skin of sufferers, and also seemed to cause neurological problems pati ents described as "brain fog." John followed up with other reports, and founders of a non-profit group hoping to help sufferers understand the disease named it Morgellons. As of February this year, the Morgellons Research Foundation has ide ntified more than ten thousand families nationwide. John profiled former A s pitch er Billy Koch who says both he and his wife have symptoms. KTVU has obtained a f ederal Request for Quotation, delivered to Kaiser Permanente, that says the CDC now wants its nationwide study to be focused in the Bay Area because 24% of Morg ellons patients "reside in California with geographic clustering in the San Fran cisco metropolitan area." Federal doctors now want Kaiser Permanente to conduct an urgent epidemiologic investigation with results due by next May "...to better characterize the clinical and epidemiologic features of this condition; to gene rate hypotheses about factors that may cause or contribute to sufferers' symptom s; and to estimate the prevalence of the condition in the population; and to pro vide information to guide public health recommendations." The CDC for the first time publicly says Morgellons is "an emerging public health problem."

Nonorganic ingredients get tentative OK 2007-06-23, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-organic23jun23,1,6277674.story The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave interim approval Friday to a controversi al proposal to allow 38 nonorganic ingredients to be used in foods carrying the "USDA Organic" seal. Manufacturers of organic foods had pushed for the change, a rguing that the 38 items are minor ingredients in their products and are difficu lt to find in organic form. But consumers opposed to the use of pesticides, chem ical fertilizers, antibiotics and growth hormones in food production bombarded t

he USDA with more than 1,000 complaints last month. "If the label says organic, everything in that food should be organic," wrote Kimberly Wilson of Austin, Tex as, in one typical comment. "If they put something in the food that isn't organi c, they shouldn't be able to call it organic. No exception." The list approved F riday includes 19 food colorings, two starches, hops, sausage casings, fish oil, chipotle chili pepper, gelatin, celery powder, dill weed oil, frozen lemongrass , Wakame seaweed, Turkish bay leaves and whey protein concentrate. Manufacturers will be allowed to use conventionally grown versions of these ingredients in fo ods carrying the USDA seal, provided that they can't find organic equivalents an d that nonorganics comprise no more than 5% of the product. A wide range of orga nic food could be affected, including cereal, sausage, bread, beer, pasta, candy and soup mixes. The Organic Consumers Assn. ... has led the opposition to the U SDA proposal. Ronnie Cummins, executive director of the consumers group, said .. . that the USDA was caving in to pressure from large food companies. USDA offici als "don't seem to care what the public wants. They're just more interested in w hat's convenient for the big companies."

Fight Over Vaccine-Autism Link Hits Court 2007-06-10, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/09/AR20070609013... For more than a decade, families across the country have been warring with the m edical establishment over their claims that routine childhood vaccines are respo nsible for the nation's apparent epidemic of autism. In an extraordinary proceed ing that begins tomorrow, the battle will move from the ivory tower to the court s. Nearly 5,000 families will seek to convince a special "vaccine court" in Wash ington that the vaccines can cause healthy and outgoing children to withdraw int o uncommunicative, autistic shells -- even though a large body of evidence and e xpert opinion has found no link. The court has never heard a case of such magnit ude. The shift from laboratory to courtroom means the outcome will hinge not on scientific standards of evidence but on a legal standard of plausibility. The de cision could not only change the lives of thousands of American families but als o have a profound effect on the decisions of parents around the world about whet her to vaccinate their children. Advocates of the vaccine theory have argued tha t the increase in cases was triggered by a mercury-based preservative in vaccine s that, they say, is toxic to children's brains. The law requires people claimin g they were harmed by a vaccine to bring the case in the special court first, bu t if they lose, they can still file suit in civil courts. Scientific advocates f or the vaccine-autism theory ... say fears about damaging public health programs have prompted scientists and the government to hide evidence of a problem. Many of the families believe that the medical establishment and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have conspired in a massive coverup. Note: For a powerful report on the alleged link between autism and vaccines, cli ck here. For more reliable news on this crucial issue, click here.

US on Mad Cow: Don't Test All Cattle 2007-05-29, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mad-Cow.html The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from test ing all their animals for mad cow disease. The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to human s who eat tainted beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows. Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekst one tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the ex

pensive test, too. The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat indu stry. A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. U.S. Distr ict Judge James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the government relies on and said the government didn't have the authority to restri ct it. The ruling was to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal -- effectively delaying the testing until the court cha llenge plays out. Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is linke d to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain. There have been th ree cases of mad cow disease in the U.S.

Is It Disease or Delusion? U.S. Takes on a Dilemma 2006-10-24, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/health/24cons.html?ex=1319342400&en=e370af4... After an avalanche of panicked inquiries from patients across the country who cl aim to have been stricken with a mysterious skin disease, the federal Centers fo r Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to begin a full investigation. The patients...describe symptoms that include sores that are slow to heal, a sensat ion of things crawling through their skin, joint pain and persistent fatigue. Ma ny say they believe they have Morgellons disease, a diagnosis that has received wide attention on the Internet but is viewed skeptically by some doctors. Morgel lons disease joins a growing list of symptom clusters that public health officia ls have been forced to examine closely in part because of the organizing power a nd unprecedented reach of the Internet. Morgellons was brought to public attenti on by...Mary Leitao, who in 2001 created a Web site describing the mysterious so res and bizarre threadlike extrusions that afflicted her young son. She said she had tried for years to find a medical explanation for his illness. Ultimately, she said, doctors accused her of staging it. After creating the Web site...she w as inundated with e-mail messages from people who said they also had the disease . Many of the people who visit her site have been told by doctors that their sym ptoms are delusional. Several mothers...told her that they had lost custody of t heir children after doctors decided the youngsters symptoms were contrived. Docto rs themselves are divided over whether Morgellons is a medical or a psychiatric illness. The patients are clearly suffering from something; it is just not clear what that something is. I think it s a real disease, said Dr. Rafael Stricker, a ph ysician in San Francisco who sees many patients claiming to have Morgellons. Man y patients also test positive for Lyme disease.

Old but Not Frail: A Matter of Heart and Head 2006-10-05, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/health/05age.html?ex=1317700800&en=4f1cfb7e... Witold Bialokur...can run 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, in less than 44 minutes. While Mr. Bialokur s performance would be the envy of most young men, he is not yo ung. Mr. Bialokur is 71. It is one of the persistent mysteries of aging, researc hers say. Why would one person, like Mr. Bialokur, remain so hale and hearty whi le another, who had seemed just as healthy, start to weaken and slow down? Rigor ous studies are now showing that seeing, or hearing, gloomy nostrums about what it is like to be old can make people walk more slowly, hear and remember less we ll, and even affect their cardiovascular systems. Positive images of aging have the opposite effects. The constant message that old people are expected to be sl ow and weak and forgetful is not a reason for the full-blown frailty syndrome. B ut it may help push people along that path.

Slaves to American medicine 2006-09-10, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2338130_1,00.html In 1972, the Tuskegee experiments on black people shocked the world. Now, a new report reveals that the official inquiry was a cover-up. The [syphilis] "trial," conducted between 1932 and 1972, involved 400 black sharecroppers. The Tuskegee "volunteers" were not to be treated, either with Salvarsan or even antibiotics after their discovery. Ignorant of the true goal of the trial, the participants were destined to be living, and dying, examples of the terrible course of the un treated illness. Tuskegee, after its exposure in the media in 1972, thus became a byword in America for racist medical experimentation. Soon after the Tuskegee revelations, fault was admitted, apologies made. Yet in time, historians of medi cine, sociologists and social anthropologists began to play down the scandal. Tu skegee, they argued, was an understandable error, given the absence of viable an tidotes in the 1930s. But renewed outrage over Tuskegee is about to explode with an investigation entitled Medical Apartheid, to be published in the US early ne xt year. The public-health historian Harriet Washington will reveal...that the T uskegee trial was even more inhumane and morally degenerate than previously susp ected. The role of Nurse Eunice Rivers became crucial. Above all, her task, aide d by the study's doctors, was to ensure that the syphilitic men would receive no treatment, despite the extraordinary advances in treatment from the 1940s onwar ds. "By 1955," according to Washington, "nearly one-third of the autopsied men h ad died directly of syphilis and many of the survivors were suffering its deadli est complications." Note: For lots more on the history humans used as guinea pigs in experiments by government: http://www.WantToKnow.info/humanguineapigs and http://www.WantToKnow .info/mindcontrollers10pg#human

Nicotine Levels Rose 10 Percent in Last Six Years 2006-08-31, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/health/31nicotine.html?ex=1314676800&en=80e... The level of nicotine that smokers typically consume per cigarette has risen 10 percent in the past six years, making it harder to quit and easier to be addicte d, said a report that the Massachusetts Department of Health released on Tuesday . The study shows a steady increase in the amount of nicotine delivered to the s mokers? lungs regardless of brand, with overall yields increasing 10 percent. Ma ssachusetts is one of three states to require tobacco companies to submit inform ation on nicotine testing to its specifications and is the sole state with data as far back as 1998. The study found that the three most popular brands with you ng smokers, Marlboro, Newport and Camel, delivered significantly more nicotine t han they did six years ago. Nicotine consumed in Kool, a popular menthol brand, rose 20 percent.

Drug firms a danger to health - report 2006-07-26, Guardian (One of U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1806084,00.html Drug companies are accused today of endangering public health through widescale marketing malpractices, ranging from covertly attempting to persuade consumers t hat they are ill to bribing doctors and misrepresenting the results of safety an d efficacy tests on their products. In a report that charts the scale of illicit practices by drug companies in the UK and across Europe, Consumers Internationa

l - the world federation of consumer organisations - says people are not being g iven facts about the medicines they take because the companies hide the marketin g tactics on which they spend billions. "Irresponsible marketing practices form a serious, persistent and widespread problem among the entire pharmaceutical ind ustry," says the report, which analyses the conduct of 20 of the biggest compani es. Scandals such as the withdrawal of Vioxx...show that unethical drug promotio n is a consumer concern. Merck withdrew the drug in September 2004, but allegedl y knew it could increase the chances of heart attacks and strokes from 2000 and has been accused of manipulating study results to play down the risk. More than 6,000 lawsuits have been filed against the company in the United States by peopl e who claim they suffered heart attacks as a result of the drug. There is no roo m for complacency when drug companies spend twice as much on marketing as on res earch...but do not publish information on their drug promotion practices.

Artificial Blood Experiment: Is Your City Participating? 2006-07-07, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2166058&page=1&WNT=true Northfield Lab's experimental blood substitute Polyheme is currently in randomiz ed phase III clinical trials recruiting patients without informed consent all ov er the country. At one point, it was being tested in as many as 27 cities; it is still being tested in 23 hospitals in 20 cities. With the FDA's approval, North field Lab has recruited hospitals to participate in the trial study with exempti on from informed consent requirements on study participants. Although Northfield Lab claims that extensive information on the study has been made public, a vast majority of the general public has never heard of the trial.

Traumas create unwitting test subjects 2006-06-13, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-06-13-traumas-trials_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA With waived-consent studies becoming more prevalent, critics question whether th e public understands how they work and whether test subjects get adequate protec tion. [A] trial, which is reported in today's Journal of the American Medical As sociation (JAMA), was halted because a device called the AutoPulse, which was us ed to revive cardiac-arrest victims, failed to save more lives than when rescuer s performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Patients in these types of studies... are treated under a broad federal rule that allows researchers to test emergency treatments on patients with specific, life-threatening medical conditions witho ut their explicit consent as long as they remain under close watch of independen t reviewers. Studies have included large, multi-city, randomized trials, which s cientists consider the gold standard for medical research. The [PolyHeme] trial has raised concern among some ethicists and alarm in Congress, where Sen. Charle s Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Finance Committee, is conducting an investig ation. Grassley is concerned that people who live in the 19 states where PolyHem e is being tested have had inadequate notice about the trial. The FDA requires t hat community input be sought in the regions around test sites. "It is outrageou s that, for all intents and purposes, the FDA allowed a clinical trial to procee d, which makes every citizen in the United States a potential 'guinea pig,' with out providing a practical, informative warning to the public," Grassley wrote in a letter to the FDA in February.

Informed Consent Waived in Public Crisis 2006-06-08, CBS News/Associated Press

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/08/ap/health/mainD8I3MMRO0.shtml In a public health emergency, suspected victims would no longer have to give per mission before experimental tests could be run to determine why they're sick, un der a federal rule published Wednesday. Privacy experts called the exception unn ecessary, ripe for abuse and an override of state informed-consent laws. Health care workers will be free to run experimental tests on blood and other samples t aken from people who have fallen sick as a result of a bioterrorist attack, bird flu outbreak, detonation of a dirty bomb or any other life-threatening public h ealth emergency, according to the rule issued by the Food and Drug Administratio n. The rule took effect Wednesday but remains subject to public comment until Au g. 7. The FDA said it published the rule without first seeking comments because it would hinder the response to an outbreak of bird flu or other public health e mergency.

Vaccine makers helped write Frist-backed shield law 2006-05-08, The Tennessean http://tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060508/NEWS02/605080356 Vaccine industry officials helped shape legislation behind the scenes that Senat e Majority Leader Bill Frist secretly amended into a bill to shield them from la wsuits, according to e-mails obtained by a public advocacy group. E-mails and do cuments written by a trade group for the vaccine-makers show the organization me t privately with Frist's staff and the White House about measures that would giv e the industry protection from lawsuits filed by people hurt by the vaccines. Fr ist, along with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., ordered the vaccine liabil ity language inserted in a defense spending bill in December without debate and in violation of usual Senate practice. In a written statement, Frist spokeswoman Amy Call stated that the senator had promised publicly to include the vaccine l iability protection in the defense spending bill. She did not address the issue of the influence of industry lobbyists. Note: For one-paragraph summaries of media articles showing why the vaccine make rs want this protection, click here.

Organic Food Fends Off Pesticides 2006-02-20, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthology/story?id=1642533 If you are looking to banish pesticides from your child's diet, new research sug gests that organic food will do the trick, at least when it comes to two common pesticides. Researchers found that pesticide levels in children's bodies dropped to zero after just a few days of eating organic produce and grains. "After they switch back to a conventional diet, the levels go up," said study co-author Che nsheng Lu, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at Em ory University. Lu said the impetus for the new study was a previous research pr oject that examined pesticide levels in 110 children and only found one child wh ose body was pesticide-free -- a child who regularly ate organic food. The findi ngs were to be discussed Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Associatio n for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis. The study, funded by the U.S. Env ironmental Protection Agency, appeared online last September in the journal Envi ronmental Health Perspectives. Learn more about organic diets from CNN.com.

The deadly terror lurking around the corner may not be such a big, ominous threa

t after all 2006-02-19, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/19/INGDDH8E2V1.DTL Americans receive a steady stream of warnings and alarms about new and horrific perils that await them. Pandemics, dirty bombs, cyber attacks, bioterror and oth er exotic threats are always on the verge of being unleashed onto a shamefully u nprepared republic. Yet, judging from statistics on life expectancy, violent dea ths and war, we live in much less perilous times than any generation before us. Avian flu, for example. We are cautioned that a pandemic...is only months away. One World Health Organization estimate says 2 million to 7 million people will d ie in the next pandemic. But it is not 1918. The WHO reports that since 2003, th ere have been 152 cases of avian flu, resulting in 83 deaths. A flu pandemic has been regularly predicted since 1997 and (knock on wood) it has never arrived. D irty bombs -- conventional explosives mixed with radioactive material -- present another example of overreaction. In 2004, experts warned in the normally staid Wall Street Journal that a terrorist attack with a dirty bomb was an imminent ce rtainty. They announced: "Shame on our leaders and on us if the lamentations of the next blue-ribbon panel will be intoned over the graves of hundreds of thousa nds of Americans, the collapse of our economy, and perhaps a fatal blow to our w ay of life." But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says a dirty bomb would conta minate "up to several city blocks." The commission's advice, if one goes off, is to walk away and take a shower. Note: This informative article, by a program director of the Center for Strategi c and International Studies in Washington, demonstrates clearly how the hype and fear around terror is much more damaging than terrorism itself. For more on thi s from both BBC and my own experience as a presidential interpreter, click here.

6 Ex-Chiefs of E.P.A. Urge Action on Greenhouse Gases 2006-01-19, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/national/19enviro.html?ex=1295326800&en=a4e... Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, including five who serv ed Republican presidents, said Wednesday that the Bush administration needed to act more aggressively to limit the emission of greenhouse gases linked to climat e change. Speaking on a panel that also included the current agency chief, Steph en L. Johnson, they generally agreed that the need to address global warming was growing urgent and that the continuing debate over what percentage of the probl em was caused by human activities was a waste of time. The blunt opinions of [th e current EPA chief's] Republican predecessors served as a sharp reminder that s ince Mr. Bush took office in 2001, neither the president nor the Republican-led Congress has proposed any comprehensive plan to limit carbon emissions from vehi cles, utilities and other sources, a problem that Mr. Bush's own Department of E nergy predicts will grow worse.

Maker of drug admits hiding its risks 2005-07-24, Miami Herald http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/front/9231611.htm The maker of a billion-dollar antipsychotic medication has acknowledged misleadi ng doctors and other healthcare providers about the safety of its product, minim izing potentially deadly side effects. On Wednesday, drug maker Janssen Pharmace utica wrote a two-page letter to doctors, warning them that the company, in prom otional material, had "minimized potentially fatal risks, and made misleading cl aims" that the medication was more safe in treating mental illness than other dr

ugs in the same category. Risperdal is the leading drug used to combat schizophr enia and other types of psychotic disorders, earning Janssen about $2.1 billion in annual sales. The drug was first marketed about eight years ago, and is presc ribed to more than 10 million people worldwide. The "important correction of dru g information" came shortly after federal regulators had accused Janssen of "dis seminating" advertising and marketing material that was "false or misleading." Don't miss the highly revealing article on this vital topic by the New England J ournal of Medicine's former editor in chief Marica Angell. Click here

Allegations of Fake Research Hit New High 2005-07-10, MSNBC/AP http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8474936 Doctors accused of making up data in medical studies. Allegations of misconduct by U.S. researchers reached record highs last year as the Department of Health a nd Human Services received 274 complaints - 50 percent higher than 2003 and the most since 1989 when the federal government established a program to deal with s cientific misconduct. Chris Pascal, director of the federal Office of Research I ntegrity, said its 28 staffers and $7 million annual budget haven't kept pace wi th the allegations. The result: Only 23 cases were closed last year. Of those, e ight individuals were found guilty of research misconduct. In the past 15 years, the office has confirmed about 185 cases of scientific misconduct. Research sug gests this is but a small fraction of all the incidents of fabrication, falsific ation and plagiarism. In a survey published June 9 in the journal Nature, about 1.5 percent of 3,247 researchers who responded admitted to falsification or plag iarism. (One in three admitted to some type of professional misbehavior.)

