Rudman: Deus ex Machina on Torture

by Ray McGovern

The announcement in mid-March that CIA Director Leon Panetta had picked former Sen. Warren Rudman to act as CIA "liaison" with the Senate Intelligence Committee during its "review" of interrogation and detention practices has drawn virtually no criticism from the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

Yet, it is a dead give-away as to how congressional leaders plan to go through the motions for a year or so, and then let everyone off the hook.

Why let everyone off the hook? Because congressional leaders, Republican and Democratic alike, were informed of the Bush/Cheney administration plans for torture - perhaps not chapter and verse, but enough to be complicit in their silence. Both parties have amply soiled the dirty linen that could be hung out.

So here's the plan. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, looking toward reelection in 2010, calculates that the last thing he needs is a bonafide investigation that would make him vulnerable to Cheneyesque charges of being weak in the "war" on terrorism. These days, if you take a hard line against torture, you can be made to appear soft on terrorism.

Worse still, other prominent Democrats like Sen. Jay Rockefeller and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were given intelligence briefings on interrogation, warrantless eavesdropping, and God knows what else. And they let Bush and Cheney run right over them with nary a whimper.

Surely, the Washington power structure concurs that what is needed is the kind of "thorough investigation" which President Richard Nixon loudly called for, with tongue in check, on Watergate. So, Senate team managers Reid and Rockefeller have gone to their bench for an ace utility infielder - quintessential practitioner of "thorough" investigations, Warren Rudman. They are eager to bring Rudman on as liaison with the Senate Intelligence Committee led by Dianne Feinstein with Rockefeller sitting at her right hand, so to speak.

The FCM, whether from indolence or timidity, have completely missed the boat on Rudman, calling him a "respected" veteran of investigations of national security issues. Does no one do due diligence - or simple homework - anymore?

Are the FCM journalists determined to make it easy for Attorney General Eric Holder to shirk his duty to see that the law is faithfully enforced, by giving him the out of saying, "Well, let's first see what the Senate Intelligence Committee comes up with."

It's been seven weeks since word got out that Rudman is back in service; yet hardly a word about Rudman's reputation as designated fixer par excellence. Rudman has been wildly successful in covering up past national security crimes.

It is troubling that it should have to fall to the likes of us - far from the comfortable environs of the FCM - to point this out.

‘Respected Politician'

The FCM has been quite busy applying the sobriquet "respected politician" to Rudman, though in his case it is truly an oxymoron.

In the 1980s, Rudman earned his spurs by working hand in glove with then-Rep. Dick Cheney to limit the scope of the Iran-Contra investigation. Rudman was essentially the good cop to Cheney's bad.

Rudman was one of three "moderate" Republican senators who collaborated with "moderate" Democratic co-chairman Lee Hamilton in soft-peddling the roles of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush in authorizing and overseeing the Iran-Contra law violations.

While Hamilton and Rudman laid most of the blame on Oliver North and other low-level "men of zeal," Cheney led the rear-guard Republican defense, insisting that the Reagan administration had committed no crimes and instead blaming Democrats in Congress for daring to pass laws interfering with the President's powers.

In the end, Hamilton got what he wanted, a veneer of "bipartisanship" with the signatures of Rudman and two other GOP senators (William Cohen and Paul Trible); Rudman got a watered-down "majority report"; and Cheney went ahead with his in-your-face "minority report" that he later proclaimed had laid the foundation for George W. Bush's views on expansive presidential powers.

In the end, none of the White House folks or other senior officials who played fast and loose with the law during the Iran-Contra affair were held to account.

A noxious precedent was set. This kind of experience, one might say, has a way of emboldening lawbreakers to try again - and again.

Dissing Gulf War Veterans

In this next example, I am having difficulty controlling my anger. For I remain outraged by Rudman's willingness to do the Pentagon's bidding in refusing to acknowledge that the illnesses of over 200,000 U.S. Gulf War veterans were related to exposure to several toxic chemicals - pesticides, experimental pills and vaccines, depleted uranium, oil-well fire pollution, and nerve gas - for starters.