Debate over vaccines, autism won't die 2005-06-26, MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8336821 Mercury in shots blamed for rise in brain disorder among children. Vested intere sts make it tough to know who to believe. Many parents have filed lawsuits. Many scientists have ties to vaccine makers or are selling their expertise in court cases. Government officials don t want people to turn away from vaccines, which ha ve clearly benefitted public health. Flu vaccine sold in multidose vials still c ontains the [mercury] preservative, and the government urges flu shots for pregn ant women and young children even though not enough thimerosal-free ones are ava ilable, critics say. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr....who has pushed the issue on news s hows and in an article in Rolling Stone magazine, said that when he looked at th e government s evidence it was laughably flawed. It was clear to me that the report s they re relying on are cigarette science, he said, referring to tobacco companies pa st arguments that there was no proof cigarettes caused cancer.

State Secret: Thousands Secretly Sterilized 2005-05-15, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Health/story?id=708780 From the early 1900s to the 1970s, some 65,000 men and women were sterilized in this country, many without their knowledge, as part of a government eugenics pro gram to keep so-called undesirables from reproducing. "The procedures that were done here were done to poor folks," said Steven Selden, professor at the Univers ity of Maryland. "They were thought to be poor because they had bad genes or bad

inheritance, if you will. And so they would be the focus of the sterilization." Even though the practice ended more than 30 years ago, some say the time has co me to make amends. North Carolina was one of the first states out of 33 that onc e practiced sterilization to offer an apology. State Rep. Larry Womble is crafti ng a bill to provide financial reparations.

2 Paths of Bayer Drug in 80's: Riskier One Steered Overseas 2003-06-22, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9A00E4DA1F3EF931A15... A division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood -clotting medicine for hemophiliacs -- medicine that carried a high risk of tran smitting AIDS -- to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980's while selling a new , safer product in the West. The Bayer unit, Cutter Biological, introduced its s afer medicine in late February 1984 as evidence mounted that the earlier version was infecting hemophiliacs with H.I.V. Yet for over a year, the company continu ed to sell the old medicine overseas. Cutter officials were trying to avoid bein g stuck with large stores of a product. Yet even after it began selling the new product, the company kept making the old medicine for several months more. In Ho ng Kong and Taiwan alone, more than 100 hemophiliacs got H.I.V. after using Cutt er's old medicine. Many have since died. Cutter also continued to sell the older product after February 1984 in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and Argent ina. While admitting no wrongdoing, Bayer and three other companies that made th e concentrate have paid hemophiliacs about $600 million to settle more than 15 y ears of lawsuits accusing them of making a dangerous product. Federal regulators helped keep the overseas sales out of the public eye. The Food and Drug Adminis tration's regulator of blood products, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr....asked that the i ssue be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public."

Cancer Cure? 1923-06-04, Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,715686,00.html A reported remedy for cancer developed by Dr. W. Blair Bell, of Liverpool, seems , on the basis of the meager information at hand, to be the most promising of al l recent " cures" that have been suggested. Dr. Bell's specific is a solution of colloidal lead (a colloid is a gluelike, noncrystalline organic substance that will not pass through a membrane), which appears to have a marked effect on mali gnant growths like cancer. Dr. Bell has been experimenting with it for 18 years and has recently employed it in 50 cases given up by surgeons as hopeless, check ing the cancer in every case, with no recurrence. William Blair Bell is a promin ent surgeon and professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the University of Live rpool. He has a high reputation in his specialties, is an authority on the pitui tary gland, is author of several standard medical works, including The Sex Compl ex, has held professorships and won prizes at important hospitals and medical sc hools in London, Durham, Belfast. That he has not made public his discovery is b ecause he desired to treat many more patients before submitting it to the medica l and surgical professions. Dr. Bell's professional standing is in itself strong presumptive evidence of the importance of his treatment, and first-hand details will be eagerly awaited. Note: For more powerful news articles from the major media on potential cancer c ures, click here.

Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers' Prying Eyes 2007-05-22, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/21/AR20070521017... Pediatrician Rupin Thakkar's first inkling that the pharmaceutical industry was peering over his shoulder ... came in a letter from a drug representative about the generic drops Thakkar prescribes to treat infectious pinkeye. In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days o f school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories. "My initial thought was 'How does she know what I'm prescribing?' " Thakkar said. "It feels intrusive ... I just feel stron gly that medical encounters need to be private." He is not alone. Many doctors o bject to drugmakers' common practice of contracting with data-mining companies t o track exactly which medicines physicians prescribe and in what quantities -- i nformation marketers and salespeople use to fine-tune their efforts. The concern s are not merely about privacy. Proponents say using such detailed data for drug marketing serves mainly to influence physicians to prescribe more expensive med icines, not necessarily to provide the best treatment. "We don't like the practi ce, and we want it to stop," said Jean Silver-Isenstadt, executive director of t he National Physicians Alliance. (Thakkar is on the group's board of directors.) "We think it's a contaminant to the doctor-patient relationship, and it's drivi ng up costs." The American Medical Association makes millions of dollars each ye ar by helping data-mining companies link prescribing data to individual physicia ns. It does so by licensing access to the AMA Physician Masterfile, a database c ontaining names, birth dates, educational background, specialties and addresses for more than 800,000 doctors. Note: For more reliable, verifiable information about major corruption in the dr ug industry, click here.

Consumer group sues FDA over biotech foods 2006-06-07, San Diego Union Tribune/Reuters http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/biotech/20060607-1051-food-gmo-la... A lawsuit filed Wednesday seeks to force the U.S. government to conduct mandator y reviews of genetically engineered foods and require labeling of such foods onc e they are approved. The Center for Food Safety's suit against the Food and Drug Administration comes after years of lobbying by environmental and consumer grou ps for more stringent regulation and labeling of biotech crops. Genetically modi fied crops, such as soybeans, corn, and canola, are grown widely throughout the United States, and the world leader in development and marketing of the gene-alt ered crops is...Monsanto. Yet the United States requires no independent testing of these crops or the food products they are used in, does not mandate what data companies must submit for review, and does not require that foods that contain biotech crops be labeled. CFS and more than fifty consumer and environmental gro ups, filed a legal petition with the FDA in March 2000, asking the agency to ado pt a more rigorous approach to biotech food regulation, but the CFS said Wednesd ay that the FDA had ignored the petition. At various times over the last several years, different scientists, including some within the FDA, have warned that al tering the genetic makeup of a food plant by inserting genes from one organism i nto another...could trigger unexpected food allergies, create toxins in food, or spread antibiotic-resistant disease. CFS said the tests that exposed that poten tial hazard have not been conducted on any of the genetically modified foods cur rently marketed. Note: Many laboratory animals died in scientific tests of GM foods, yet this new s has yet to be reported in the major media. If you want to understand the risks

involved with the ever-increasing numbers of genetically modified organisms in the food you eat, don't miss: http://www.WantToKnow.info/deception10pg

Ministers back 'terminator' GM crops 2006-03-05, Independent (one of the UK's leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article349331.ece Ministers are trying to scrap an international agreement banning the world's mos t controversial genetic modification of crops, grimly nicknamed "terminator tech nology", a move which threatens to increase hunger in the Third World. The Gover nment is to push for terminator crops to be considered for approval on a "case-b y-case basis" at two meetings this month; its position closely mirrors the stanc e of the United States and other GM [genetically modified organisms]-promoting c ountries. Terminator technology...would stop hundreds of millions of poor farmer s from saving seeds from their crops for resowing for the following harvest, for cing them to buy new ones from biotech companies every year. The technique is of ficially known as genetic use restriction technology (Gurt), making crops produc e sterile seeds. It could be applied to any crop, including maize and rice, wide ly grown in developing countries. The UK working group on terminator technology. ..says: "It could destroy traditional farming methods, damage farmers' livelihoo ds and threaten food security, particularly in developing countries." [Former UK Minister of Environment Michael] Meacher said: "For the first time in the histo ry of the world, farmers would be stopped from using their own seeds." Note: For more on this alarming development: http://www.WantToKnow.info/deceptio n10pg

Royal Rife: Discovering a Cure for Cancer Can Be Dangerous to Your Health 2000-10-09, WantToKnow.info/Jeff Rense http://www.WantToKnow.info/cancercuresroyalrife Note: We usually limit ourselves to information which comes from sources known a nd respected by the public. For this message, we're making an exception. Jeff Re nse of rense.com is a radio personality and researcher of major cover-ups with n o strong credentials other than a large following of people convinced of the qua lity of his work. His popular website receives millions of visits a month. Below is vital information everyone should know. Royal Raymond Rife was a brilliant scientist born in 1888 and died in 1971. He r eceived 14 major awards and honors and was given an honorary Doctorate by the Un iversity of Heidelberg for his work. By 1933, he had ... constructed the incredi bly complex Universal Microscope, which...was capable of magnifying objects 60,0 00 times their normal size. With this incredible microscope, Rife became the fir st human being to actually see a live virus. In 1934, the University of Southern California appointed a Special Medical Research Committee to bring terminal can cer patients ... to Rife's San Diego Laboratory and clinic for treatment. The te am included doctors and pathologists assigned to examine the patients - if still alive - in 90 days. After the 90 days of treatment, the Committee concluded tha t 86.5% of the patients had been completely cured. On November 20, 1931, forty-f our of the nation's most respected medical authorities honored Royal Rife with a banquet billed as The End To All Diseases. But by 1939, almost all of these dis tinguished doctors and scientists were denying that they had ever met Rife. The last thing in the world that the pharmaceutical industry wanted was ... a painle ss therapy that cured ... terminal cancer patients and cost nothing to use but a little electricity. It might give people the idea that they didn't need drugs. Medical journals, supported almost entirely by drug company revenues and control

led by the AMA, refused to publish any paper by anyone on Rife's therapy. Rife t echnology became public knowledge again in 1986 with the publication of The Canc er Cure That Worked, by Barry Lynes, and other material about Royal Rife and his monumental work. Note: For excellent video documentaries, including interviews with Royal Rife: h ttp://www.rifevideos.com. For an excellent website focused on Rife's work, click here. For more reliable, verifiable information on health cover-ups, click here .

NIH: Scientists Escape Ethics Punishment 2006-09-12, CBS News/Associated Press http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/12/ap/tech/mainD8K3IQO00.shtml Most of the federal scientists who improperly accepted personal money from drug or biotechnology companies walked away with reprimands or were allowed to retire unscathed. Only two of the 44 scientists found to have violated rules governing private consulting deals are being investigated for possible criminal activity, and they remain on the government payroll. NIH spokesman John Burklow said his agency wanted eight others reviewed for possible crimes, but those cases were re jected by the investigating office at the U.S. Health and Human Services Departm ent. The two still outstanding...both committed "serious misconduct," so grave t hat they would be fired if they were civilians, NIH internal ethics reports cont end. [A Congressional] subcommittee is expected to question NIH officials about documents showing it approved several taxpayer-paid trips for [Dr. Trey] Sunderl and to attend conferences and events in places like Hawaii and Toronto, even aft er recommending his firing. Of the 44 alleged offenders...the majority received reprimands or warnings for failing to properly obtain approvals for their outsid e consulting work. NIH ethics reports allege...two scientists had unauthorized, unreported deals with drug companies -- Sunderland earning more than $600,000 ov er eight years for consulting and speeches and [Dr. Thomas] Walsh more than $100 ,000 in five years -- and that their consulting improperly overlapped with gover nment duties. Note: The Los Angeles Times later reported that Dr. Sunderland was the first NIH scientist in 14 years to be found guily of conflict of interest laws. For more vital information on major collusion between government and the pharmaceutical c ompanies: http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup.

EPA Charges DuPont Hid Teflon's Carcinogenic Risks 2005-01-18, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0501180271jan18,1,1986717.... More than 50 years after DuPont started producing Teflon ... federal officials a re accusing the company of hiding information suggesting that [the chemical] mig ht cause cancer, birth defects and other ailments. Environmental regulators are particularly alarmed because scientists are finding perfluorooctanoic acid, or P FOA, in the blood of people worldwide and it takes years for the chemical to lea ve the body. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported last week that ex posure even to low levels of PFOA could be harmful. With virtually no government oversight, PFOA has been used since the early 1950s. Questions about potential effects on human health and the environment often aren't raised until years afte r a chemical is introduced to the marketplace. The long and mostly secret histor y of PFOA began to unravel down the road from DuPont's Teflon plant...where a Pa rkersburg family began asking questions in the late 1990s about a mysterious was ting disease killing their cattle. Their lawsuit ended with a monetary settlemen

t ... but the legal battle uncovered a trove of industry documents about PFOA. O ne document detailed how DuPont scientists started warning company executives to avoid human contact with PFOA as early as 1961. Industry tests later determined the chemical accumulates in the body [and] doesn't break down in the environmen t. Tests on lab animals have found links to illnesses including liver and testic ular cancer, reduced weight of newborns and immune-system suppression. The findi ngs concern EPA officials because rats flush the chemical out of their bodies wi thin days, while PFOA stays in human blood for at least four years. Note: As this article is no longer available on the Chicago Tribune website, to read it in full, click here.

Psychiatrists, Children and Drug Industry s Role 2007-05-10, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/health/10psyche.html?ex=1336449600&en=027d7... When Anya Bailey developed an eating disorder after her 12th birthday, her mothe r took her to a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota who prescribed a pow erful antipsychotic drug called Risperdal. Created for schizophrenia, Risperdal is not approved to treat eating disorders, but increased appetite is a common si de effect and doctors may prescribe drugs as they see fit. Anya gained weight bu t within two years developed a crippling knot in her back. She now receives regu lar injections of Botox to unclench her back muscles. She often awakens crying i n pain. Isabella Bailey, Anya s mother, said she had no idea that children might b e especially susceptible to Risperdal s side effects. Nor did she know that Risper dal and similar medicines were not approved at the time to treat children. Just as surprising, Ms. Bailey said, was learning that the university psychiatrist wh o supervised Anya s care received more than $7,000 from 2003 to 2004 from Johnson & Johnson, Risperdal s maker, in return for lectures about one of the company s drug s. The intersection of money and medicine, and its effect on the well-being of p atients, has become one of the most contentious issues in health care. Nowhere i s that more true than in psychiatry, where increasing payments to doctors have c oincided with the growing use in children of a relatively new class of drugs kno wn as atypical antipsychotics. These best-selling drugs, including Risperdal, Se roquel, Zyprexa, Abilify and Geodon, are now being prescribed to more than half a million children in the United States to help parents deal with behavior probl ems despite profound risks and almost no approved uses for minors. Note: For lots more reliable information on cover-ups affecting your health, cli ck here. To read an inspiring story on the benefits of healthy school diet for s tudents' health, behavior and studies, click here.

Scientists warn US Congress of cancer risk for cell phone use 2008-09-25, Breitbart News/Agence France Presse http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080925220553.si7sokjt&show_article=1 Scientists on Thursday warned US legislators of the risks of brain cancer from c ell phone use, highlighting the potential risk for children who use mobile phone s. "We urgently need more research," said David Carpenter, director of the Insti tute of Health and Environment at the University of Albany, in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy. "We must not repeat the situation we had with the relationship between smoking and lung cancer," Carpenter said. Rona ld Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said th at most studies "claiming that there is no link between cell phones and brain tu mors are outdated, had methodological concerns and did not include sufficient nu mbers of long-term cell phone users." Many studies denying a link "defined regul

ar cell phones as 'once a week,'" added Herberman. "I cannot tell this committee that cell phones are definitely dangerous. But, I certainly cannot tell you tha t they are safe," he said. Carpenter and Herberman both told the committee the b rain cancer risk from cell phone use is far greater for children than for adults . Herberman held up a model for lawmakers showing how radiation from a cell phon e penetrates far deeper into the brain of a 5-year-old than that of an adult. "E very child is using cell phones all of the time, and there are three billion cel l phone users in the world," said Herberman. He added that, like the messages th at warn of health risks on cigarette packs, cell phones "need a precautionary me ssage." Note: For a treasure trove of important reports on health issues, click here.

Clones' Offspring May Be In Food Supply: FDA 2008-09-03, Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN0231832820080902 Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may have entered the U.S. foo d supply, the U.S. government said on Tuesday, but [then claimed] it would be im possible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in January [that] meat and milk from cloned cattle, swine and goats and their offspring were as safe as pro ducts from traditional animals. Before then, farmers and ranchers had followed a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clones and their offspring. While the FDA e valuated the safety of food from clones and their offspring, the U.S. Agricultur e Department was in charge of managing the transition of these animals into the food supply. "It is theoretically possible" offspring from clones are in the foo d supply, said Siobhan DeLancey, an FDA spokeswoman. Cloning animals involves ta king the nuclei of cells from adults and fusing them into egg cells that are imp lanted into a surrogate mother. There are an estimated 600 cloned animals in the United States. Critics contend not enough is known about the technology to ensu re it is safe, and they also say the FDA needs to address concerns over animal c ruelty and ethical issues. "It worries me that this technology is out of control in so many ways," said Charles Margulis, a spokesman with the Center for Enviro nmental Health. Note: For a revealing summary of the health risks associated with genetically mo dified foods, click here.

Contaminated sand slated for Idaho dump site 2008-05-02, Seattle Times/Associated Press http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004387018_apidtoxicsand1stld... Nearly 80 rail cars loaded with contaminated sand from Kuwait are headed toward a dump in southwestern Idaho. American Ecology Corp. is shipping about 6,700 ton s of sand containing traces of depleted uranium and lead to a hazardous waste di sposal site 70 miles southeast of Boise. The company has previously disposed of low-level radioactive waste and hazardous materials from U.S. military bases ove rseas at facilities in Idaho, Nevada and Texas, said American Ecology spokesman Chad Hyslop, who is based in Boise. "As you can imagine, the host countries of t hose bases don't want the waste in their country," Hyslop said. Neither do leade rs of the Snake River Alliance, a nuclear watchdog group, who have vowed to moni tor the site. "Depleted uranium is both a toxic metal and a radioactive substanc e," said Andrea Shipley, the group's executive director. "That is a concern." Th e sand coming to Idaho from Camp Doha, a U.S. Army Base in Kuwait, was contamina ted with uranium after military vehicles and munitions caught fire during the fi

rst Iraq war in 1991. Depleted uranium, twice as dense as lead, has been used as a component in armor plating to protect tanks and for armor-piercing projectile s. American Ecology operates the only commercial hazardous waste disposal site i n Idaho on 1,100 acres of land in the Owyhee desert. Disposal operations cover 1 00 acres in the middle of the property, Hyslop said, and about a third of the ma terial disposed at the Idaho site is from the U.S. military. The company dispose d of uranium-contaminated Bradley fighting vehicles there in 2006. Note: If Kuwait is rejecting this contaminated sand, why is the U.S. taking it?