Dual-use technologies needed to make nerve agents were sold to Iraq during the Reagan and Bush I administrations (when Saddam Hussein was something of a secret ally) and the stockpiles of nerve agents were then blown up by U.S. Army engineers in 1991 oblivious to the fact that 145,000 U.S. troops were downwind. After a decade of denials, the Pentagon fessed up and notified those 145,000 Gulf War veterans they may have been exposed to low levels of chemical warfare agents.

Patrick and Robin Eddington, former colleagues of mine at CIA, had been appalled at the cover-up of Gulf War illnesses orchestrated by the Pentagon and by then-CIA Director John Deutch. I watched closely as the Eddingtons tried, in vain, to do the right thing by Gulf War veterans who had served in the Iraq Theater. (When the couple saw no alternative to quitting and exposing the continuing injustices by writing a book, "Gassed in the Gulf," I was honored to be asked to write the Foreword.)

But U.S. government bureaucrats and politicians had other priorities, such as deflecting attention from - and cost of - the Gulf War illnesses.

So, in May 1997, Warren Rudman was appointed the Pentagon's special adviser on Gulf War syndrome by his old Senate colleague William Cohen, who had moved on to be President Bill Clinton's bipartisan choice as Defense Secretary.

In this advisory post, Rudman dismissed all evidence that challenged the Pentagon's conclusion that Gulf War illnesses were not caused by multiple toxic exposures. Rudman succeeded in sparing the Pentagon embarrassment, but at the price of denying over 200,000 Gulf War veterans the medical care they needed to cope with a wide array of neurological and other maladies. The result was to delay for over a decade medical research, treatment and disability benefits for Gulf War veterans.

That's right, over 200,000 of the 700,000 U.S. troops remain ill 18 years after the March 1991 cease-fire.

For readers with strong stomachs and a yearning for more detail, we include below the gist of a short piece I wrote at the time to chronicle Rudman's role in this unconscionable cover-up from May 1997 until January 2001, when Clinton awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal for services performed.

Taking no credit away from Rudman for his effective hatchet-man role, it is only fair to point out that it was Clinton who chose to cave in to the Pentagon. Rudman was merely a willing functionary - a hired gun doing his best to protect his client in The Pentagon v. Gulf War Veterans.

That Clinton would single out Rudman for a special award, however, was a gratuitous slap in the face of tens of thousands of ill veterans without a voice in the high councils of our government.

Rudman Rebuffed

The findings of the panel led by Rudman from 1997 to 2001 have now been thoroughly discredited.

Late last year, after reviewing hundreds of peer-reviewed research studies, an independent Research Advisory Committee (RAC) mandated by Congress, concluded that prior investigations were biased against veterans, slanted in favor of the military and VA leadership, and woefully incomplete.

The November 2008 RAC report found that scientific research has determined a conclusive link between Gulf War illnesses and toxic exposures during deployment. The RAC also called pointedly for a reduction in government interference in the scientific process.

When I mentioned the re-emergence of Rudman to shepherd yet another "investigation" - this one on torture, Paul Sullivan, a former project manager for the Veterans Administration and now executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, expressed outrage. I asked Sullivan why the Pentagon was so stubbornly resisting the reality that over 200,000 troops needed proper care - many of them for the long term.

"Previous administrations fought against our veterans because the government wanted to save money and preserve the myth of an easy, cheap Gulf War victory," said Sullivan. "Healthcare and disability benefits for life might well cost over a million dollars for each of the 200,000 Gulf War veterans who are ill - a total price tag in the billions of dollars per year.

"This means the inexpensive, "casualty-light" Gulf War portrayed by the Pentagon and FCM was actually a very expensive, high-casualty conflict," said Sullivan, who served as a Cavalry Scout during Desert Storm.

Speaking on behalf of Veterans for Common Sense, Sullivan indicated that VCS strongly opposes the involvement of Warren Rudman in investigating torture, given his role in covering up the Gulf War scandal of the 1990s. Sullivan noted that at least one active duty Army soldier committed suicide rather than follow orders to torture detainees.

Veterans for Common Sense is co-plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit that is forcing President Obama to release torture documents and photos.

Another Cover-up?

Covering up President Bush's torture policies is more about avoiding liability to prosecution - or, at least, acute political embarrassment. But the tools of cover-up are the same; and, again, what is needed is an experienced hand.

CIA Director Panetta seems confident that he has that kind of person in Rudman. It was while Panetta was White House chief of staff under President Clinton that Rudman became head of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), after the previous chairman, Les Aspin, died in May 1995. Rudman, the consummate insider, was officially named chair of PFIAB in 1997 and served in that capacity until 2001.

He is now 79, but can be assumed to be well rested and no doubt has been warming up for his new job with Panetta and CIA operatives-some of whom were involved in implementing the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture policy. It is becoming clearer and clearer what Panetta meant when, at his confirmation hearings in early February he tried to reassure members of the Senate Intelligence Committee they should expect little trouble from him. "I am a creature of Congress," he said with a broad smile, which was returned by smiles of equal width from members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Rudman, another "creature of Congress," can be expected over the coming months to exhibit his characteristic exuberance in coming off the bench to play the role of designated hitter. If all goes as our distinguished Senators expect, the torture thing will be fixed by this time next year, when Rudman reaches 80.

We shall have to wait to see if the FCM will wake up and take some interest so that the American body politic has an opportunity to be informed and perhaps even to summon the courage to prevent a Rudman Redux - this time on torture.

* * *

Chronicling Rudman Role on Gulf War Illness

May 1997: Rudman is retained by his close friend, Defense Secretary William Cohen, to act as special adviser on Gulf War illnesses. The announcement coincides with a report of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses criticizing the Pentagon for being too slow to investigate possible chemical incidents and for obstructing the Committee's work.

November 1997: The final Presidential Advisory Committee report covering the months since May 1997 finds that "public mistrust about the government's handling of Gulf War veterans' illness has not only endured, it has expanded." The Committee charges that the Pentagon-run battlefield surveys and research and analysis had hopelessly biased conclusions against the possibility that low-level exposures to chemical agents were a factor.

This stinging critique notes that many U.S. alarm and detection systems could not detect lower levels of chemicals that might have delayed effects, and that the Pentagon had summarily dismissed virtually all other reported detections - by British, French, and Czech forces, for example - as unproven. President Bill Clinton names Rudman to head an "independent panel" (The Presidential Special Oversight Board) to ensure that the Pentagon's inquiry into Gulf War illnesses "meets the highest standards."

In view of the Committee's findings and Rudman's close relationship with Cohen, then-Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Connecticut, and others immediately question how independent such a panel could be. How could Rudman be expected to perform an unbiased investigation of the behavior of a major client on an issue on which Rudman had been advising that client for the preceding half-year?

October 2000: The Pentagon announces that 30,000 additional Gulf War servicemen and women are to be told they have been exposed to Iraqi nerve gas. In 1997, 99,000 were informed they might have been exposed. At a public meeting convened to announce the new notifications, Rudman interrupts to ask (and answer) rhetorically, "Does this (the additional 30,000) mean any more people are ill? So far, there is no evidence of this."

The Pentagon briefer explains that 30,000 of those who earlier were told they had been exposed would now be told they were not, leaving the overall total for exposures at 99,000. [Since then, the total has risen to 145,000.]

November-December 2001: Dr. William H. Taylor and Dr. Vinh Cam, members of the Rudman-led Presidential Special Oversight Board, object strongly to his attempts to steer it toward findings favorable to the Pentagon. Vinh charged that under Rudman, the Board has acted as a mere extension of the Pentagon.

In a letter to Rudman, Taylor wrote:

"OSAGWI (the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses) selectively ignored evidence that it did uncover, and repeatedly showed an unwillingness to investigate leads that suggested a conclusion contrary to its assessment. In short, OSAGWI's investigations are biased, and the conclusions and assessments that OSAGWI states in its reports cannot be considered credible."

Dr. Taylor went on to decry efforts by the Board's executive director to "depejoratize" (sic) Board members' reports, "particularly concerning the presence of chemical warfare agents," and sharply criticized Rudman's expressed wish to give the Office of Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses "an ‘A' for effort."