'Doomsday' Vault Opens to Protect Seeds 2008-02-26, Associated Press http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jRw_99fcIqca5u6uzuVRuiogts2gD8V1HNK80 It's been dubbed a Noah's Ark for plant life and built to withstand an earthquak e or a nuclear attack. Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the "doomsday" vault is designed by Norway to protect the world's seeds from gl obal catastrophe. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup to the world's 1,400 other seed banks, was to be officially inaugurated in a ceremony Tuesday on the northern rim of civilization attended by about 150 guests from 33 countries. The frozen vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, war, natural disasters and other thr eats. Norway's government owns the vault in Svalbard, a frigid archipelago 620 m iles from the North Pole. The Nordic country paid $9.1 million for construction, which took less than a year. Other countries can deposit seeds for free and res erve the right to withdraw them upon need. Giant air conditioning units have chi lled the vault to just below zero, a temperature at which experts say many seeds could survive for 1,000 years. Inside the concrete entrance ... a roughly 400-f oot-long tunnel of steel and concrete leads to three separate 32-by-88-foot cham bers where the seeds will be stored. The first 600 boxes with 12 tons of seeds a lready have arrived from 20 seed banks around the world, Norwegian Agriculture M inister Terje Riis-Johansen said. Each chamber can hold 1.5 million packets hold ing all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat.

Parents Concerned Over Potentially Toxic Baby Bottles 2008-02-07, ABC News http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=4259036&page=1 Dozens of environmental health organizations in the United States and Canada are calling for an immediate moratorium on the use of a chemical, bisphenol A or BP A in food and beverage containers, including baby bottles. They say a new study found that, when exposed to heat, baby bottles release a chemical that, research ers say, has been linked to obesity, diabetes and developmental problems in lab animals. "When bottles are used extensively over time, and when they're heated, higher levels of this chemical leach out, exposing young infants to elevated lev els of this unnecessary toxic chemical," says Mike Shaade at the Center for Heal th Environment and Justice. BPA is used to make plastic in 95 percent of baby bo ttles now on the market. But it is up for debate whether it is harmful or not. B PA is already in most of us: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention foun d BPA in the urine of 95 percent of people it tested. Dr. Maida Galvez is a pedi atrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, who studies whether traces of BPA found in children's urine is harmful to them. "We know the animal studies r aise concerns, but there aren't human studies showing effects yet ... so, when w e don't have the evidence, what we recommend is that parents try to err on the s ide of caution," she says.

Note: For many highly informative reports on health, click here.

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler 2008-01-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?ex=1359090000&e... A sea change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted ma y be in store something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily lif e. And it isn t oil. It s meat. Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent year s, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, c onfined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume en ormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhous e gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dep endency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world s tropical rai n forests. The world s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubl ed over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling i n the last 20 years.) At about 5 percent of the world s population, [Americans] pro cess (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 perc ent of the world s total. Growing meat (it s hard to use the word raising when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it s a challenge to enum erate them all. An estimated 30 percent of the earth s ice-free land is directly o r indirectly involved in livestock production. Livestock production generates ne arly a fifth of the world s greenhouse gases more than transportation. Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the ma jority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens.

DNA Molecules Display Telepathic Abilities 2008-01-25, Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,325349,00.html DNA molecules can display what almost seems like telepathy, research now reveals . Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and the n gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules, scientis ts find. Previously, under the classic understanding of DNA, scientists had no r eason to suspect that double helixes of the molecule could sort themselves by ty pe, let alone seek each other out. Scientists investigated double-stranded DNA t agged with fluorescent compounds. These molecules were placed in salt water that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experimen t or help the DNA molecules communicate. Curiously, DNA with identical sequences of bases were roughly twice as likely to gather together as DNA molecules with different sequences. Although it looks as if spooky action or telepathic recogni tion is going on, DNA operates under the laws of physics, not the supernatural. The bases that make up a strand of DNA each cause the corkscrew to bend one way or the other. Double-stranded DNA with identical sequences each result in corksc rews "whose ridges and grooves match up," said researcher Sergey Leikin, a physi cal biochemist. Identical DNA double helixes have matching curves, meaning they repel each other the least, Leikin explained. The scientists conjecture such "te lepathy" might help DNA molecules line up properly before they get shuffled arou nd. This could help avoid errors in how DNA combines, errors that underpin cance r, aging and other health problems.

Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells 2008-01-18, Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/17/AR20080117003... Scientists at a California company reported yesterday that they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a si gnificant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patient s suffering from various diseases. Creation of the embryos -- grown from cells t aken from the company's chief executive and one of its investors -- also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creati on of cloned babies. The study leader, who is also the medical director of a fer tility clinic ... emphasized that he has no interest in cloning people. "It's un ethical and it's illegal, and we hope no one else does it either," said Samuel H . Wood, chief executive of Stemagen in La Jolla, whose skin cells were cloned an d who led the study. The closely held company hopes to make embryos that are clo nes, or genetic twins, of patients, then harvest stem cells from those embryos a nd grow them into replacement tissues. Opponents of research on human embryos la shed out at the approach. "This study seems to confirm that human cloning ... is technically possible," said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catho lic Bishops. "It does not answer the ethical or social questions about the massproduction of developing human lives in order to destroy them. It only tells us that these questions are more urgent than ever." Other critics noted that scient ists in Japan and Wisconsin recently discovered a way to "reprogram" stem cells directly from skin cells, without having to make embryos as a middle step. "In l ight of the recent cell reprogramming developments, cloning-based stem cell rese arch is less justified than ever," said Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Geneti cs and Society.

The Water's a Must, but the Bottle Could Be Trouble 2007-12-25, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/24/AR20071224018... Catching his breath at a fitness club, Matt McHugh took a gulp of water from his trusty Nalgene plastic bottle and pondered the idea of switching to an alternat ive made of glass, stainless steel or another kind of plastic. Worries about a h ormone-mimicking chemical used in the bottles' construction led a major Canadian retailer to remove polycarbonate containers made by Nalgene and other manufactu rers from store shelves in early December. Vancouver-based Mountain Equipment Co -op is waiting for Canadian health regulators to finish a preliminary review in May before it reconsiders restocking its 11 stores with the reusable, transparen t bottles made with bisphenol A, or BPA. There is little dispute that the chemic al can disrupt the hormonal system, but scientists differ markedly on whether ve ry low doses found in food and beverage containers can be harmful. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sides with the plastics industry that BPA-based product s do not pose a health risk. But an expert panel of researchers reported at a U. S. government conference that the potential for BPA to affect human health is a concern and that more research is needed. The panel cited evidence that American s have levels of BPA higher than those found to cause harm in lab animals. Patag onia, an outdoor-gear retailer based in Ventura, Calif., pulled polycarbonate wa ter bottles from its 40 stores worldwide in December 2005 and, a month later, th e Whole Foods Markets chain stopped selling polycarbonate baby bottles and child ren's drinking cups. "Given there are comparably priced, greener alternatives, I 'm quite convinced that within a couple of years, we're going to see the end of this chemical in consumer products," said Rick Smith, executive director of Toro nto-based Environmental Defense Canada. Note: For many revealing major-media reports on health issues, click here.

EPA approves new pesticide despite scientists' concerns 2007-10-06, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pesticide6oct06,0,2247860.story Despite the protests of more than 50 scientists, including five Nobel laureates in chemistry, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday approved use of a new, highly toxic fumigant, mainly for strawberry fields. The new pesticide, methyl iodide, is designed for growers, mainly in California and Florida, who ne ed to replace methyl bromide, which has been banned under an international treat y because it damages the Earth's ozone layer. In a letter sent last month to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, 54 scientists, mostly chemists, warned that "pre gnant women and the fetus, children, the elderly, farmworkers and other people l iving near application sites would be at serious risk." Methyl iodide is a neuro toxin and carcinogen that has caused thyroid tumors, neurological damage and mis carriages in lab animals. But EPA officials said Friday that they carefully eval uated the risks and decided to approve its use for one year, imposing restrictio ns such as buffer zones to protect farmworkers and neighbors. Growers, particula rly those who grow strawberries and tomatoes, have been searching for 15 years f or a new soil fumigant to replace methyl bromide. Fumigants are valuable to grow ers because they can be injected into the soil before planting to sterilize the field and kill a broad spectrum of insects and diseases without leaving residue on crops. But fumigants are among the most potentially dangerous pesticides in u se today because the toxic gas can evaporate from the soil, exposing farmworkers and drifting into neighborhoods. Methyl iodide ... will be allowed on fields gr owing strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, ornamentals, turf, trees and vines.

Autism Debate Strains a Family and Its Charity 2007-06-18, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/us/18autism.html?ex=1339819200&en=9e51ad7f1... A year after their grandson Christian received a diagnosis of autism in 2004, Bo b Wright, then chairman of NBC/Universal, and his wife, Suzanne, founded Autism Speaks, a mega-charity dedicated to curing the dreaded neurological disorder tha t affects one of every 150 children in America today. The Wrights venture was als o an effort to end the internecine warfare in the world of autism where some are convinced that the disorder is genetic and best treated with intensive therapy, and others blame preservatives in vaccinations and swear by supplements and die t to cleanse the body of heavy metals. With its high-powered board ... the chari ty was a powerful voice, especially in Washington. It also made strides toward i ts goal of unity by merging with three existing autism organizations and raising millions of dollars for research into all potential causes and treatments. The Wrights call it the big tent approach. But now the fissures in the autism communit y have made their way into the Wright family, where father and daughter are not speaking after a public battle over themes familiar to thousands of families wit h autistic children. The Wrights daughter, Katie, the mother of Christian, says h er parents have not given enough support to the people who believe, as she does, that the environment specifically a synthetic mercury preservative in vaccines is to blame. No major scientific studies have linked pediatric vaccination and a utism, but many parents and their advocates persist, and a federal vaccine court i s now reviewing nearly 4,000 such claims. Note: For a highly revealing interview with Katie Wright on this critical topic, click here. For a treasure trove of reliable and verifiable articles on autism, click here.

From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine

2007-05-06, The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06poison.html?ex=1336104000&... The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern wor ld, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze. It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident. Over the year s, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituti ng the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products. Toxic syrup has fi gured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades . Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise orig in of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counter feit drugs. Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials th ere unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine wi th devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 o f which have been confirmed so far. Panama s death toll leads directly to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.

Administration Opposes Plan for Negotiating Medicare Drug Prices 2006-11-13, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/washington/13medicare.html?ex=1321074000&en... The Bush administration said on Sunday that it would strenuously oppose one of t he Democrats top priorities for the new Congress: legislation authorizing the gov ernment to negotiate with drug companies to secure lower drug prices for Medicar e beneficiaries. In an interview, Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health an d human services, said he saw no prospect of compromise on the issue. Dozens of plans are available in every state. They charge different premiums and co-paymen ts and cover different drugs. The 2003 Medicare law explicitly prohibits the fed eral government from negotiating drug prices or establishing a list of preferred drugs. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is in line to b ecome the House speaker, has said the House will take up legislation to repeal t hat ban in its first 100 hours under Democratic control. Senate Democrats have e xpressed a similar desire. The eight Democrats newly elected to the Senate all s ay Medicare should have the power to negotiate with drug makers. Note: To understand how the drug companies have become the most powerful lobby i n government and will compromise our health for their profits, read what a top M D has to say by clicking here.

US study supports claims of MMR link to autism 2006-05-29, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2201494,00.html American researchers say that their study supports the findings of Andrew Wakefi eld, the discredited gastroenterologist who raised fears that the measles, mumps and rubella injection might be causing autism. His research, published in The L ancet in 1998, detected traces of the measles virus in the guts of 12 children w ith autism. The latest study, led by Arthur Krigsman, of New York University Sch ool of Medicine, involved 275 children. Serious intestinal inflammations were fo und in some of the autistic children and biopsies of gut tissue were performed o n 82 of them. Of these, 70 are said to have shown evidence of the measles virus, which so far has been confirmed in 14 cases by more stringent DNA tests. Steve Walker, assistant professor at Wake Forest University Medical Centre, North Caro

lina, who analysed the gut samples, said the work mirrored Dr Wakefield's study. All the children involved were diagnosed with autism and had come to Dr Krigsma n and Dr Walker seeking help for symptoms of serious digestive problems for whic h no explanation could be found. Mainstream science has repeatedly examined the theory of a link between MMR and autism and found no evidence to back it. Note: Though "mainstream science" has allegedly found no links, many other scien tific and media sources have found strong evidence of a link. See http://www.Wan tToKnow.info/060215vaccinesmercurydangers

Special Report: 'Toxic Sky' 2006-05-24, NBC Los Angeles http://www.nbc4.tv/news/9155725/detail.html It's a quiet mountain community, but some residents claim something's happening in the sky that's making them sick. Mystery clouds and unusual contrails ... Is it a weather experiment on a massive scale? In a Channel 4 News investigation, P aul Moyer looks into why some say the government is manipulating the weather. Wa tch: Video Report. References: U.S. Senate Committee testimony on Weather Modifi cation, Owning the Weather in 2025 (U.S. Airforce), California Skywatch (Rosalin d Peterson), Alpenhorn News Stories. Note: In certain circles, the phenomenon of chemtrails is hotly debated. Very ra rely does it make the news. The fact that NBC in LA is reporting on this is big. Don't miss the video news report available free online at: http://www.nbc4.tv/v ideo/9265818/detail.html.

Warning: This bill could make you sick 2005-03-21, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerhoff21mar21,0,33357... The House of Representatives this month passed the National Uniformity for Foods Act, a measure that would kill or cancel significant parts of 200 food-safety l aws in 50 states. This ill-advised bill, supported by millions of food-industry dollars, passed without a single hearing. Now it's in the hands of the Senate. I f it passes there, among its many victims would be California's requirement that foods containing harmful chemicals display a warning for consumers. Those warni ngs are mandated by Proposition 65, enacted...by an overwhelming majority of vot ers in 1986. In passing the measure, Californians wanted to encourage manufactur ers to remove dangerous substances from their products before they reached super market shelves. Proposition 65's requirement that companies either warn consumer s or remove harmful chemicals works, and it remains a vital protection. The clea r lesson is that states often do more to protect consumers than do federal regul ators. So why is Congress even considering passing a bill denying California and other states the right to protect citizens? Follow the money. All told, food co mpanies have forked over $5.2 million to the bill's 226 co-sponsors.

Autism rate doubles among state's kids 2003-05-14, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/14/MN27754.DTL The number of kids in California being treated for autism doubled between 1998 a nd 2002, and there is still no end in sight to the growing trend, state official s reported. The report ... found that 10,360 autistic children sought services i

n 1998. By the end of last year the number had jumped to 20,377, a 97 percent in crease, far outstripping the growth rate in population or births. Concern over r ising autism rates has been growing since the late 1990s as parents, educators a nd pediatricians began reporting increasing numbers of affected children across the country. As many as 20 different genes are known to play a role, but it also is believed that environmental factors are at work. Steep increases have also b een documented in other industrialized countries such as Japan and Israel. "Cali fornia is absolutely not special," Huff said. "In fact, we're middle of the road in terms of our rates." Scientists continue to search for a cause. Theories abo und, including the possibility that childhood immunizations may be involved. How ever, recent studies into the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine have not shown a link. Others have suggested that environmental toxins or food additives might be the cause. Some research has focused on possible causes in the womb, in cluding a mother's immune response to common infections that could affect the de veloping fetus. Researchers connected to the MIND Institute found in an initial study that high levels of certain proteins in the blood of newborns could predic t which ones went on to develop autism and mental retardation. Note: Though industry-funded studies have shown no link between autism and vacci nes, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For reliable information on th is key topic, click here.

Inside Medicine: Some 'diseases' invented for profit 2007-05-26, Sacramento Bee (Sacramento's leading newspaper) http://www.sacbee.com/107/story/193101.html By Dr. Michael Wilkes. When is a disease really a disease? Young doctors in trai ning work hard, and so do lots of other people. When people work 24 hours in a r ow ... the body feels tired. Is this fatigue an abnormal physiologic state requi ring medication and treatment, or is it a normal part of belonging to the human race? If abnormal, then doctors and pharmaceutical companies argue that the fati gue requires treatment. If it is normal -- despite a movement to label it as an illness -- then post-work fatigue belongs to the growing phenomenon of disease-m ongering. "Disease-mongering" ... is the process of trying to convince healthy p eople that they are sick, or people with minor problems that they have extremely worrisome symptoms. This is all in an attempt to sell treatments. Countless exa mples of disease-mongering are driven by the pharmaceutical industry's drive to sell drugs. Conditions such as female sexual dysfunction syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, toenail fungus, baldness and social anxiety disorder (a.k.a. shyness) are a few places where the medical community has stepped in, thereby t urning normal or mild conditions into diseases for which medication is the treat ment. Most pharmaceutical companies devote huge amounts of money to prevent, con trol and cure diseases. When their profits don't match corporate expectations, t hey invent "new" diseases to be cured by existing drugs. What happens to real di seases when [the media] are filled with information promoting disease mongering? Government funding for public health campaigns pales by comparison with the bil lions spent by pharmaceutical companies on disease mongering intended to increas e the markets for their products. Note: For more reliable information about major corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.

Top Democrat Finds F.D.A.'s Efforts Have Plunged 2006-06-27, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/health/policy/27fda.html?ex=1309060800&en=e...

A 15-month inquiry by a top House Democrat has found that enforcement of the nat ion's food and drug laws declined sharply during the first five years of the Bus h administration. For instance, the investigation found, the number of warning l etters that the Food and Drug Administration issued to drug companies, medical d evice makers and others dropped 54 percent, to 535 in 2005 from 1,154 in 2000. T he seizure of mislabeled, defective or dangerous products dipped 44 percent. The research found no evidence that such declines could be attributed to increased compliance with regulations. Investigators at the F.D.A. continued to uncover ab out the same number of problems at drug and device companies as before...but top officials of the agency increasingly overruled the investigators' enforcement r ecommendations. The investigation found that by almost every measure, enforcemen t actions had significantly declined from 2000 to 2005. Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, dir ector of the Health Research Group at the watchdog organization Public Citizen, noted that the agency now received about $380 million a year in fees from drug m akers. "The public," Dr. Wolfe said, "is getting the kind of F.D.A. that the ind ustry is paying for them to get." Note: For lots more on collusion between government and the medical industry, se e our Health Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthinformation

Homeland Security to be lead in flu crisis 2005-10-11, MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9654456/ If the nightmare of an avian flu pandemic emerges from the dark chapters of doom sday scenarios, it will fall to the Department of the Homeland Security, not the medical establishment, to manage the crisis, according to federal documents and interviews with government officials. Under the National Response Plan, which a lso plans for actions in case of pandemics, DHS assumes top authority when an inc ident of national significance is declared. The first such incident of national si gnificance was declared in August after Hurricane Katrina hit; however, federal c oordination among agencies and state and local governments broke down on so many levels that even President Bush was forced to acknowledge that the plan was fla wed. Federal officials have been role playing different flu outbreak scenarios f or the past several months. Last year s plan called for closing of schools, restri cting travel and...lock-down quarantine measures. Those extreme measures jumped into the spotlight...when President Bush suggested that federal military troops -- not just the National Guard -- may have to be called in to enforce a quaranti ne. Note: Isn't it interesting how the government seems to be predicting that the av ian flu, which has killed less than 100 people worldwide, is going to mutate and cause massive deaths? How do they know this? Could this be another way of pushi ng us into fear and giving up our civil liberties?

Moore film attacks health U.S. care 2007-05-19, ABC News/ Reuters http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=3192032 Director Michael Moore says the U.S. health care system is driven by greed in hi s new documentary "SiCKO," and asks of Americans in general, "Where is our soul? " He also said he could go to jail for taking a group of volunteers suffering il l health after helping in the September 11, 2001 rescue efforts on an unauthoriz ed trip to Cuba, where they received exemplary treatment at virtually no cost. I n "SiCKO" he turns his attention to health, asking why 50 million Americans, 9 m illion of them children, live without [coverage], while those that are insured a

re often driven to poverty by spiraling costs or wrongly refused treatment at al l. But the movie, which has taken Cannes by storm, goes further by portraying a country where the government is more interested in personal profit and protectin g big business than caring for its citizens, many of whom cannot afford health i nsurance. "I'm trying to explore bigger ideas and bigger issues, and in this cas e the bigger issue in this film is who are we as a people?" Moore told reporters after a press screening. "Why do we behave the way we behave? What has become o f us? Where is our soul?" One section of the film explains how a U.S. man severe d the tip of two fingers in an accident and was told he would have to pay $12,00 0 to re-attach the end of his ring finger, and $60,000 to re-attach that of his index finger. "Being a hopeless romantic, Rick chose his ring finger," Moore qui pped in a typically sardonic voiceover. It also follows a woman whose young daug hter falls seriously ill but who said she was refused admission to a general hos pital and instructed to go to a private one instead. By the time she got to the second hospital, it was too late to save the girl.

Military's Role in a Flu Pandemic 2005-10-05, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/AR20051004006... President Bush said yesterday that he would consider using the military to "effe ct a quarantine" in the event of an outbreak of pandemic influenza in the United States. Bush also suggested that putting National Guard troops under federal, r ather than state, control might be one part of a response to the "catastrophe" o f an avian influenza outbreak. The president raised the same idea after Hurrican e Katrina, suggesting that he is considering a greater role for the military in natural disasters. Most public health experts believe it is impossible to entire ly isolate neighborhoods, towns, cities or regions during an outbreak of disease . Instead, quarantines today generally refer to a variety of strategies for iden tifying and limiting the movement of people who are infected with a contagious p athogen or are at high risk. That might include screening travelers for fever an d flu symptoms; prohibiting large gatherings of people, including at some workpl aces; and requiring that people exposed to infected individuals stay at home unt il the incubation period for the illness has passed. China took these measures d uring the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003.

Prescription Data Used To Assess Consumers 2008-08-04, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/03/AR20080803020... Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evalu ating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million America ns. Collecting and analyzing personal health information in commercial databases is a fledgling industry, but one poised to take off as the nation enters the ag e of electronic medical records. Some insurers have already begun testing system s that tap into not only prescription drug information, but also data about pati ents held by clinical and pathological laboratories. Privacy and consumer advoca tes fear [the trend] it is taking place largely outside the scrutiny of federal health regulators and lawmakers. The practice also illustrates how electronic da ta gathered for one purpose can be used and marketed for another -- often withou t consumers' knowledge, privacy advocates say. And they argue that although cons umers sign consent forms, they effectively have to authorize the data release if they want insurance. "As health care moves into the digital age, there are more and more companies holding vast amounts of patients' health information," said Joy Pritts, research professor at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institut

e. "Most people don't even know these [companies] exist. Unfortunately the feder al health privacy rule does not cover many of them." Tim Sparapani, senior legis lative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "We've got to stop t hese practices before the marketplace is fully developed and patients lose all c ontrol over their medical information." Note: For lots more on increasing threats to privacy from reliable sources, clic k here.

Organic fruit and vegetables really are better for your heart 2007-07-05, The Times (London) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/healthy_eating/article... Organic fruit and vegetables may be better for the heart and general health than eating conventionally grown crops, new research has found. A ten-year study com paring organic tomatoes with standard produce found that they had almost double the quantity of antioxidants called flavonoids which help to prevent high blood pressure and thus reduce the likelihood of heart disease and strokes. Alyson Mit chell, a food chemist, who led the research at the University of California, bel ieves that flavonoids can also help to stave off some forms of cancer and dement ia. Her findings are due to be published in full in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The team believes that the different levels of flavonoids in tomatoes are due to the absence of fertilisers in organic farming. Plants produ ce flavonoids as a defence mechanism; they are triggered by nutrient deficiency. Feeding a plant with too many nutrients, such as inorganic nitrogen commonly fo und in conventional fertiliser, curbs the development of flavonoids. The lower l evels of flavonoids in conventional tomatoes were caused by over-fertilisation , th e research team concluded.

Extraordinary Kiwis: Saving the World 2007-06-23, TVNZ.co.nz (New Zealand's leading TV station) http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/413551/1181085 A garage in an Auckland suburb is an unlikely laboratory for a 57-year-old milli onaire with a passion to change the world. But Ray Avery is anything but typical . A charismatic Kiwi ... he's taken a horrific childhood, combined it with a pas sion and prodigious aptitude for science and turned it into a motivation to chan ge the world. Ray now runs Medicine Mondiale, a non-profit aid organisation dedi cated to doing things differently. Medicine Mondiale is based from his home ... and his garage has been converted into high tech lab. Here Ray works designing a nd developing simple and sustainable medical solutions for the many health probl ems in the developing world. He enlists the help of other scientists and experts to work on specific projects with him. Ray dragged himself up by the bootstraps , from a childhood in orphanages and on the streets of London, to become a scien tist, businessman and self-made millionaire. After coming to New Zealand, a chan ce meeting with Fred Hollows (world renowned eye surgeon) set him on a path to E ritrea and Nepal to build lens factories for the Fred Hollows Foundation. Exposu re to the raw and real shortcomings of heath care in these regions made him dete rmined to use his knowledge of pharmaceuticals, science, project management, des ign and development to tackle the issues at a very practical level.

Fat 'counters vitamin C benefits' 2007-04-08, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6510479.stm

In laboratory experiments, a team at the University of Glasgow simulated what ha ppens in the human stomach. They found vitamin C (ascorbic acid) mopped up poten tial cancer-causing compounds that are made when saliva and food mixes with stom ach acid. But when they added fat to the mix, the ascorbic acid could no longer convert the hazardous compounds into safe ones. Antioxidants like ascorbic acid protect against the formation of (carcinogenic) nitrosocompounds by converting t he nitrosating species into nitric oxide. However, when fat is present, it react s with the nitric oxide to reform nitrosating species, the scientists found. Bri dget Aisbitt, nutrition scientist for the British Nutrition Foundation, said: .. . "This research is interesting." She said fat-compatible antioxidants in the bo dy, such as beta-carotene, could also neutralise the nitrosocompounds. This is a nother reason to underline the importance of a healthy balanced diet where meals high in fat should not be frequent and five portions of fruit and vegetables our main source of vitamin C - are eaten each day. Note: Why isn't it being widely reported the Vitatmin C and beta-carotene are ef fective cancer fighters? For a possible answer by one of the top physicians in t he U.S., click here.

Dirt exposure 'boosts happiness' 2007-04-01, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6509781.stm Exposure to dirt may be a way to lift mood as well as boost the immune system, U K scientists say. Lung cancer patients treated with "friendly" bacteria normally found in the soil have anecdotally reported improvements in their quality of li fe. Mice exposed to the same bacteria made more of the brain's "happy" chemical serotonin, the Bristol University authors told the journal Neuroscience. A lack of serotonin is linked with depression in people. The scientists say more work i s now needed to determine if the bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae has antidepressa nt properties. Lead researcher Dr Chris Lowry said: "These studies help us under stand how the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune system i s important for maintaining mental health. They also leave us wondering if we sh ouldn't all spend more time playing in the dirt." The work could also help exper ts' understanding of why an imbalance in the immune system leaves some individua ls vulnerable to mood disorders like depression, he added.

CDC Shifts Vaccine-Data Focus 2006-11-01, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/31/AR20061031013... Federal health officials have decided to forgo gathering detailed data on whethe r children in 22 big cities are receiving recommended immunizations and instead will survey teenagers, who are the target of several new vaccines. The decision is drawing protests from local health officials, who say the soon-to-be-lost inf ormation is essential to their efforts to make sure that infants and toddlers, m any from poor families, are protected against childhood infections. Each year, t he CDC contracts a polling company to get data on vaccination rates in various a ge, demographic and income groups nationwide. "We need to know if the new vaccin e has helped, or had no change, or hurt [coverage], and we cannot really make th ose judgments without the NIS data," [one health official] said. CDC officials s aid they are redirecting about $3 million to survey adolescents. The only way to pay for the 22-city sampling would be to use money now used to help states buy vaccine, they added. The decision comes at a time when the government is spendin g record amounts on public health. The CDC's budget has risen 42 percent since 2

001 and is now $8.73 billion. Note: This unusual decision makes sense if you consider that the powerful pharma ceutical industry doesn't want tracking on toddler vaccinations, as it may show what they have long denied -- that there is a link between autism and childhood vaccinations. The mercury-derivative Thimerosal was largely taken out of childho od vaccinations just a few years ago. The much-awaited data needed to prove or d isprove a link will now be more difficult to obtain.

FDA Is Set To Approve Milk, Meat From Clones 2006-10-17, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR20061016013... Three years after the Food and Drug Administration first hinted that it might pe rmit the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals...the agency is poised to end orse marketing of the mass-produced animals for public consumption. The decision ...is based largely on new data indicating that milk and meat from cloned livest ock and their offspring pose no unique risks to consumers. On Thursday, advocacy groups filed a petition asking the FDA to regulate cloned farm animals one type at a time, much as it regulates new drugs, a change that would drastically slow marketing approval. "The available science shows that cloning presents serious food safety risks, animal welfare concerns and unresolved ethical issues that re quire strict oversight," the petition states. "The government talks about being science-based, and that's great, but I think there is another pillar here: the q uestion of whether we really want to do this," said Carol Tucker Foreman, direct or of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America. Each clone is a genetic replica of the animal that donated the cell from which it was grown. It was Oct ober 2003 when the FDA released its first draft document concluding that clones and their offspring are safe to eat. But an agency advisory panel and the Nation al Academies, while generally supportive, raised flags, citing a paucity of safe ty data. Clonal meat or milk would be impossible to authenticate, since there is no way to distinguish them from conventional products. "That you can go online today to any number of different Web sites and purchase semen from cloned bulls tells you there are cloned sires out there fathering calves in the food supply." Note: For an ABC article on this, click here. If you believe that government age ncies are unbiased on matters of public health, I most highly urge you to read o ur summary at http://www.WantToKnow.info/deception10pg

World Bank accused over malaria 2006-04-24, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4939810.stm The World Bank has been accused of publishing false accounts and wasting money o n ineffective medicines in its malaria treatment programme. A Lancet paper claim s the bank faked figures, boosting the success of its malaria projects, and rene ged on a pledge to invest $300-500m in Africa. It also claims the bank funded ob solete treatments - against expert advice. The claims against the bank [were] ma de by 13 international public health experts headed by Amir Attaran, of Canada's University of Ottawa. They quote the bank saying that it reduced deaths from ma laria in the Indian states of Gujarat by 58%, Maharashtra by 98% and Rajasthan b y 79%. According to India's Directorate of National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme, deaths from malaria rose in all three states in the 2002-3 period in question. "Our investigations suggest that the bank wasted money and lives on i neffective medicines." It accuses the bank of supplying India with an anti-malar ial drug, called chloroquine, at a cost of $1.8m, which it says is unsuitable fo

r the type of malaria seen there and against World Health Organisation guideline s.

Medical research increasingly funded by industry 2006-03-17, Reuters/Princeton Media Associates http://princetoncme.com/news.php?story=20060317prof001 From 1994 to 2003, medical research funded by pharmaceutical and biotechnology c ompanies steadily increased and now surpasses research funded by government or p ublic sources, according to a review of the most frequently cited studies. In th e new study, reported in the March 17th online issue of the British Medical Jour nal, the sponsorship of 289 articles...was determined. Overall, 60% of articles had government or public funding and 36% were funded by industry. However, this masks the dramatic rise in industry funding that occurred over time: in 1994, ro ughly 30% of articles were funded by industry compared with over 50% in 2001. Mo reover, 65 of the 77 most cited randomized controlled trials involved industry f unding. "Medical research should reflect public needs more closely and the effor ts of all of those involved should be better coordinated," the authors emphasize .

AIDS chief doubts drug firms on HIV vaccine 2005-12-26, MSNBC/Associated Press http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10608364/ In an unusually candid admission, the federal chief of AIDS research says he bel ieves drug companies don't have an incentive to create a vaccine for the HIV and are likely to wait to profit from it after the government develops one. Tramont is head of the AIDS research division of the National Institutes of Health, and he predicted in his testimony that the government will eventually create a vacc ine. He testified in July in the whistleblower case of Dr. Jonathan Fishbein. "I f we look at the vaccine...it's not going to be made by a company," Tramont said . "They're dropping out like flies because there's no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it." Tramont said the HIV vaccine mirrors the history of o ther vaccines. "It is not just a HIV vaccine -- it's all vaccines -- that is why there was/is a shortage of flu vaccines," Tramont wrote. Note: For lots more on this topic, see our Health Information Center.

Study: Ozone layer has stopped shrinking 2005-08-31, CNN/Reuters http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/08/31/ozone.layer.reut/ The ozone layer has stopped shrinking but it will take decades to start recoveri ng, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday. They said an international agreement to limit production of ozone-depleting chemicals has apparently worked, but the da mage to ozone has not been halted completely. An analysis of satellite records a nd surface monitoring instruments shows the ozone layer has grown a bit thicker in some parts of the world, but is still well below normal levels, the scientist s report in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. The expert s credited, at least in part, the 1987 Montreal Protocol which was ratified by m ore than 180 nations and set legally binding controls for on the production and consumption of ozone-depleting gases containing chlorine and bromine.

Beer maker boycotts biotech rice 2005-04-05, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7488622 Anheuser-Busch Cos., the nation s No. 1 buyer of rice as well as its largest brewe r, says it won t buy rice from Missouri if genetically modified, drug-making crops are allowed to be grown in the state. Last month, Arkansas-based Riceland Foods Inc., the world s largest rice miller and marketer, asked federal regulators to d eny a permit for Ventria s project, saying its customers don t want to risk buying g enetically modified rice. Anheuser-Busch is believed to be the first major compa ny to threaten a boycott over the issue, according to comments filed last month with the Agriculture Department.

Scientists to make 'Stuart Little' mouse with the brain of a human 2005-03-06, Telegraph (one of the UK's leading papers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/06/wmouse06.xml&s In one of the most controversial scientific projects ever conceived, a group of university researchers in California's Silicon Valley is preparing to create a m ouse whose brain will be composed entirely of human cells. Researchers at Stanfo rd University have already succeeded in breeding mice with brains that are one p er cent human cells. In the next stage they plan to use stem cells from aborted foetuses to create an animal whose brain cells are 100 per cent human.

Report: Global warming near critical point 2005-01-24, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6863557 Global warming is approaching the point of no return, after which widespread dro ught, crop failure and rising sea levels will be irreversible, an international climate change task force warned Monday. It called on the Group of 8 leading ind ustrial nations to cut carbon emissions, double their research spending on techn ology and work with India and China to build on the Kyoto Protocol for cuttings emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. n ecological time bomb is ticking away, said Stephen Byers, who was co-chairman o f the task force with U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. World leaders need to rec ognize that climate change is the single most important long-term issue that the planet faces. According to the report, urgent action is needed to stop the globa l average temperature rising by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the level of the year 1750 the approximate start of the Industrial Revolution, when mankind first started significantly adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere . No accurate temperature readings were available for 1750, the report said, but since 1860 the global average temperature has risen by 0.8 percent to 15 degree s Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit).

The EPA won't release some data on 140 Superfund locations 2006-06-16, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-toxic16jun16,1,1013231.s... At a congressional hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the Environmental Protection Agency had designated as confidential the details of about 140 Super fund sites where toxic exposure remained uncontrolled. The secret data included information about how much money and time it would take to clean up the dangerou

s sites, including one site where the EPA predicted it would take 26 years to cl ose off access to toxics. "This isn't a question of left or right," Boxer said, waving a document marked "Privileged" by EPA officials to prevent its release to the public. "This is a question of right and wrong." The Superfund program was created almost three decades ago in response to environmental disasters such as Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., where chemical contamination forced the removal of 800 families and led to $200 million in remediation costs. Those sites are areas where the public still faces some possible exposure to to xic substances -- such as a building near buried radioactive waste that was not surrounded by a fence. A skateboard park built over the site, however, was prote cted by a layer of dirt. One Republican-sponsored bill moving through Congress w ould limit data available on toxic substances released into communities, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has blocked information on flooding dangers in Flo rida. Note: Major toxic hazards would seem to be a direct threat to the security of th ose living around the hazards, yet the EPA is keeping these records secret. If y ou read the entire article, you will see how the LA Times is framing this as a D emocrat vs. Republican issue, when it is in fact about public health and safety.