The correspondence makes it abundantly clear that Drs. Taylor and Cam would not give Rudman's Pentagon client a passing grade, and that they have little but disdain for Rudman's (successful) attempt to manipulate the Board's findings.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

A Moldovan-Israeli Werewolf in Paris

By Will

Israel's racist-thug-turned-racist-Foreign-Minister Avigdor Lieberman continues his sideshow tour of Europe. While the party in the Washington DC Hilton that housed the AIPAC conference moved to Capitol Hill, Minister Lieberman made his way to Paris.

In the City of Love, the chauvinistic hatemonger was a virtual Pepé Le Pew (sorry for the mixed metaphors, but there's more to come). He was met by protesters calling him a fascist. The French weekly Journal du Dimanche ran the headline, "Lieberman, a bothersome visitor," and called his views "nefarious."

The debonair French leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, was too embarrassed to slap palms with the former nightclub bouncer, and probably did not want to have to wait in line behind the velvet ropes to make the club look popular.

The Sark chose to duck out of town, leaving his own Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner to repeat the French demands for "the complete halt of settlement building, including that linked to 'natural growth.'"

Kouchner also told Lieberman there is no military solution to the Gaza problem and that the Strip must be opened permanently to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis. He then slapped the visiting minister in a face with a baguette.

While these diplomats apply pressure, day-time Lieberman seems minimally diplomatic -- perhaps he's comforted by the cast of expert Palestinian-screwers, Bibi, Barak and Peres, who expertly fend off any outside pushes for Israeli concessions.

I just fear that a full court diplomatic press will be the full moon, setting off the true monster, candidate Lieberman and the pro-settler constituency that put the goon in office. This wolf has a particular appetite for Palestinians, and their crushed bones feed the careers of many Israeli pols. Israel's alarming move to revoke the citizenship of some non-Jewish citizens is an alarming sign of possible future paths to keep the Jewish state Jewish -- especially with growing demographic evidence that Jews are no longer a majority in the lands the government presides over.

If I could leave with one positive note, I love that Lieberman is just another public relations fiasco for Israel. It causes the state to spend that much more of its resources on PR clean-up.

Blowback in Lebanon on Cheney-Rove-Abrams hit team

Word from Lebanon is that WMR's report on the Bush-Cheney White House operating a hit team that was behind the assassinations of Lebanese political leaders was featured on Lebanese television today.

This article also appeared on a Lebanese news site.

Excerpts:

"Dick Cheney, the name that always pops up whenever there is talk about a serious crime someplace in the world. Well, Cheney had his own death squad CIA unit which he ran from the white house. By Cheney’s orders, the assassinations unit killed former Lebanese minister and Lebanese Forces chief Elie Hobeika on the 24th of January 2002 and former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on the 14th of March 2005, prominent investigative journalist Wayne Madsen said.

Madsen who is known for his close ties with active circles in the CIA, was speaking to the Russia Today television when he revealed that the same squad that had assassinated Hobeika in coordination with former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s office, had also assassinated Hariri.

“This is something that I have heard about five years ago from CIA sources,” Madsen said. “I reported in 2004-2005 that the CIA unit linked to the White House was responsible for coordinating the assassinations in Lebanon of former Christian leader Elie Hobeika and also the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, and that this was done in close coordination with a similar unit operated by then Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s office in Jerusalem,” Madsen said. . .

What Madsen had revealed has drawn storms of reactions that demand Cheney be prosecuted . . .

In 2005, Madsen cited one “key source’ in his report and said that “a number of intelligence sources have reported that assassinations of foreign leaders like Hariri and Hobeika are ultimately authorized by two key White House officials, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams. In addition, Abrams is the key liaison between the White House and Sharon’s office for such covert operations, including political assassinations and Abrams is the guy the Israelis go to for a wink and a nod for such ops.”

More evidence emerges that H1N1 was engineered in "Jurassic Park" bio-labs

Informed sources have revealed to WMR that the H1N1 virus, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned could become a global pandemic, was reverse engineered from genetic material obtained from the remains of victims of the deadly 1918 "Spanish flu" influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide.

WMR has obtained information from biological researchers that the 1918 Spanish flu genetic sequences were "manipulated" in order to effect transmission capability. The current H1N1 virus, called "swine flu," is reportedly a combination of two forms of human flu, two forms of swine flu (North American and Eurasian), and avian or bird flu. There are now reports of species hopping from humans to pigs in Canada.

The scientific name for the current H1N1 virus that was manipulated is "Influenza A virus (strain A/Brevig Mission/1/1918 H1N1)." It is called Brevig Mission because, as WMR previously reported, U.S. Army biological warfare specialists recovered the genetic material from the fairly intact corpse of an Inuit woman who died from the 1918 flu in Brevig Mission, Alaska. WMR has learned that work on manipulation of the Brevig Mission flu strain began in 1997.

Two bio-safety laboratories have been associated with the genetic reverse engineering of not only A-H1N1, the current "swine flu" strain, but also the deadly Ebola virus. They are the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada. The Associated Press reported on September 20, 2007, that the Madison laboratory was cited for safety violations: "University of Wisconsin-Madison research on the deadly Ebola virus was conducted for a year in a less-secure laboratory than required, until the National Institutes of Health alerted the school to the problem. The deadly virus itself was never present in the laboratory, said Jan Klein, UW-Madison biological safety officer. Instead, DNA copies of the virus were being studied to better understand one of the world's most dangerous pathogens."

The report also stated that the Madison research facility was involved with combining "materials": "Klein said no one was ever at risk, though an infectious virus could have been produced if the research material had been combined with other components. But that was not part of any planned experiment and would not be done by accident,' she said."

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reportedly shut down the Ebola research at Madison but it was reportedly moved to a Level 4 Bio-Safety Laboratory at the National Microbiology Laboratory at the Canadian Science Center for Human and Animal Health in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 2007, macaque monkeys were infected with the 1981 flu virus at the Canadian laboratory by some of the same researchers who were involved in the risky Ebola research in Madison.

The research in Madison on Ebola had been conducted in a Bio Safety Level 2 laboratory when it should have been conducted in a Bio Safety Level 4 laboratory, the most stringent for pathogens like Ebola and H1N1. At the time of the safety violations, Madison has less stringent Level 3 labs but no Level 4 labs. In early 2008, Madison again conducted work on Ebola, but in a Level 4 lab.

Science Daily reported the following from Madison on October 7, 2004: "Using a gene resurrected from the virus that caused the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, recorded history's most lethal outbreak of infectious disease, scientists have found that a single gene may have been responsible for the devastating virulence of the virus."

The Winnipeg laboratory figures into the November 15, 2001 disappearance of noted Harvard University virologist Dr. Don C. Wiley in Memphis, Tennessee after his attendance at a banquet honoring his service as a scientific advisory board member of St. Jude's Hospital. Wiley's body was found one month later in the Mississippi River in Vidalia, Louisiana. The Shelby County medical examiner ruled Wiley's death a "suicide" from jumping into the Mississippi River from the west bound lane of the I-40 Hernando de Soto bridge. Wiley was heading back to his father's residence in Millington, northeast of Memphis at the time of his disappearance.

This editor reported on the Wiley death extensively at the time. And the Canadian facility became involved in the investigation. From "Mystery in Memphis," published in "Abuse Your Illusions, 2003, edited by Russ Kick: "While the Memphis Police and the FBI continued to handle the Wiley case as just another distraught "jumper" hurling himself 135 feet into the Mississippi River, other law enforcement agencies were not as sanguine.

On November30 [2001], [Memphis Police Sergeant Robert 'Bubba' Shemwell received a call from Detective Paul McKemmie of the National Security Investigation Unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Ottawa. McKemmie advised Shemwell that his unit was responsible for protecting scientists with Level-3 and Level-4 clearance at the Canadian Science Center for Human and Animal Health in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The Canadian center houses the National Microbiology Laboratory, where scientists deal with the most dangerous and contagious human and animal pathogens and diseases, which are categorized as Level-4. These include hantavirus, hepatitis, influenza, and hemorrhagic fevers such as the Ebola virus, Marburg virus, and Lassa Fever. In another hghly-protected laboratory, scientists work with Level-3 agents, which include bacteria such as anthrax that, although not contagious, can be transmitted through the air and can cause death or serious illness. The center's tight security is overseen by the RCMP and Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.