Beyond Genetically Modified Crops 2006-07-12, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/03/AR20060703009... For years the life science companies...have argued that genetically modified foo d is the next great scientific and technological revolution in agriculture. Nong overnmental organizations...have been cast as the villains in this unfolding agr icultural drama...accused of continually blocking scientific and technological p rogress because of...opposition to genetically modified food. Now, in an ironic twist, new, cutting-edge technologies have made gene splicing and transgenic cro ps obsolete. The new frontier is called genomics, and the new agricultural techn ology is called marker-assisted selection, or MAS. This technology offers a soph isticated method to greatly accelerate classical breeding. A growing number of s cientists believe that MAS...will eventually replace genetically modified food. Environmental organizations that have long opposed genetically modified crops ar e guardedly supportive of MAS technology. Rapidly accumulating information about crop genomes is allowing scientists to [use] MAS to locate desired traits in ot her varieties of a particular food crop, or its relatives that grow in the wild. Then they cross-breed those related plants with the existing commercial varieti es to improve the crop. With MAS, the breeding of new varieties always remain wi thin a species, thus greatly reducing the risk of environmental harm and potenti al adverse health effects associated with genetically modified crops. If properl y used as part of a much larger systemic and holistic approach to sustainable ag ricultural development, MAS technology could be the right technology at the righ t time in history. Note: For astonishing information on the dangers to your health of genetically m odified foods, see the most popular document on our website in recent months at http://www.WantToKnow.info/deception10pg

The true story of how multinational drug companies took liberties with African l ives 2005-09-26, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article315125.ece The pharmaceutical industry is bracing itself for criticism when the film 'The C

onstant Gardener' opens next month. Away from the Hollywood script is a true sto ry of how multinational drug companies took liberties with African lives with de vastating consequences. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, of City of God fame, it is a thriller, a love story and a blistering attack on the drugs industry and th e way it carelessly expends the lives of innocent citizens in the Third World in the quest for billion-dollar medicines to sell to the first world. After the cr edits roll, a note from John Le Carr appears on screen that reads: "As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by compar ison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard." The film fea tures two brutal killings, a savage beating, a campaign of harassment, intimidat ion and threats. The crimes of the pharmaceutical industry - from the price prot ection of Aids drugs which have denied life-saving medicines to millions, to the cover up of lethal side effects to protect profits - are well documented. The c ompanies are not obliged to disclose a lot of information about how they test or make their drugs. There's big, big money involved. Editors of medical journals including The Lancet and The Journal of the American Medical Association had com e under pressure not to publish data or to change it. The bigger scandal...lies in the rapacious pricing of the pharmaceutical industry that puts lifesaving dru gs out of reach of individuals, hospitals and even nations.

Psychiatric drugs fare favorably when companies pay for studies 2006-05-24, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-05-24-drug-studies_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA Drug companies fund a growing number of the studies in leading psychiatric journ als, and drugs fare much better in these company-funded studies than in trials d one independently or by competitors, researchers reported Wednesday. About 57% o f published studies were paid for by drug companies in 2002, compared with 25% i n 1992, says psychiatrist Igor Galynker of Beth Israel Medical Center in New Yor k City. His team looked at clinical research in four influential journals: Ameri can Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical P sychiatry and Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology. In the report, released at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Toronto, reviewers did not know who paid for the studies they evaluated, Galynker says. There were favorable ou tcomes for a medication in about: eight out of 10 studies paid for by the compan y that makes the drug; five out of 10 studies done with no industry support; thr ee out of 10 studies done by competitors of the firm making the drug. As drug co mpanies increasingly fund research that yields favorable outcomes for their drug s, there may be a built-in bias because journals are reluctant to publish studie s with negative or inconclusive findings. Note: To learn more about the astonishing profits and power of the major drug co mpanies, read our concise summary of a major insider's research at http://www.Wa ntToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Medical Journal Says It Was Again Misled 2006-07-12, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/health/13jama.html?ex=1310443200&en=a20364b... For the second time in two months, The Journal of the American Medical Associati on says it was misled by researchers who failed to reveal financial ties to drug companies. The latest incident, disclosed in letters to the editor and a correc tion in Wednesday's journal, involves a study showing that pregnant women who st op taking antidepressants risk slipping back into depression. Most of the 13 aut hors have financial ties to drug companies including antidepressant makers, but only two of them revealed their ties when the study was published in February.

Note: To understand how the drug companies manipulate results and even exert tre mendous influence over the U.S. Congress, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthc overup

Science accuses BBC of medical quackery 2006-03-26, London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2104024,00.html Some of Britain s leading scientists have accused the BBC of quackery by misleading viewers in an attempt to exaggerate the power of alternative medicine. The criti cisms centre on Alternative Medicine, a series broadcast on BBC2 in January. The key critics include two scientific advisers to the series: Edzard Ernst, profes sor of complementary medicine at Exeter University; and George Lewith, director of the centre for the study of complementary medicine at Southampton University. Lewith, an expert on the effects of acupuncture, said in an interview yesterday : The experiment was not groundbreaking; its results were sensationalised. A [BBC] spokesman said yesterday: We take these allegations very seriously and we strong ly refute them. We used two scientific consultants for the series, Professor Ern st and Jack Tinker, dean emeritus of the Royal Society of Medicine, both of whom signed off the programme scripts. It seems extremely unusual that Professor Ern st should make these comments so long after the series has aired. The spokesman s aid Tinker had indicated he remained happy with the tone and content of the film s, stating: Fellow medics at the Royal Society, including one eminent professor, said it was the best medical series they had seen on television.

FDA Panel Recommends Ban on Nonprescription Asthma Inhalers 2006-01-24, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=1537095 Millions of nonprescription inhalers used for decades by asthma sufferers, often against the advice of doctors, could be taken off drugstore shelves because the y contain propellants that harm the ozone layer. An advisory panel voted 11-7 Tu esday to recommend that the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] remove the "essen tial use" status that Primatene Mist and other similar nonprescription inhalers require to be sold, spokeswoman Laura Alvey said. Final revocation of that statu s would mean a de facto ban on their sale. Wyeth Consumer Healthcare estimates t hat 3 million Americans use Primatene Mist for mild or intermittent cases of ast hma. About two-thirds also use a prescription inhaler but rely on Primatene as a backup. Another 700,000 use the inhalers because they don't have a prescription or lack health insurance. Note: This is an excellent example of the FDA and industry colluding to give dru g companies big profits. Are these inhalers being banned because they harm the o zone or because they are generics which decrease sales of the big drug companies ? For lots more, see the revealing article of the prestigious Journal of New Eng land Medicine on drug company control of FDA and congress: http://www.WantToKnow .info/healthcoverup

Medicare drug plan is prescribing profits 2006-08-04, San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/04/BUG2PKAJGH39.DTL Medicare's drug benefit has given a shot in the arm to pharmaceutical companies

and insurers, whose revenue is climbing thanks to government subsidies for presc ription medicine. What's happened so far: Drugmakers including GlaxoSmithKline a nd Pfizer reported higher-than-expected sales and profit in the second quarter, with some of the momentum coming from Medicare. Meanwhile, membership rolls of b ig insurers, including UnitedHealth Group and Humana, are mushrooming as Medicar e beneficiaries sign up for drug plans. Drug companies -- which successfully thw arted price-control attempts -- are reaping the rewards of more seniors and disa bled people getting access to their medications. British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKli ne's second-quarter net income grew 14 percent over the same quarter last year d ue in part to strong Medicare drug sales. Merck & Co., Schering Plough, Wyeth, R oche and Pfizer...all exceeded analysts' expectations, reflecting sales boosts f rom the program. In the first three months of the benefit, brand-name drug price s rose 4 percent, according to a report from the AARP. WellPoint Inc., the natio n's largest insurer, reported second-quarter profit gains of 34 percent. UnitedH ealth...posted quarterly profit gains of 26 percent. Humana reported earlier thi s week its second-quarter profit increased 9.9 percent and revenue jumped 52 per cent over the same quarter last year, due in large part to a surge in Medicare m embership. The insurer expects annual revenue to grow by 50 percent. Note: This article fails to mention who pays for all these profits -- our tax do llars. To understand the degree of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, re ad a two-page summary by one of the most respected MDs in the U.S. at http://www .WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Scientists stop the ageing process 2008-08-11, Australian Broadcasting Corporation http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/08/11/2331197.htm Scientists have stopped the ageing process in an entire organ for the first time , a study released today says. Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Med icine ... also say the older organs function as well as they did when the host a nimal was younger. The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the ageing process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful p roteins inside the organ's cells. As people age their cells become less efficien t at getting rid of damaged protein resulting in a build-up of toxic material th at is especially pronounced in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerat ive disorders. The researchers say the findings suggest that therapies for boost ing protein clearance might help stave off some of the declines in function that accompanies old age. In experiments, livers in genetically modified mice 22 to 26 months old ... cleaned blood as efficiently as those in animals a quarter the ir age. The benefits of restoring the cleaning mechanisms found inside all cells could extend far beyond a single organ, says Cuervo. "Our findings are particul arly relevant for neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer' s," she says. "Many of these diseases are due to 'misbehaving' or damaged protei ns that accumulate in neurons. By preventing this decline in protein clearance, we may be able to keep these people free of symptoms for a longer time." If the body's ability to dispose of cell debris within the cell were enhanced across a wider range of tissues, she says, it could extend life as well. Note: For many key reports on health issues from reliable, verifiable sources, c lick here.

USDA may relax standards for organic foods 2007-06-09, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-organic9jun09,1,1653705....

Many beer drinkers may not know that Anheuser-Busch has the organic blessing fro m federal regulators even though Wild Hop Lager uses hops grown with chemical fe rtilizers and sprayed with pesticides. The [USDA] is considering a list of 38 no norganic ingredients that will be permitted in organic foods. Because of the bro ad uses of these ingredients as colorings and flavorings, for example almost any type of manufactured organic food could be affected, including cereal, sausage, bread and beer. Organic food advocates have fought to block approval of some or all of the proposed ingredients, saying consumers would be misled. "This propos al is blatant catering to powerful industry players who want the benefits of lab eling their products 'USDA organic' without doing the work to source organic mat erials," said Ronnie Cummins, executive director of the Organic Consumers Assn. of Finland, Minn., a nonprofit group that boasts 850,000 members. With big compa nies entering what was formerly a mom-and-pop industry, new questions have arise n about what exactly goes into organic food. Many nonorganic ingredients, includ ing hops, are already being used in organic products, thanks to a USDA interpret ation of the Organic Foods Protection Act of 1990. In addition to hops, the list includes 19 food colorings, two starches, casings for sausages and hot dogs, fi sh oil, chipotle chili pepper, gelatin and a host of obscure ingredients (one, f or instance, is a "bulking agent" and sweetener with the tongue-twisting name of fructooligosaccharides). Under the agency's proposal, as much as 5% of a food p roduct could be made with these ingredients and still get the "USDA organic" sea l.

Rich countries 'blocking cheap drugs for developing world' 2006-11-14, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1946998,00.html Poor people are needlessly dying because drug companies and the governments of r ich countries are blocking the developing world from obtaining affordable medici nes. Five years to the day after the Doha declaration - a groundbreaking deal to give poor countries access to cheap drugs - was signed at the World Trade Organ isation, Oxfam says things are worse. The charity accuses the US, which champion s the interests of its giant pharmaceutical companies, of bullying developing co untries into not using the measures in the Doha declaration and the EU of standi ng by and doing nothing. Doha technically allows poor countries to buy cheap cop ies of desperately needed drugs, but the US is accused of trying to prevent coun tries such as Thailand and India, which have manufacturing capacity, [from] maki ng and selling cheap generic versions so as to preserve the monopolies of the dr ug giants. "Rich countries have broken the spirit of the Doha declaration," said Celine Charveriat, head of Oxfam's Make Trade Fair campaign. "The declaration s aid the right things but needed political action to work and that hasn't happene d. In fact, we've actually gone backwards. Many people are dying or suffering ne edlessly." The US has pursued its own free trade agreements with developing coun tries, tying them into much tighter observance of patent rights than anticipated at Doha. "The USA has also pressured countries for greater patent protection th rough threats of trade sanctions," the report says.

Drug Find Shocks Researchers: In Antipsychotics, Newer Isn't Better 2006-10-03, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR20061002013... Schizophrenia patients do as well, or perhaps even better, on older psychiatric drugs compared with newer and far costlier medications, according to a study pub lished yesterday that overturns conventional wisdom about antipsychotic drugs, w hich cost the United States $10 billion a year. The results are causing constern ation. The researchers who conducted the trial were so certain they would find e

xactly the opposite that they went back to make sure the research data had not b een recorded backward. The study was requested by Britain's National Health Serv ice to determine whether the newer drugs -- which can cost 10 times as much as t he older ones -- are worth the difference in price. While the researchers had ex pected a difference of five points on a quality-of-life scale -- showing the new er drugs were better -- the study found that patients' quality of life was sligh tly better when they took the older drugs. There has been a surge in prescriptio ns of the newer antipsychotic drugs in recent years, including among children. I n an editorial accompanying the British study, the lead researcher in the U.S. t rial asked how an entire medical field could have been misled into thinking that the expensive drugs, such as Zyprexa, Risperdal and Seroquel, were much better. Note: Those who have read our two-page health cover-up summary know very well ho w the entire medical field could have been misled. For those who haven't seen it : http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Inner Circle Taking More of C.D.C. Bonuses 2006-09-17, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/washington/17cdc.html?ex=1316145600&en=3f8c... Top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received premium bonuses in recent years at the expense of scientists and others who perform muc h of the agency's scientific work. Those inside the office of the centers' direc tor, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, have benefited the most. From 2002 through mid-200 6, William H. Gimson III, the agency's chief operating officer, received bonuses totaling $147,863. Before Dr. Gerberding's appointment, members of the C.D.C. d irector's inner circle rarely received premium bonuses. Because bonus money is l imited...the growing share of premium bonuses for Dr. Gerberding's closest advis ers has meant less money is available for some scientists and other workers. In addition to those within Dr. Gerberding's inner circle, the increase in large ca sh awards within the centers has mostly benefited employees in the agency's fina ncial, computer and human resources departments -- not its scientists. Soon afte r arriving at the centers, Dr. Gerberding began a comprehensive reorganization o f the agency. In its wake, many of the agency's senior scientists and leaders ei ther left or have announced that they are planning to leave. The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution have reported on the turmoil at the center s in articles quoting disgruntled former senior scientists who said the changes had undermined the agency. Note: Could it be that these bonuses are meant to keep top officials in line the the CDC's strong bias towards to pharmaceutical companies? For more vital infor mation on this: http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup.

US rice farmers sue Bayer CropScience over GM rice 2006-08-28, Reuters http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=N8S372113 Rice farmers in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and California have sued Bayer CropScience, alleging its genetically modified rice has contami nated the crop. The farmers alleged that the unit of Germany's Bayer AG failed t o prevent its genetically modified rice, which has not been approved for human c onsumption, from entering the food chain. As a result, they said, Japan and the European Union have placed strict limits on U.S. rice imports and U.S. rice pric es have dropped dramatically. U.S. agriculture and food safety authorities learn ed on July 31 that Bayer's unapproved rice had been found in commercial bins in Arkansas and Missouri. While the United States is a small rice grower, it is one

of the world's largest exporters, sending half of its crop to foreign buyers. J apan, the largest importer of U.S. rice, suspended imports of U.S. long-grain ri ce a week ago. U.S. rice growers are responsible for about 12 percent of world r ice trade. Note: Why did no major media report this important story in the U.S.? Only the C hristian Science Monitor mentioned it. The media rarely reports anything negativ e about genetically modified food. To learn about the dangers of GMOs in the foo d you eat: http://www.WantToKnow.info/deception10pg

Placebo's power goes beyond the mind 2006-08-21, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14309026/ For years, scientists have looked at the placebo effect as just a figment of ove ractive patient imaginations. Sure, dummy medications seemed to curb epileptic s eizures, lower blood pressure, soothe migraines and smooth out jerky movements i n Parkinson's -- but these people weren't really better. Now, using PET scanners and MRIs...researchers have discovered that the placebo effect is not "all in p atients' heads" but rather, in their brains. New research shows that belief in a dummy treatment leads to changes in brain chemistry. Says Dr. Michael Selzer, p rofessor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, "Aft er pooh-poohing this for years, here are studies that show that our thoughts may actually interact with the brain in a physical way." New insights into how plac ebos work may even help scientists figure out how to harness the effect and teac h people to train their own brains to help with healing. Studies in depressed pa tients...have found that almost as many are helped by placebo treatments as by a ctual medications. Researchers are just starting to appreciate the power that th e mind can have over the body. Part of what goes into the brain's interpretation is expectation. By changing the expectancy and bumping up the placebo response we might be able to ultimately find a way to provide sustained therapy for chron ic pain.

Study Puts a Cork in Belief That a Little Wine Helps the Heart 2006-03-30, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-alcohol30mar30,0,2810101.story The long-held belief that moderate drinking reduces your risk of a heart attack or dying is based on flawed data and is most likely wrong, according to a study released today. A couple glasses of wine aren't going to hurt you...but they are n't going to help you much either. Heavy drinking, of course, is unquestionably bad for you. Dr. A. G. Shaper...observed that many people who abstained from alc ohol did so because of advancing age, serious illness or the use of drugs whose effects were altered by alcohol. He warned...that counting such people as abstai ners in alcohol studies would bias the results. Fillmore's team identified 54 pu blished reports that examined the health effects of drinking. They found that th e majority of the papers included significant numbers of people who had recently quit drinking...among the group who abstained from alcohol. Seven of the 54 stu dies included only long-term abstainers -- people who had never consumed alcohol or who had stopped drinking years earlier for reasons unrelated to their curren t health. All seven of those studies showed no benefit from moderate drinking.

Chemtrails Are Over Las Vegas 2005-08-19, Las Vegas Tribune

http://www.lasvegastribune.com/20050819/headline1.html Las Vegas residents are increasingly noticing the appearance of chemical trails overhead. Such "chemtrails" are substantially different in appearance to the nor mal condensation trails left by jet airliners. The difference is that while cond ensation trails are composed of water vapor that dissipates rapidly, "chemtrails " linger much longer and spread out over time to eventually cover the sky with a thin haze. The U.S. Air Force Website refutes the "Chemtrail Hoax" as having be en around since 1996. Before you believe...the government's "denial," do an Inte rnet search for the following terms: "Joint Vision for 2020" and "Weather is a F orce Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025", a whitepaper by MIT's Bernard East lund and H-bomb father Edward Teller. Before he died in 2003, Teller was directo r emeritus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where plans for nuclear, b iological and directed energy weapons are crafted. In 1997, Teller publicly outl ined his proposal to use aircraft to scatter through the stratosphere millions o f tons of electrically-conductive metallic materials, ostensibly to reduce globa l warming. Two scientists working at Wright Patterson Air Force Base confirmed.. .that they were involved in aerial spraying experiments. In the U.S. Air Force r esearch study, "Weather as a Force Multiplier" issued in August, 1996, seven U.S . military officers outlined how HAARP and aerial cloud-seeding from tankers cou ld allow U.S. aerospace forces to "own the weather" by the year 2025. Among the desired objectives were "Storm Enhancement," "Storm Modification" and "Drought I nducement." Note: This is far from a leading newspaper, but as many readers have asked about chem trails, and this is the only significant article on the topic that I've se en in the media, I've included it for those who might be interested. For more fr om a good alternative website, click here. Interesting also that the writer of t his article, Marcus Dalton, was fired not long after this article was published. And if the above link fails, click here.

Organic farming produces same yields as conventional farms, but consumes less 2005-07-13, Cornell University News Service http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July05/organic.farm.vs.other.ssl.html Organic farming produces the same yields of corn and soybeans as does convention al farming, but uses 30 percent less energy, less water and no pesticides, a rev iew of a 22-year farming trial study concludes. David Pimentel, a Cornell Univer sity professor of ecology and agriculture...is the lead author of a study that i s published in the July issue of Bioscience (Vol. 55:7) analyzing the environmen tal, energy and economic costs and benefits of growing soybeans and corn organic ally versus conventionally. The study is a review of the Rodale Institute Farmin g Systems Trial, the longest running comparison of organic vs. conventional farm ing in the United States. "Organic farming approaches for these crops not only u se an average of 30 percent less fossil energy but also conserve more water in t he soil, induce less erosion, maintain soil quality and conserve more biological resources than conventional farming does," Pimentel added.

NHS sues drug firms 'for #100m' 2004-06-23, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3832291.stm The NHS is seeking at least 100m compensation from two drug companies who it alle ges "fixed" the price of an ulcer drug in the late 1990s. The allegations relate to the sale and supply of ranitidine between 1997 and 2000. The NHS's Counter F raud Service [CFS]...is currently investigating similar concerns in regard to ar

ound 30 other drugs. As in any case where a drug comes off patent, the NHS expec ted its price to fall, but this did not happen with ranitidine. The investigatio n into why this failed to happen has led to the High Court action against Generi cs, a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical company Merck, and the British arm of the Indian company Ranbaxy. The CFS estimates that the NHS could have lost o ut on at least 100m, and possibly as much as 110m. It has already said it will sue seven companies over the sale of common medicines including warfarin and penici llin-based drugs.

Custom-Built Pathogens Raise Bioterror Fears 2006-07-31, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/30/AR20060730005... In 2002, [a] German-born molecular geneticist startled the scientific world by c reating the first live, fully artificial virus in the lab. It was a variation of the bug that causes polio. The virus was made wholly from nonliving parts, usin g equipment and chemicals on hand. The most crucial part, the genetic code, was picked up for free on the Internet. The new technology opens the door to new too ls for defeating disease and saving lives. But today, in hundreds of labs worldw ide, it is also possible to transform common intestinal microbes into killers. O r to resurrect bygone killers, such the 1918 influenza. New techniques...allow t he creation of synthetic viruses in mere days. Hardware unveiled last year by a Harvard genetics professor can churn out synthetic genes by the thousands, for a few pennies each. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has decli ned so far to police the booming gene-synthesis industry. "It would be possible -- fully legal -- for a person to produce full-length 1918 influenza virus or Eb ola virus genomes," said Richard H. Ebright, a biochemist and professor at Rutge rs University. "It is also possible to advertise and to sell the product." Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government budgets nearly $8 billi on annually -- an 18-fold increase since 2001 -- for the defense of civilians ag ainst biological attack. Billions have been spent to develop and stockpile new d rugs, most of them each tied to a single, well-known bioterrorism threat, such a s anthrax. If successful, [each] drug is a solution for just one disease threat out of a list that is rapidly expanding to include man-made varieties. Note: The government research lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, has been secretly d eveloping this technology for decades. For serious questions on the role of secr et government projects in deadly disease creation and dissemination, see http:// www.WantToKnow.info/resources#emerging or click here.

Free trade leaves world food in grip of global giants 2005-01-27, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,1399480,00.html Global food companies are aggravating poverty in developing countries by dominat ing markets, buying up seed firms and forcing down prices for staple goods inclu ding tea, coffee, milk, bananas and wheat, according to a report to be launched today. Two companies dominate sales of half the world's bananas, three trade 85% of the world's tea, and one, Wal-mart, now controls 40% of Mexico's retail food sector. It also found that Monsanto controls 91% of the global GM seed market.

Twice as Strong 2006-08-07, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-integrate7aug07,0,4785543.story

When a medical crisis hits, people want to know that someone smart in a white co at can prescribe Prozac to boost their mood, perform heart surgery to open their clogged arteries, or administer chemotherapy, radiation or surgery to cure them of cancer. But growing numbers of Americans are also eager to experiment with a lternative therapies. A natural tension has long existed between these two kinds of medicine. Western medical practitioners have been wary of the sometimes wack y-sounding, often-untested therapies in alternative medicine's toolkit. Alternat ive medicine practitioners have typically operated outside the conventional syst em, with consumers paying out of pocket. But over the last 10 years this wall ha s started, partially, to erode. Aided by federal funds, an increasing number of alternative therapies have been put to Western-style clinical tests, separating ones that seem beneficial, such as acupuncture for relief of pain, meditation to reduce hypertension, or ginger to relieve nausea -- from the chaff that appears ineffective. And conventional practitioners have come to appreciate the effect of the mind on chronic pain, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, anxiety and d epression -- even the progress of disease.

Study Finds Lung Problems in WTC Workers 2006-09-05, New York Times/Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Attacks-Health.html Nearly 70 percent of the rescue and cleanup workers who toiled in the dust and f umes at ground zero have had trouble breathing, and many will probably be sick f or the rest of their lives, doctors said Tuesday in releasing results of the big gest Sept. 11 health study yet. The Mount Sinai Medical Center study is conclusi ve proof of a link between recovery work at the World Trade Center ruins and lon g-term respiratory problems, doctors aid.

Hurricane Katrina News Articles Excerpts of Key Hurricane Katrina News Articles in Major Media Below are many highly revealing excerpts of important Hurricane Katrina articles from the mainstream media. Links are provided to the full articles on major med ia websites. If any link should fail to function, click here. These Hurricane Ka trina news articles are listed by order of importance. For the same articles by date posted to this list, click here. For the list by date of news article click here. By choosing to educate ourselves on these important issues and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.

Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen enga ging topics, click here. Going (Down) by the Book 2005-09-17, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/opinion/17tierney.html?ex=1284609600&en=7a8... When the Federal Emergency Management Agency's paperwork slowed the evacuation o f patients from the airport, Acadian's frustrated medics waited with empty helic opters. "At one point I had 10 helicopters on the ground waiting to go," said Ma rc Creswell, an Acadian medic, "but FEMA kept stonewalling us with paperwork. Me anwhile, every 30 or 40 minutes someone was dying." The company sent in outside doctors and nurses. FEMA rejected the help because the doctors and nurses weren' t certified members of a National Disaster Medical Team. "When the doctors asked why they couldn't help these critically ill people lying there unattended," Mr. Creswell recalled, "the FEMA people kept saying, 'You're not federalized.' "

Hurricane Katrina: Compilation of FEMA's Rejections of Qualified Help 2005-09-12, Chicago Tribune/New York Times/Washington Post/CNN/More http://www.WantToKnow.info/femafailureskatrina FEMA refuses hundreds of personnel, dozens of vehicles - Chicago Tribune, 9/2/05 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-050902daley,1,2011979.story FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/3/05 http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05246/565143.stm FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board - Chicago Tribune , 9/4/05 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509040369sep04,1,4144825.sto ry FEMA turns away state-of-the-art mobile hospital from Univ. of North Carolina CNN, 9/5/05 http://edition.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/09/04/katrina.sick.redtape.ap/ FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations - Financial Times, 9/5/05 http://news.ft.com/cms/s/84aa35cc-1da8-11da-b40b-00000e FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks - New York Times, 9/6/05

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05blame.html FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel - New York Times, 9/6/05 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05blame.html FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid - News Sentinel, 9/8/0 5 http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/12595873.htm FEMA asks media not to take pictures of dead - Washington Post, 9/8/05 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702126. html FEMA turns back German government plane loaded with 15 tons of food - Spiegel, 9 /12/05 http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,374268,00.html FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond" Unless Dispatched - FEMA's own web site http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=18470 For those who are ready to go even deeper, read about FEMA's shady beginnings by clicking here. Then, to see Online Journal's revealing analysis article "New Or leans: Dress rehearsal for lockdown of America," click here.

Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Annual Profit for U.S. Company 2006-01-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/business/30cnd-exxon.html?ex=1296277200&en=... Exxon Mobil, the nation's largest energy company, today reported a 27 percent su rge in profits for the fourth quarter as elevated fuel prices gave rise to the m ost lucrative year ever for an American company. Exxon's profits are expected to generate new scrutiny of the company's operations in Washington, where legislat ors have recently expressed concern over Big Oil's good fortune as soaring oil a nd natural gas prices pressure consumers. Exxon said its profits climbed more th an 40 percent last year, while its tax bill rose only 14 percent. Exxon's revenu e last year allowed it to surpass Wal-Mart as the largest company in the United States. [The company's] revenue of $371 billion surpassed the gross domestic pro duct of $245 billion for Indonesia, an OPEC member and the world's fourth most p opulous country with 242 million people. Note: This article fails to mention the huge profits reaped by oil companies as a result of gas price gouging immediately after Katrina.

FEMA twice failed to give Congress plan to evacuate New Orleans 2005-09-18, CNN/Associated Press http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/17/katrina.evacuation.ap Eight years ago Congress...set aside $500,000 for FEMA to create "a comprehensiv e analysis and plan of all evacuation alternatives for the New Orleans metropoli tan area." Frustrated two years later that no study had materialized, Congress s trengthened its directive. This time it ordered "an evacuation plan for a Catego ry 3 or greater storm, a levee break, flood or other natural disaster for the Ne w Orleans area." The $500,000 that Congress appropriated for the evacuation plan went to a commission that studied future options for the 24-mile bridge over La ke Pontchartrain.

Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy 1997-04-28, Defense Link (Official Website of U.S. Department of Defense) http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/1997/t042897_t0428coh.html Some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to d evise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they coul d just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Other s are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the clim ate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves. So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's t he reason why we have to intensify our efforts. If terrorist organizations have the capability to set off earthquakes and other major natural disasters, do you think huge military research laboratories with v ast budgets might have some of the same capabilities? For more, click here and h ere.

Fuming over formaldehyde 2008-10-07, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-formaldehyde7-2008oct07,0,4737194.... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed to act for at least a year on warnings that trailers housing refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita con tained dangerous levels of formaldehyde, according to a House subcommittee repor t released [on October 6]. Instead, the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Di sease Registry demoted the scientist who questioned its initial assessment that the trailers were safe as long as residents opened a window or another vent, the report said. That appraisal was produced in February 2007 at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had received thousands of complaints about fumes since providing the trailers to families left homeless by the devas tating 2005 hurricanes. Formaldehyde is known to cause cancer, chronic bronchiti s, eye irritation and other ailments. It was used in glue for rugs, plywood, fib erboard and other materials. The subcommittee's report came three days after a f ederal judge in New Orleans ruled that FEMA can be sued by hurricane victims who claim they were exposed to toxic fumes. The subcommittee report noted that the agency took eight months to revise its initial finding and did so only after Chr istopher De Rosa, then director of the CDC agency's Division of Toxicology and E nvironmental Medicine, publicly flagged scientific errors. "We believe that Dr. De Rosa is a whistle-blower and was removed from his position, which he had held for 16 years, in retaliation for his persistent attempts to push the agency's l eadership to take more substantive actions to protect the public's health," the report said. Note: For more revealing reports on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, click he re.

Casinos, not homes, rise after Katrina 2007-11-25, San Francisco Chronicle/Washington Post http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/25/MN37TIILO.DTL

Nowhere has the rebound from Hurricane Katrina been gaudier than along Mississip pi's casino-studded coast. Even as the storm's debris was being cleared, Biloxi' s night skies were illuminated with the high-wattage brilliance of the Imperial Palace, then the Isle of Capri, then the Grand Casino. More followed, and so did vacation-condo developers. Yet in the wrecked and darkened working-class neighb orhoods just blocks from the waterfront glitter, those lights cast their colorfu l glare over an apocalyptic vision of empty lots and scattered trailers that is as forlorn as anywhere in Katrina's strike zone. "At night, you can see the casi no lights up in the sky," Shirley Salik, 72, a former housekeeper at one of the casinos, said while standing outside her FEMA camper with her two dogs. "But tha t's another world." More than two years after the storm, the highly touted recov ery of the Mississippi coast remains a starkly divided phenomenon. Gov. Haley Ba rbour, a Republican, has hailed the casino openings as a harbinger of Mississipp i's resurgence, and developers have proposed more than $1 billion in beachfront condos and hotels for tourists. But fewer than 1 in 10 of the thousands of singl e-family houses destroyed in Biloxi are being rebuilt. More than 10,000 displace d families still live in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management A gency. Now, long-standing resentment over the way the state has treated displace d residents has deepened over a proposal by the Barbour administration to divert $600 million in federal housing aid to fund an expansion plan at the Port of Gu lfport. The port's recently approved master plan calls for ... creating an "upsc ale tourist village" with hotel rooms, condos, restaurants and gambling. "We fea r that this recent decision ... is part of a disturbing trend by the governor's office to overlook the needs of lower and moderate income people in favor of eco nomic development," 24 ministers on the Mississippi coast wrote in September in a letter to state leaders. State leaders rejected the complaints.

The shock doctrine 2007-09-08, Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://business.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2165023,00.html At the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana ... the news ... was that the Republican Congressman Richard Baker had told a group of lobbyists, "We fin ally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities." All that week Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportuniti es: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller, safer city" - which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects. One of tho se who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Fri edman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the ruleboo k for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. "Most New Orleans schools a re in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the children who have atte nded them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a traged y. It is also an opportunity." Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spend ing a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding a nd improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should p rovide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions. I n sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with mos t of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

Senators: White House Stalls Katrina Probe 2006-01-24, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1537047 The White House is crippling a Senate inquiry into the government's sluggish res ponse to Hurricane Katrina by barring administration officials from answering qu estions and failing to hand over documents, senators leading the investigation s aid Tuesday. In some cases, staff at the White House and other federal agencies have refused to be interviewed by congressional investigators, said the top Repu blican and Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Com mittee. In addition, agency officials won't answer seemingly innocuous questions about times and dates of meetings and telephone calls with the White House, the senators said. A White House spokesman said the administration is committed to working with separate Senate and House investigations of the Katrina response bu t wants to protect the confidentiality of presidential advisers. Sen. Susan Coll ins of Maine, the committee's Republican chair, said "We are entitled to know if someone from the Department of Homeland Security calls someone at the White Hou se during this whole crisis period." She added, "It is completely inappropriate" for the White House to bar agency officials from talking to the Senate committe e.

Most powerful hurricanes of 2005 were filled with mysterious lightning 2006-01-09, NASA http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/09jan_electrichurricanes.htm?list115530 The boom of thunder and crackle of lightning generally mean one thing: a storm i s coming. Curiously, though, the biggest storms of all, hurricanes, are notoriou sly lacking in lightning. Hurricanes blow, they rain, they flood, but seldom do they crackle. During the record-setting hurricane season of 2005, three of the m ost powerful storms--Rita, Katrina, and Emily--did have lightning, lots of it. A nd researchers would like to know why. Richard Blakeslee of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center (GHCC) in Huntsville, Alabama, was one of a team of scientis ts who explored Hurricane Emily. "Hurricanes are most likely to produce lightnin g when they're making landfall," says Blakeslee. But there were no mountains ben eath the "electric hurricanes" of 2005 -- only flat water. It's tempting to thin k that, because Emily, Rita and Katrina were all exceptionally powerful, their s heer violence somehow explains their lightning. But Blakeslee says that this exp lanation is too simple. "Other storms have been equally intense and did not prod uce much lightning," he says. "There must be something else at work." Note: A number of researchers suspect there may have been clandestine involvemen t in Katrina and other recent hurricanes, possibly using HAARP technologies, whi ch have been well documented. For a good summary of this, click here. For more o n HAARP, click here.

Aide Says FEMA Ignored Warnings 2005-10-21, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR20051020008... For 16 critical hours, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, including former director Michael D. Brown, dismissed urgent eyewitness accounts by FEMA's only staffer in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina had broken the city's levee system the morning of Aug. 29 and was causing catastrophic flooding. Marty Baham onde, sent to New Orleans by Brown, said he alerted Brown's assistant shortly af ter 11 a.m. that Monday with the "worst possible news" for the city: The Categor y 4 hurricane had carved a 20-foot breach in the 17th Avenue Canal levee. Bahamo

nde said he called Brown personally after 7 p.m. to warn that 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater and that he had photographed a 200-foot-wide breach. Test ifying to a bipartisan Senate panel investigating the response to the hurricane, Bahamonde said his accounts were discarded by officials in Baton Rouge and Wash ington. President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Defense Se cretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Richard B. Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chie fs of Staff, have all said they were told that the city's flood walls did not fa il until Aug. 30. Bahamonde said he found it "amazing" that New Orleans official s continued to let thousands gather at the Superdome, even though they knew that the area around it was going to flood. Ten people later died at the Superdome.

U.S. Censoring Katrina Coverage, Groups Say 2005-09-08, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR20050907021... When U.S. officials asked the news media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disa ster story, free-speech watchdogs said yesterday. The move by the Federal Emerge ncy Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration's ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors c harged in separate telephone interviews. On Tuesday, FEMA refused to take report ers and photographers along on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying th ey would take up valuable space needed in the recovery effort and asked them not to take pictures of the dead. A FEMA spokeswoman wrote: "The recovery of victim s is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect and we have requested tha t no photographs of the deceased be made by the media." FEMA's policy of excludi ng media from recovery expeditions in New Orleans is "an invitation to chaos," s aid Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of Columbia University's journalism school. Note: Death tolls were reported prominently on a daily basis after the Asian tsu nami, so why are the media and government so reluctant to give figures on the nu mber dead in this catastrophe?

When sluggishness isn't OK 2005-09-04, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0509040406sep04,1,3926343.c... E-mailers sent me copies of two news photos that revealed an apparent double sta ndard regarding black and white flood victims in New Orleans. One of the images, shot by photographer Dave Martin for The Associated Press, shows a young black man wading through chest-deep waters after "looting" a grocery store, according to the caption. In the other, taken by photographer Chris Graythen for AFP/Getty Images, a white man and a similarly light-skinned woman also waded through ches t-deep water after "finding" goods that included bread and soda in a local groce ry store, according to the caption. Apparently, quipped a cynical blogger at Dai ly Kos, "It's not looting if you're white." Note: For both photos and more on this disturbing story, click here.