McKemmie told Shemwell that someone had posted an email suggesting that Dr. Wiley was not the target for a kidnapping to obtain anthrax but that a scientist working at the Winnipeg laboratory was a more likely target for a kidnapping by bioterrorists.

Nevertheless, the RCMP wanted to know if Memphis hadany information that would indicate that Wiley was the target for an abduction by terrorists. Shockingly, Shemwell fed te RCMP the same line he was feeding the Wiley family and the media: There was no evidence to support the theory that Wiley's disappearance was the result of foul play and that suggestions to the contrary were being mentioned only in the media.

Obviously, not buying Shemwell's line, the Mountie indicated that the RCMP, like the FBI, also would continue to monitor Wiley's disappearance and check out any leads from Canada."

The idea that Wiley's body could have been in the fast-raging Mississippi for a month seems fanciful. When his body was discovered in Louisiana, Wiley's clothing was intact. Recovered from Wiley's clothing were his watch, wedding band, belt, wallet, and even a piece of hard candy that managed not have dissolved after an entire month in water.

Wiley co-wrote a paper on the structures of H5 avian flu and H9 swine flu that was published in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences in September 18, 2001, just some two months before he went missing in Memphis. However, Wiley's expertise on the 1918 influenza was longstanding. In 1981, Wiley co-wrote a paper, titled "X-ray structures of H5 avian and H9 swine influenza virus hemagglutinins bound to avian and human receptor analogs," that defined the crystal structure of the 1918 influenza virus, a step that made it easier to conduct "forensic" analysis on the origin of precursor viruses and their naturally-occurring or man-made genetic off-shoots.

Although virology, not bacteriology, was Wiley's area of expertise, it was revealed during my investigation of Wiley's death that he had become quite concerned about the mailing of anthrax through the postal system. A week before his disappearance, Wiley attended a session on "Bioethics and Research" at a meeting of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. At the time of the conference, four people had already been killed from being exposed to anthrax-laden letters sent through the mail. It was later discovered that the anthrax originated from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Wiley had also received a letter from a failed PhD student at University College in Dublin, Ireland that sought to warn him about the origins of anthrax. In October 2001, a series of "white powder" samples were discovered at University College. Irish Army specialists transferred all the samples to Britain's Porton Down bio-warfare facility, the UK's equivalent of Fort Detrick.

Based on Dr. Wiley's expertise in tracking down the origins of viruses and, with his speciality in crystallization of samples, bacteria like anthrax, as well, it is clear that whoever is benefiting from the outbreak of a A-H1N1 flu that has been resurrected and genetically "manipulated" in a "Jurassic Park" laboratory had a very good reason to murder Dr. Wiley and make it appear to be a suicide.

SPECIAL REPORT. The Bush clan and a seized $250 billion Treasury Note

According to WMR's sources, the FBI and London police are working together on a case that involved a $250 billion U.S. Treasury Note seized by the FBI from a London safety deposit box company, London Safe Deposit Company, Ltd. The box was reportedly placed at the London firm by self-described 20-year CIA veteran Robert Booth Nichols, who reportedly died in Geneva, Switzerland on February 14, 2009.

A heart attack was believed to have been the cause of death but there was a blow to Nichols's head. A "friend" of Nichols, a New York stockbroker who was reportedly helping Booth move a large sum of cash, bonds and gold in Geneva, arranged for a quick cremation of Nichols's body and the U.S. embassy in Bern was notified.

The T-Note is reportedly secured by 2500 metric tons of gold at the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta. There are indications that the movement of the gold out of the United States involves at least one member of the family of former Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Samuel Israel III, the former head of the collapsed Stamford, Connecticut-based hedge fund Bayou Group LLC, who was arrested after he tried to fake his own suicide by abandoning his vehicle, with the words "Suicide in Painless" written on the hood, on Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River in New York on June 9, 2008, hired Nichols to help locate the T-Note and then place it in a London safety deposit box. Israel had already been convicted of a $400 million fraud and was due to report to prison to serve a 20-year sentence on the day his car was found on the bridge.

Nichols was reportedly assisted in the location and placement of the T-Note in London by John P. Ellis, a cousin of George W. Bush and nephew of George H. W. Bush. Ellis is the son of Nancy Bush, Bush 41's sister and was the Fox News consultant in 2000 whose analysis of Florida's returns led the network to call Florida for George W. Bush. Ellis had also been a columnist for The Boston Globe.

Ellis became an investment banker and acted as a "feeder" to IM Partners (Israel-Marino), a Connecticut-based venture capital company set up by Israel and his partner Daniel Marino. Ellis, a close friend of Israel, was managing director of New York City-based G H Venture, in which IM Partners invested some $25 million.

Nichols received $10 million from Israel for locating the T-Note and securing it in the London deposit box company. According to papers filed in the cases U.S. v. Israel, 05 Cr. 1039 (CM) and Bayou Management LLC v. Robert B. Nichols, et al, 08 Civ. 6036 (CM), the box seized by the FBI in London bore the "seal of the United States Federal Reserve and the serial number SC 3040-20." However, acting pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) investigation, the FBI, working with Scotland Yard, seized the safety deposit box and the T-Note. Israel subsequently sued Nichols for return of the $10 million.

Court papers in the cases also refer to a "$250 billion obligation," as well as the Federal Reserve Bank and 2500 metric tons of gold being used to secure the T-Note.

Acting on a lawsuit filed by Bayou investors, a British judge in November 2007 froze $1 million Nichols held in London. HSBC is also named in the judge's order, along with Nichols and his wife.

Nichols maintained that he assisted Israel in moving money as part of a "project" involving U.S. "national interest."

WMR has, in the past, reported on then-Vice President George H. W. Bush shaking down soon-to-be-exiled Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos for gold seized from the Japanese (the so-called "Yamashita's Gold" looted from Asia and hidden in the Philippines by World War II Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita) and having it sent to the United States on barges owned by the CIA front company Oceaneering International of Houston. In return, Marcos was granted asylum in Hawaii. A December 2, 1982, FBI document on Robert Booth Nichols states that "Robert Booth Nichols, also known as Robert Bert Nichols, Robert Nelson, and Robert Nioon, was reportedly an internationally known launderer of money from both narcotics and organized crime activities. In addition, Nichols was well-known in the sale of armaments to various countries throughout the world. Nichols is alleged to be very influential in the sale of armaments to the Philippines Government and has assisted officials of the Philippines Government in removing large sums of money from the Philippines , thereafter, investing the money with Nichols, who was placing the money in Swiss bank accounts."

Robert Booth Nichols (right) with John Lear (left), son of Bill Lear, founder of Lear Jet Corporation. John Lear claims to have inside information on U.S. government work on extraterrestrial craft at Groom Lake's Area-51 in Nevada.

In November 2004, this editor exposed the use of a multi-billion dollar off-shore tranche of Bush fund held in an Isle of Man account and connected to the movement of the Marcos/Yamashita gold to Switzerland and UBS bank secret accounts by George H. W. Bush. Part of this money, as I reported, was used to fund the fixing of the 2004 election through the use of mercenary computerized voting machine programmers and operatives in Ohio and other states, ensuring George W. Bush's re-election. The story came under immediate attack by individuals and websites funded by George Soros.

What is unfolding as FBI and Scotland Yard pursues the case is the very real possibility that at least one member of the Bush family, in concert with Nichols, whose name arose in the investigation of the "suicide" of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro in 1991 and who was reportedly one of Casolaro's more dubious "sources," may have been involved in a criminal enterprise to move U.S. Federal Reserve gold out of the United States and into secret offshore accounts. In addition, there is the possibility that at least two other Federal Reserve Banks, in addition to Atlanta, may have been similarly looted of their gold reserves. There is also an indication that Representative Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) was referring to the looting of the Federal Reserve when he referred to a one- or two-hour $550 billion electronic run on the banks "around September 15, 2008."

President Obama recently announced a crack down on American individuals and corporations using off-shore bank accounts. Whether the President is aware of the massive gold rip-off operation against the Federal Reserve is not known but the Nichols-Israel case continues to be investigated by the FBI and Scotland Yard.