Audit: Feds wasted millions on Katrina work 2008-09-10, MSNBC/Associated Press http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26647780

The government wasted millions of dollars on four no-bid contracts it handed out for Hurricane Katrina work, including paying $20 million for a camp for evacuee s that was never inspected and proved to be unusable, investigators say. A repor t by the Homeland Security Department's office of inspector general, obtained .. . by The Associated Press is the latest to detail mismanagement in the multibill ion-dollar Katrina hurricane recovery effort, which investigators have said wast ed at least $1 billion. The review examined temporary housing contracts awarded without competition to Shaw Group Inc., Bechtel Group Inc., CH2M Hill Companies Ltd. and Fluor Corp. in the days immediately before and after the August 2005 st orm that smashed into the U.S. Gulf Coast. It found that FEMA wasted at least $4 5.9 million on the four contracts that together were initially worth $400 millio n. FEMA subsequently raised the total amounts for the four contracts twice, both times without competition, to $2 billion and then $3 billion. FEMA did not alwa ys properly review the invoices submitted by the four companies, exposing taxpay ers to significant waste and fraud, investigators wrote. In many cases, the agen cy also issued open-ended contract instructions for months without clear guideli nes on what work was needed to be done and the appropriate charges. "We question how FEMA determined that the amounts invoiced were allowable and reasonable," t he IG report states, warning that its review was limited in scope so that additi onal waste and fraud might yet to be found. Note: For many more reports of government corruption from major media sources, c lick here.

FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be . . . FEMA 2007-10-26, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/25/AR20071025024... FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media ha s improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefi ng. Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unli kely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices. They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a "listen only" line, the notice said -- no qu estions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News. Johnson ... was ap parently quite familiar with the reporters -- in one case, he appears to say "Mi ke" and points to a reporter. FEMA press secretary Aaron Walker interrupted at o ne point to caution he'd allow just "two more questions." Later, he called for a "last question." "Are you happy with FEMA's response so far?" a reporter asked. Another asked about "lessons learned from Katrina." "I'm very happy with FEMA's response so far," Johnson said, hailing "a very smoothly, very efficiently perf orming team. And so I think what you're really seeing here is the benefit of exp erience, the benefit of good leadership and the benefit of good partnership, non e of which were present in Katrina." Very smooth, very professional. But somethi ng didn't seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. And the med ia seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA's greatness. Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playi ng reporters. The staff played reporters for what on TV looked just like the rea l thing. "If the worst thing that happens to me in this disaster is that we had staff in the chairs to ask questions that reporters had been asking all day, Wid omski said, "trust me, I'll be happy." Heck of a job, Harvey. Note: To watch this amusing "news briefing", click here.

Bush allies getting Katrina work 2005-09-13, CNN News/Reuters

http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/12/news/economy/katrina_contracts.reut Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clin ching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction cont racts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At least two major corporate client s of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a forme r head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to s tart recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast. One is...Halliburton Co. (Rese arch) subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton. Allbaugh formally registered as a lobbyist for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root in February. Allbaugh is also a friend of Mich ael Brown, director of FEMA who was removed as head of Katrina disaster relief a nd sent back to Washington amid allegations he had padded his resume. Halliburto n continues to be a source of income for Cheney, who served as its chief executi ve officer from 1995 until 2000. According to tax filings released in April, Che ney's income included $194,852 in deferred pay from the company.

Intricate Flood Protection Long a Focus of Dispute 2005-09-01, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/national/nationalspecial/01levee.html?ex=12... No one expected that weak spot to be on a canal that...had received more attenti on and shoring up than many other spots in the region. It did not have broad ber ms, but it did have strong concrete walls. Shea Penland, director of the Pontcha rtrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, sai d that was particularly surprising because the break was "along a section that w as just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee," Dr. Penland said. "It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick."

FEMA gives away $85 million of supplies for Katrina victims 2008-06-11, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/06/11/fema.giveaway/ FEMA gave away about $85 million in household goods meant for Hurricane Katrina victims, a CNN investigation has found. These items, stored by FEMA, were meant for Katrina victims but were given to state and federal agencies. The material, from basic kitchen goods to sleeping necessities, sat in warehouses for two year s before the Federal Emergency Management Agency's giveaway to federal and state agencies this year. James McIntyre, FEMA's acting press secretary, said that FE MA was spending more than $1 million a year to store the material and that anoth er agency wanted the warehouses torn down, so "we needed to vacate them." Photos from one of the facilities in Fort Worth, Texas, show pallet after pallet of co ts, cleansers, first-aid kits, coffee makers, camp stoves and other items stacke d to the ceiling. And even though the stocks were offered to state agencies afte r FEMA decided to get rid of them, one of the states that passed was Louisiana. Martha Kegel, the head of a New Orleans nonprofit agency that helps find homes f or those still displaced by the storm, said she was shocked to learn about the e xistence of the goods and the government giveaway. "These are exactly the items that we are desperately seeking donations of right now: basic kitchen household supplies," said Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans. "FEMA , in fact, refers homeless clients to us to house them. How can we house them if we don't have basic supplies?" Note: For revealing reports on government corruption from reliable sources, clic k here.

U.S. paying a premium to cover storm-damaged roofs 2005-09-29, Duluth News Tribune/Knight Ridder http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/nation/12775741.htm Across the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast, thousands upon thousands of blue tarps are being nailed to wind-damaged roofs, a visible sign of government assistance. The blue sheeting...isn't coming cheap. Knight Ridder has found that a lack of oversight, generous contracting deals and poor planning mean that government age ncies are shelling out as much as 10 times what the temporary fix would normally cost. The government is paying contractors an average of $2,480 for less than t wo hours of work to cover each damaged roof - even though it's also giving them endless supplies of blue sheeting for free. Steve Manser, the president of Simon Roofing and Sheet Metal of Youngstown, Ohio, which was awarded an initial $10 m illion contract to begin "Operation Blue Roof" in New Orleans, acknowledged that the price his company is charging to install blue tarps could pay for shingling an entire roof. Note: Google news shows that though many small papers reported this story, no ma jor media did.

Many Contracts for Storm Work Raise Questions 2005-09-26, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/26/national/nationalspecial/26spend.html?ex=12... Topping the federal government's list of costs related to Hurricane Katrina is t he $568 million in contracts for debris removal landed by a Florida company with ties to Mississippi's Republican governor. More than 80 percent of the $1.5 bil lion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were a warded without bidding or with limited competition, government records show, pro voking concerns among auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse. Already, questions have been raised about the political con nections of two major contractors - the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton - that have been represented by the lobbyist Joe M. Al lbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former leader of FEMA. Bi lls have come in for deals that apparently were clinched with a handshake, with no documentation. Kellogg, Brown & Root, which was given $60 million in contract s, was rebuked by federal auditors for unsubstantiated billing from the Iraq rec onstruction and criticized for bills like $100-per-bag laundry service.

Experts blame flooding on faulty levees 2005-09-21, MSNBC News/Washington Post http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9419053 Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for th e floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurric ane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood-protection system should have kept most of the city dry. With the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists a nd engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded tha t Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the l ikely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls. Ivor van Heerden, the Hurricane Center's deputy director, said the real scandal of Katrina is the "catastrophic structural failure" of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with rela

tive ease. "We are absolutely convinced that those floodwalls were never overtop ped," said van Heerden. On a tour Tuesday, researchers...showed a "debris line" that indicates the top height of Katrina's waves was at least four feet below th e crest of Lake Pontchartrain's levees. They contended that the pattern of destr uction behind the breaches was consistent with a localized "pressure burst," rat her than widespread overtopping. Former representative Bob Livingston, (R-La.).. .noted that the earthen levees along Lake Pontchartrain had all held, while conc rete floodwalls had failed. He was especially concerned about the 17th Street ba rrier, saying it "shouldn't have broken." If Katrina did not exceed the design c apacity of the New Orleans levees, the federal government may bear ultimate resp onsibility for this disaster.

Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA 2005-09-06, Salt Lake Tribune http://www.sltrib.com/search/ci_3004197 Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?" As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin plea ded on national television for firefighters...a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday [less than a week after landfall] in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, tho ught they were going to be deployed as emergency workers. Instead, they have lea rned they are going...to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA. On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled of f their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency. Note: If the above link does not work, click here.

Katrina contractor has reaped millions 2008-03-14, Los Angeles Times/Associated Press http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-katrina14mar14,1,4559085... Two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands of homeowners ar e still waiting for their government rebuilding checks, and many complain they c an't even get their calls returned. But the company that holds the contract to d istribute the aid is doing quite well. ICF International of Fairfax, Va., has po sted strong profits, gone public, landed additional multimillion-dollar governme nt contracts -- and recently secured a potentially big raise from the state of L ouisiana. In the waning days of Democratic Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's admi nistration, state officials increased the management contract ceiling from $756 million to $912 million -- this, after the Legislature wanted to fire ICF over i ts handling of the homeowner recovery program, called Road Home. "It is outrageo us that ICF couldn't do the job for more than $750 million and that they were gi ven a pay raise after their history of disappointing service," Blanco's successo r, Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, said in an e-mail Thursday. Displaced residents expressed anger. Road Home was created in June 2006 as a state-run, federally f unded plan to compensate homeowners for the breach of New Orleans' government-ru n levees. Homeowners can apply for grants to repair their homes or to obtain buy outs if they don't want to fix things up. As of last month, 56,000 applicants -nearly 40% of the qualified total -- had yet to receive a cent. Plagued by cost overruns and delays, Road Home is expected to cost federal taxpayers $10 billio n and has become a glaring symbol of frustration in post-Katrina New Orleans. Note: For many more revealing reports on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, cli

ck here.

25 questions about murder of the Big Easy 2005-10-02, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/02/INGSHEVHR31.DTL The most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats t he streets..., but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wak e of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incomp etence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern delibera te design and planned neglect -- the murder, not the accidental death, of a grea t city. Here are 25 of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with on a trip to New Orleans and South Louisiana. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossi ble. 20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept the city? W hy have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification? 23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central re gistry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipa l elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?

Cold-war device used to cause Katrina? 2005-09-20, USA Today/Associated Press http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2005-09-20-wacky-weatherman_x.htm An Idaho weatherman says Japan's Yakuza mafia used a Russian-made electromagneti c generator to cause Hurricane Katrina in a bid to avenge itself for the Hiroshi ma atom bomb attack. Meteorologist Scott Stevens, a nine-year veteran of KPVI-TV in Pocatello, said he was struggling to forecast weather patterns starting in 1 998 when he discovered the theory on the Internet. It's now detailed on Stevens' website, www.weatherwars.info. Stevens...says a little-known oversight in physi cal laws makes it possible to create and control storms -- especially if you're armed with the Cold War-era weapon said to have been made by the Russians in 197 6. Stevens' bosses at KPVI-TV say their employee can think and say what he wants as long as he keeps the station out of the debate and acknowledges that his vie ws are his own opinion. Bill Fouch, KPVI's general manager, said. "He's very kno wledgeable about weather, and he's very popular." Note: Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen in a 1997 news briefing stated: "Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can a lter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of ele ctromagnetic waves." To verify this quote on the U.S. Department of Defense webs ite, click here. If terrorist organizations have the capability to set off earth quakes and other major natural disasters, do you think huge military research la boratories might have some of the same capabilities? For more, click here and he re.

U.S. agency blocks photos of New Orleans dead 2005-09-06, Reuters http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID... The U.S. government agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina sa id on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as

they are recovered from the flooded New Orleans area. The Federal Emergency Man agement Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caus ed by the hurricane, rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boat s as they went out to search for storm victims. "We have requested that no photo graphs of the deceased be made by the media," the spokeswoman said in an e-maile d response to a Reuters inquiry. Note: Though a Washington Post article mentioned this news a couple days later, no major media picked up this important Reuters story.

FEMA Wants Over $300M in Katrina Aid Back 2007-02-06, ABC News/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2852688 In the neighborhood President Bush visited right after Hurricane Katrina, the U. S. government gave $84.5 million to more than 10,000 households. But Census figu res show fewer than 8,000 homes existed there at the time. Now the government wa nts back a lot of the money it disbursed. The Federal Emergency Management Admin istration has determined nearly 70,000 Louisiana households improperly received $309.1 million in grants, and officials acknowledge those numbers are likely to grow. An Associated Press analysis of government data obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act suggests the government might not have been careful enough with its checkbook as it gave out nearly $5.3 billion in aid to storm vic tims. The analysis found the government regularly gave money to more homes in so me neighborhoods than the number of homes that actually existed. The pattern was repeated in nearly 100 neighborhoods. At least 162,750 homes that didn't exist before the storms may have received a total of more than $1 billion in improper or illegal payments. In one neighborhood GAO scrutinized, at least one person ga ve an address as a cemetery. Records show FEMA gave 27,924 assistance grants wor th $293 million in that neighborhood. Only 18,590 homes existed, meaning up to $ 98 million in aid could have been disbursed improperly or illegally. The AP's fi ndings are similar to those of a February report by the Government Accountabilit y Office, which found hurricane aid was used for to pay for guns, strippers and tattoos. The GAO concluded that between $600 million and $1.4 billion was improp erly spent on Katrina relief alone.

Blackwater Down 2005-09-22, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/22/opinion/main878822.shtml The men from Blackwater USA arrived in New Orleans right after Katrina hit. The company known for its private security work guarding senior U.S. diplomats in Ir aq beat the federal government and most aid organizations to the scene. About 15 0 heavily armed Blackwater troops dressed in full battle gear spread out into th e chaos of New Orleans. When asked what authority they were operating under, one guy said, "We're on contract with the Department of Homeland Security." Then, p ointing to one of his comrades, he said, "He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem i t necessary." Says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Ri ghts, "These private security forces have behaved brutally, with impunity, in Ir aq. To have them now on the streets of New Orleans is frightening and possibly i llegal." Blackwater is operating under a federal contract...[that] was announced just days after Homeland Security Department spokesperson Russ Knocke told the Washington Post he knew of no federal plans to hire Blackwater. With President B ush using the Katrina disaster to try to repeal Posse Comitatus (the ban on usin g U.S. troops in domestic law enforcement)...the war is coming home in yet anoth

er ominous way. As one Blackwater mercenary said, "This is a trend. You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."

Judge Chastises FEMA as Botching Katrina Housing Program 2006-12-14, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/washington/14fema.html?ex=1323752400&en=221... A federal judge on Wednesday called the Bush administration s handling of a Hurric ane Katrina housing program a legal disaster and ordered officials to explain a co mputer system that cannot count evacuees with precision or explain why they were denied aid. The judge ... ruled last month that the Federal Emergency Managemen t Agency had violated evacuees constitutional rights by eliminating their housing payments without notice. Judge Leon ruled that the agency last spring and summe r had mishandled the transition from a short-term housing program to a longer-te rm program. Instead of explaining why financing was being cut, the agency provid ed only computer-generated and sometimes conflicting program codes, Judge Leon s aid. He ordered agency officials to explain those decisions so that thousands of evacuees could understand the reasoning and decide whether to appeal. I m not look ing for a doctoral dissertation, Judge Leon said. I m looking for a couple of paragr aphs in plain English. This is a legal disaster, Judge Leon said. People s rights are being denied. I don t want us to get so mired in the minutiae and the law while, i n the meantime, people who need help are not getting help. The agency has appeale d Judge Leon s initial order and is hoping a higher court will block its enforceme nt.

FEMA ignored early offers of Katrina aid 2006-01-30, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0601300204jan30,1,4809351.... Hundreds of federal search-and-rescue workers and large numbers of boats, aircra ft and bulldozers were offered to FEMA in the hours immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, but the aid proposals were either ignored or not effectively used, newly released documents show. The Interior Department, which made the offers, a lso proposed dispatching as many as 400 of its law enforcement officers to provi de security in Gulf Coast cities ravaged by flooding and looting. But nearly a m onth would pass before FEMA put the officers to work. Acting in the "immediate a ftermath" of the hurricane, Interior officials provided FEMA with a comprehensiv e list of assets that were "immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance," according to the memo, dated Nov. 7, 2005. Those assets included m ore than 300 boats, 11 aircraft, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 dump trucks and other vehicles. Also offered were rescue crews from the Fish and Wildlife Se rvice and the National Park Service--teams that were trained for urban search-an d-rescue missions using flat-bottom boats...but they were "never formally tasked " for that assignment by FEMA. The Interior Department wasn't the only governmen t agency to offer assistance to FEMA that was not used effectively. Amtrak repor tedly offered, before the storm, to carry residents out, but its train left near ly empty. New Mexico offered National Guard troops, but for days officials waite d for formal approval to use them.

Exxon Mobil Posts New Record for Profit 2005-10-27, ABC/Associated Press http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=1255549 Exxon Mobil Corp. had a quarter for the record books. The world's largest public

ly traded oil company said Thursday high oil and natural-gas prices helped its t hird-quarter profit surge almost 75 percent to $9.92 billion, the largest quarte rly profit for a U.S. company ever, and it was the first to ring up more than $1 00 billion in quarterly sales. The hurricanes slashed Exxon Mobil's U.S. product ion volumes by 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, down nearly 5 percent y ear-over-year, costing the company $45 million before taxes. The company said to tal daily production slipped to 2.45 million barrels of oil equivalent from 2.51 million barrels. Note: Isn't it amazing that though oil production fell, and though we all are pa ying much higher gas prices, Exxon Mobil earned the largest profits ever in the same quarter as Hurricane Katrina? Wouldn't it be nice if during a national cata strophe the oil companies were willing to drop their prices and suffer a little with the rest of us?

The 30 greatest conspiracy theories 2008-11-19, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3483477/The-30-greate... From the assassination of John F Kennedy to the death of Diana, Princess of Wale s. From Roswell, New Mexico, to Nasa's moon landings. From the bloodline of Chri st to the death of Elvis Presley. From the Moscow appartment bombings to the Ind ian Ocean tsunami. From Pearl Harbour to Peak Oil, the Philadelphia experiment a nd Pan Am flight 103. Every major event of the last 2,000 years has prompted a c onspiracy theory and here we examine those with the biggest followings and the m ost longevity. 1. September 11, 2001. Thanks to the power of the web and live br oadcasts on television, the ... theories surrounding the events of 9/11 ... have surpassed those of Roswell and JFK in traction. The [alternative] theories cont inue to grow in strength. At the milder end of the spectrum are the theorists wh o believe that the US government had prior warning of the attacks but did not do enough to stop them. Others believe that the Bush administration deliberately t urned a blind eye to those warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch wars i n the Middle East to usher in another century of American hegemony. A large grou p of people - collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement - cite evidence that a n airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not ha ve been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. Many w itnesses - including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time - claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves. Note: For a concise two-page summary of many unanswered questions about what rea lly happened on 9/11, click here.

Most Katrina Aid From Overseas Went Unclaimed 2007-04-27, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR20070428011... As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidan te Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassador s worldwide. Titled "Echo-Chamber Message" -- a public relations term for talkin g points designed to be repeated again and again -- the Sept. 7, 2005, directive was unmistakable: Assure the scores of countries that had pledged or donated ai d at the height of the disaster that their largesse had provided Americans "prac tical help and moral support" and "highlight the concrete benefits hurricane vic tims are receiving." Eventually the United States ... would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina's

victims. Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstr uction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncoll ected, including $400 million worth of oil. Overall, the United States declined 54 of 77 recorded aid offers from three of its staunchest allies: Canada, Britai n and Israel.

$11 Million a Day Spent on Hotels for Storm Relief 2005-10-13, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/13/national/nationalspecial/13housing.html?ex=... The federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurrican e Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy lo cal officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful. The number of people in hotels has grown by 60 percent in the past two weeks as some shelters closed, reaching nearly 600,000 as of Tuesday. The reliance on ho tels has been necessary, housing advocates say, because [FEMA] has had problems installing mobile homes and travel trailers for evacuees and has been slow to pl ace victims in apartments that real estate executives say are available througho ut the southeast. Critics point out that hotel rooms, at an average cost of $59 a night, are significantly more expensive than apartments and are not suitable f or months-long stays. Even conservative housing experts have criticized the Bush administration's handling of the temporary housing response. "I am baffled," sa id Ronald D. Utt, a former...Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fell ow at the Heritage Foundation. "This is not incompetence. This is willful." Note: Do you ever wonder if the current administration might be trying to bankru pt our country? For more excellent information on the hurricanes: http://www.Wan tToKnow.info/050927hurricanecoverupcorruption

New FEMA boss is 'Duct Tape Man' 2005-09-12, MSNBC: Keith Olbermann blog http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8514671/#050912a In another gesture symbolizing the continued confusion of the federal response, the man President Bush immediately named to succeed Brownie, proves to have been t he same FEMA official who, two-and-a-half years ago, suggested that Americans st ock up on duct tape to protect against a biological or chemical terrorist attack . David Paulison, then the government's Fire Administrator, joined with the then -head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, on February 10th, 2003, to say that duct t ape and plastic sheeting should be part of any home's "survival kit" in preparat ion for a terrorist attack. That set off a run on duct tape at stores, and wides pread criticism of the administration. It might have been the first time after 9 /11 that a large number of Americans wondered if the government really knew what it was talking about when it came to disaster preparedness. And the man behind that politically explosive proposal, has just been named to succeed the man who had been the face of the politically explosive response to Hurricane Katrina.

Earwitness says explosives blew Industrial Canal levee 2005-09-11, ABC News (Video Clip) http://www.total411.info/leveeboom.rm DAVID MUIR, ABC NEWS: This is the actual levee that runs along the canal on the eastern side of the city. You can see the massive breach here and...what the wat

er did to the Lower Ninth Ward. It completely destroyed neighborhoods. JOE EDWAR DS, JR., 9TH WARD RESIDENT: I heard something go "boom"!!! MUIR: Joe Edwards rus hed to get himself and as many neighbors as possible into his truck. They drove to this bridge, where they've been living ever since. Was it solely the water th at broke the levee, or was it the force of this barge? Joe Edwards says neither. People...in this neighborhood...actually think the city did it, blowing up the levee to save richer neighborhoods like the French Quarter. MUIR: So you're conv inced... EDWARDS: I know this happened! MUIR: They broke the levee on purpose? E DWARDS: They blew it.

Navy Pilots Who Rescued Victims Are Reprimanded 2005-09-07, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07navy.html?ex=128... Two Navy helicopter pilots and their crews returned from New Orleans on Aug. 30 expecting to be greeted as lifesavers after ferrying more than 100 hurricane vic tims to safety. Instead, their superiors chided the pilots...at a meeting the ne xt morning for rescuing civilians when their assignment that day had been to del iver food and water to military installations along the Gulf Coast. While refuel ing at a Coast Guard landing pad in early evening, Lieutenant Udkow said, he cal led Pensacola and received permission to continue rescues that evening. Accordin g to the pilots and other military officials, they rescued 110 people. The next morning, though, the two crews were called to a meeting with Commander Holdener, who said he told them that while helping civilians was laudable, the lengthy re scue effort was an unacceptable diversion from their main mission of delivering supplies.

Hurricane Katrina - Our Experiences 2005-09-06, TruthOut/EMS Network http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090805A.shtml On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Qu arter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, a nd locals. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources...and scores of b uses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have be en invisible... Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderl y clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway. As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line a cross the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began f iring their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various direc tions. A few of us...managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's a ssurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander h ad lied to us to get us to move. We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans. T hese were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mis sissippi River... Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up...aimed his gu n at our faces, screaming, "Get off the f... freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreate d, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water. The next days, our g roup of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. This offic ial treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to u s by the ordinary Texans. Note: Though this and other stunning accounts spread widely over the Internet an

d alternative news services, no major media would report this highly newsworthy account by to emergency medics caught in the disaster.

Government paid $1.4 billion in bogus hurricane aid 2006-06-13, Houston Chronicle/Associated Press http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3966483.html The government doled out as much as $1.4 billion in bogus assistance to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, getting hoodwinked to pay for season football ti ckets, a tropical vacation and even a divorce lawyer, congressional investigator s have found. The GAO concluded that as much as 16 percent of the billions of do llars in FEMA help to individuals after the two hurricanes was unwarranted. GAO provided lawmakers with a copy of a $2,358 U.S. Treasury check for rental assist ance that an undercover agent got using a bogus address. The money was paid even after FEMA learned from its inspector that the undercover applicant did not liv e at the address. FEMA paid an individual $2,358 in rental assistance, while at the same time paying about $8,000 for the same person to stay 70 nights at more than $100 per night in a Hawaii hotel. FEMA also could not establish that 750 de bit cards worth $1.5 million even went to Katrina victims. Among the items purch ased with the cards: an all-inclusive, one-week Caribbean vacation; five season tickets to New Orleans Saints professional football games; and adult erotica pro ducts in Houston. FEMA paid millions of dollars to more than 1,000 registrants w ho used names and Social Security numbers belonging to state and federal prisone rs for expedited housing assistance.

Third World Scenes 2005-09-05, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/04/AR20050904009... Mullen has a schoolteacher's kindly demeanor, so it was jarring to hear him say he suspected that the levee breaks had somehow been engineered to keep the wealt hy French Quarter and Garden District dry at the expense of poor black neighborh oods...a suspicion I heard from many other black survivors. And it was surprisin g to hear Mullen's gentle voice turn bitter as he described the scene at the con vention center, when helicopters bringing food didn't even land and the soldiers "just pushed the food out like we were in the Third World." I literally stumble d into the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He looked genuinely shaken, [saying] "this looks like the hold of a slave ship."

Bush Has Declared Katrina-Related Emergencies in 40 States 2005-09-15, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1129802 The dire conditions created by Hurricane Katrina may be confined to the Gulf Coa st, but on paper the emergency is all over the country. President Bush has decla red that Katrina-related emergencies exist in 40 states and the District of Colu mbia. Some, such as California, Massachusetts and North Dakota, are far removed from Katrina's wrath. Apparently it does not take much to qualify as an emergenc y. Note: These "emergencies" also give the president extraordinary powers to curtai l civil liberties.

Bush Has Declared Katrina-Related Emergencies in 40 States 2005-09-15, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1129802 The dire conditions created by Hurricane Katrina may be st, but on paper the emergency is all over the country. red that Katrina-related emergencies exist in 40 states mbia. Apparently it does not take much to qualify as an confined to the Gulf Coa President Bush has decla and the District of Colu emergency.

Note: These "emergencies" also give the president extraordinary powers to curtai l civil liberties.

A month later, no change on Katrina contracts 2005-11-11, MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10006959/ Despite a month-old pledge, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has yet to r eopen four of its biggest no-bid contracts for Hurricane Katrina work and won t do so until the contracts are virtually complete. A promise to hire more minorityowned firms also is largely unfulfilled. The no-bid contracts for temporary hous ing, worth up to $100 million each, were given to Shaw Group Inc., Bechtel Corp. , CH2M Hill Inc. and Fluor Corp. right after Katrina struck. Bechtel CEO Riley B echtel served on Bush s Export Council from 2003-2004, and the Shaw Group s lobbyist , Joe Allbaugh, is a former FEMA director and friend of Bush. Charges of favorit ism helped prompt last month s pledge by FEMA acting director R. David Paulison, b ut now officials with the Homeland Security Department, which oversees FEMA, say the contracts won t be awarded again until February. FEMA promised to boost the n umber of contracts given to minority-owned businesses but in the last month the percentage has increased only slightly, from 1.5 percent to 1.8 percent. That s st ill well below the 5 percent of federal contracts normally set aside for minorit y-owned firms.

Kanye West's Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC 2005-09-03, Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR20050903001... NBC's levee broke and Kanye West flooded through with a tear about the federal r esponse in New Orleans during the network's live concert fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina. The rapper was among the celebs and singers participating in the one-hour special, produced by NBC News. West was not scheduled to perform ; he was one of the blah, blah, blahers, who would read from scripts prepared by the network. West: I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, "They're looting." You see a white family, it says, "They're l ooking for food." And, you know, it's been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I wo uld be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the TV because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can g ive, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there . Parent company NBC Universal said in a statement, "Kanye West departed from th e scripted comments that were prepared for him, and his opinions in no way repre sent the views of the networks." West's comments would be cut from the West Coas t feed, an NBC spokeswoman told The TV Column.

Ready or Not, Katrina Victims Lose Temporary Housing 2009-05-08, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/us/08trailer.html Though more than 4,000 Louisiana homeowners have received rebuilding money only in the last six months, or are struggling with inadequate grants or no money at all, FEMA is intent on taking away their trailers by the end of May. The deadlin e, which ends temporary housing before permanent housing has replaced it, has be come a stark example of recovery programs that seem almost to be working against one another. Thousands of rental units have yet to be restored, and not a singl e one of 500 planned Katrina cottages has been completed and occupied. The Road Ho me program for single-family homeowners, which has cost federal taxpayers $7.9 b illion, has a new contractor who is struggling to review a host of appeals, and workers who assist the homeless are finding more elderly people squatting in aba ndoned buildings. Nonetheless, FEMA wants its trailers back, even though it plan s to scrap or sell them for a fraction of what it paid for them. As of last week , there were two groups still in the agency s temporary housing program: more than 3,000 in trailers and nearly 80 who have been in hotels paid for by FEMA since last May, when it shut down group trailer sites. Most are elderly, disabled or b oth, including double amputees, diabetes patients, the mentally ill, people pron e to seizures and others dependent on oxygen tanks. Of those in trailers, more t han 2,000 are homeowners who fear that the progress they are making in rebuildin g will come to a halt if their trailers are taken. Progress on renovations has b een slow for many reasons: contractors who did shoddy work or simply absconded w ith money, baffling red tape and rule changes, and inadequate grants. Note: For further reports on the amazingly unhelpful government response to hurr icanes Katrina and Rita, click here.

Brits sent 400,000 meals but U.S. didn't use them 2005-10-14, San Francisco Chronicle/Washington Post http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/15/MNG5VF8PJI1.DTL In the early days of September, as military helicopters plucked desperate New Or leanians from rooftops and Red Cross shelters swelled with the displaced, nearly 400,000 packaged meals landed on a tarmac at Little Rock Air Force Base and wer e whisked by tractor-trailer to Louisiana. But most of the $5.3 million worth of food never reached the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Instead, because of fears about mad cow disease and a long-standing ban on British beef, the rations routi nely consumed by British soldiers have sat stacked in an Arkansas warehouse. Now , with some of the food set to expire in early 2006 and U.S. taxpayers spending $16,000 a month to store the meals, the State Department is quietly looking for a needy country to take them. No fewer than six federal agencies or departments had a role in accepting, distributing and rejecting the food. Note: This unbelievable news was first reported by the London Times and WantToKn ow.info a month prior to this recent article. Why didn't the US press report it back then?

Cheney orders rural electric crews to work on oil pipeline from Texas 2005-09-11, WKYC (Ohio NBC affiliate) http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_fullstory.asp?id=40633 Shortly after Hurricane Katrina roared through South Mississippi knocking out el ectricity and communication systems, the White House ordered power restored to a

pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast. That order...delayed efforts by at l east 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water syst ems. Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Mike Callahan said the U.S. Departm ent of Energy called him [stating that] opening the fuel line was a national pri ority. Manager Dan Jordan said Vice President Dick Cheney s office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substation s needed power restored immediately. Callahan said energy officials told him gas oline and diesel fuel needed to flow through the pipeline to avert a national cr isis from the inability to meet fuel needs in the Northeast. Our concern was that ...it would be a national crisis for Mississippi, Callahan said.

Gone With the Water (Hurricane Predicted One Year Before It Happened) 2004-10-00, National Geographic October 2004 Issue http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5 As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacu ated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Bi g Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were home less, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. When did this calamity happen? It hasn't yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. "It's not if it will happen," says University of Ne w Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when."

New Orleans is Sinking (Hurricane predicted on 9/11!!!) 2001-09-11, Popular Mechanics (Note date of this article) http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282151.html Emergency planners believe that it is a foregone conclusion that the Big Easy so meday will be hit by a scouring storm surge. This watery "big one" will produce a staggering amount of damage. Yet, this doesn't necessarily mean that there wil l be a massive loss of lives. The key is a new emergency warning system develope d by...Louisiana State University. Within 30 minutes to an hour after raw data i s collected from monitoring stations in the Gulf, an assessment of storm-surge d amage would be available to emergency planners. Disaster relief agencies then wo uld be able to mobilize resources.

Katrina forecasters were remarkably accurate 2005-09-16, NBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9369041 The National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center...forecast the pa th of the storm and the potential for devastation with remarkable accuracy. Nati onal Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield also gave daily pre-storm videoconfe rence briefings to federal officials in Washington, warning them of a nightmare scenario of New Orleans levees not holding...and flooding wiping out large swaths of the Gulf Coast. Mayfield also...personally called the governors of Mississip pi and Louisiana and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin two days ahead of time to warn them about the monstrous hurricane.

Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist 2005-09-05, CNN News

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued...that government planners did not predict su ch a disaster ever could occur. But in fact, government officials, scientists an d journalists have warned of such a scenario for years. Chertoff...said governme nt officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees tha t would flood the city of New Orleans. As far back as Friday, August 26 [three d ays before landfall], the National Hurricane Center was predicting the storm cou ld be a Category 4 hurricane at landfall, with New Orleans directly in its path. The National Weather Service prediction proved almost perfect.

Halliburton Subsidiary Taps Contract For Repairs 2005-09-05, Washington Post/Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/04/AR20050904011... An Arlington-based Halliburton Co. subsidiary that has been criticized for its r econstruction work in Iraq has begun tapping a $500 million Navy contract to do emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and Marine facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root Services Inc., won the competiti ve bid contract last July to provide debris removal and other emergency work ass ociated with natural disasters. KBR has been at the center of scrutiny for recei ving a five-year, no-bid contract to restore Iraqi oil fields shortly before the war began in 2003. Halliburton has reported being paid $10.7 billion for Iraq-r elated government work during 2003 and 2004. The company reported its pretax pro fits from that work as $163 million. Pentagon auditors have questioned tens of m illions of dollars of Halliburton charges for its operations there. Last month t hree congressional Democrats asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to inves tigate the demotion of a senior civilian Army official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, who publicly criticized the awarding of that contract. Vice President Cheney he aded Halliburton from 1995 to 2000.

Dozens indicted in alleged Katrina scam 2005-12-29, CNN http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/12/28/katrina.fraud/ Forty-nine people have been indicted in a scam to pocket Red Cross hurricane rel ief funds and more indictments are expected. Authorities said 22 people working for a Red Cross contractor at a call center in Bakersfield, California, filed fa lse claims, and by involving family members and friends, brought the number of p eople under indictment to 49. Officials said they planned to widen the investiga tion. "Our investigation is going to be expanded to include other parts of Calif ornia and other states, and there are thousands of claims made in other states," FBI Special Agent Javier Colon said. The Red Cross had safeguards in place afte r Katrina, but "they were not fully adequate," spokesman Steve Cooper said.

Katrina makes many of planners fears a reality 2005-09-09, MSNBC News http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9274362 As Katrina roared into the Gulf of Mexico, emergency planners pored over maps an d charts of a hurricane simulation that projected 61,290 dead and 384,257 injure d or sick in a catastrophic flood that would leave swaths of southeast Louisiana uninhabitable for more than a year. These planners were not involved in the fra

ntic preparations for Katrina. By coincidence, they were working on a yearlong p roject to prepare federal and state officials for a Category 3 hurricane strikin g New Orleans. Their fictitious storm eerily foreshadowed the havoc wrought by C ategory 4 Katrina a few days later, raising questions about whether government l eaders did everything possible...to protect New Orleans residents from a well-do cumented threat.

Religious Leaders Quit Katrina Panel 2006-07-14, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/14/katrina/main1805194.shtml By all accounts, the group of nine was a religious powerhouse: Their ranks inclu ded rabbis, imams and ministers, including the man hailed by some as the next Bi lly Graham. But as of Thursday, seven of the nine religious leaders serving on a committee created by the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to disburse money to churche s destroyed by Hurricane Katrina had quit their posts, claiming their advice was ignored. Departing members of the interfaith advisory committee say the fund's Washington staff disregarded their advice, cutting checks for Gulf Coast churche s without properly investigating the institutions. "I've been in ministry for 30 years and I don't think I've ever resigned from anything. I'm a loyalist to a f ault. But what's happened is unacceptable," said [Bishop T.D.] Jakes who was nam ed one of the 25 most influential evangelists by TIME Magazine. Another committe e member who resigned, said the Washington staff wanted the religious leaders to "rubber stamp" their decisions. "They had their agenda and that's unacceptable, " he said.

Finally fooling none of the people 2005-09-13, Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheer13sep13,0,2708046.... The Federal Emergency Management Agency is now run by political hacks appointed by Bush who know zilch about disaster relief. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," the president said to Michael Brown a few days before the FEMA chief was relieved of his oversight of the relief efforts. Brown, who reportedly doctored his unimpressive resume and didn't have a background in emergency management, re signed Monday. He had secured this plum job because he was a college buddy of hi s predecessor, Joe Allbaugh, who managed Bush's 2000 presidential campaign.

House committee dismisses bulk of investigative division 2006-10-19, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-19-house-committee-shakeup_x.htm The House Appropriations Committee has let go about 60 private contractors who m ade up most of an investigative unit that was auditing billions of dollars in go vernment spending, including the $62 billion federal relief package for Hurrican e Katrina. The investigators...were released during the past week. The shake-up which leaves only 16 full-time employees in the investigative unit comes about a year after the Appropriations Committee's chairman, Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., launched the Katrina review by saying the unit would "conduct a wide-ranging as sessment and analysis of disaster spending." At the time, Lewis said the unit ha d a tradition of "comprehensive" reporting. It's unclear how the departures will affect the work of the unit, whose contract staff is made up of former employee s of the FBI, CIA and other government investigative services. Some of them had worked for the unit for several years. Scofield said he could not identify the s

pecific work being done by investigators because much of the unit's inquiries in volve classified information. Established in 1943, the investigative unit has fo cused mainly on defense and intelligence spending programs.