In any event, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appears to have been neutralized as any sort of significant oversight authority over the currnet bail-out of Wall Street and the banks. Informed sources have told WMR that high-level rumors of a sex scandal involving the Treasury Secretary are swirling around both Treasury and the Inter-American Development Bank, headquartered in Washington, DC.

These stories are developing.

Ignore AIPAC at America’s Peril by Philip Giraldi

What do Charles Freeman and Jane Harman have in common? Nothing, apart from the fact that they are both involved in the truly ugly side of the Israel lobby’s activity in the United States and, for that reason, had their stories dropped by the mainstream media in record time. Harman’s story broke on April 19 and was on life support by the 24th. Freeman’s story had slightly more legs to it only because his withdrawal from his nomination to head the National Intelligence Council on March 10 was preceded by a three-week barrage of vicious ad hominem attacks from the media and the usual suspects in Congress. After he resigned, his story was allowed to die, ending as far as the mainstream media was concerned on March 14 with a coup de grace from Republican Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia, who claimed in a Washington Post op-ed that the Israel lobby had nothing to do with his opposition to Freeman’s appointment. Wolf has reportedly received $72,000 from pro-Israel PACs, more than any other Virginia congressman except Eric Cantor, something that he chose not to mention.

If one were to ask a reasonably well-informed American citizen about either Harman or Freeman, one would most likely draw a blank. This is because they have been airbrushed out of the collective political consciousness almost as effectively as the pictures of Stalin’s rivals were removed from group photos in Red Square. The mainstream media, which is where most Americans still get their news, has trivialized their stories and has no desire to grapple with issues like Israeli espionage and the establishment of a de facto Israeli loyalty test for the holders of high office. Corruption of the U.S. political system by a small country 5,000 miles away is of no interest to Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC, not to mention their newsprint counterparts.

It did not have to be so, and if there had been any spine or even a shred of conscience in the media, then all of this might have gone in another direction, leading to a serious inquiry into how a tiny foreign power has managed to create the most powerful lobby in Washington. When Freeman went down and dared to complain about his treatment, there was considerable noise in the blogosphere suggesting that the Israel lobby had finally overreached itself and would pay the price because everyone would now know just how much it interferes in American politics. That judgment proved premature, as did the suggestion by some that the victory over Freeman might prove Pyrrhic in nature, leading to future defeats. Others, including Stephen Walt, were not so sure, noting that the basis for AIPAC’s power in the media and within the government had not in any way been diminished. That has proven to be the case. A complaisant establishment media rolled over on the Harman story only weeks after Freeman.

So much for the Fourth Estate, where the only freedom of the press in evidence is the freedom to run as fast as possible from any story that is critical of Israel and its friends. The American public should wake up to the fact that the Freeman and Harman stories are serious in their implications, whether or not the media is interested. Freeman was appointed to head the National Intelligence Council, an essentially non-political position that is responsible for shaping the vitally important National Intelligence Estimates. He was supremely well qualified for the position and was esteemed for his maverick qualities, which led to the expectation that he would head a team that would challenge assumptions on existing policies in such a way as to make a repeat of the bad intelligence on Iraq unlikely. But when it was learned that Freeman had been particularly critical of Israeli settlement policies and had observed that the tie to Israel did not exactly serve the U.S.’ national interests, his appointment was heavily criticized. To be sure, the critics most often attacked Freeman by misrepresenting his views on China and links to Saudi Arabia, where he had served as ambassador, but everyone in Washington and the media knew that it was really all about Israel.

Bereft of any support from the White House, Freeman was doomed. Also doomed was any expectation that Washington might benefit from sound intelligence providing a realistic assessment of the threats facing the U.S., unadorned by the fake analysis dished out by interest groups like AIPAC. Leaders in the media could have actually enabled a debate about a sound foreign policy that actually works in our national interests, but they chose to walk away instead. If, as is likely, President Obama has learned his lesson from the Freeman affair and decides that it is better to go along with AIPAC than to resist it, business as usual will continue in Washington, with Israel’s current crop of right-wing fanatics, headed by Bibi Netanyahu, protected to the last drop of American blood and treasure.

Harman’s tale is somewhat different, but it also involves the Israel lobby as well as the considerable Israeli espionage effort directed against the United States. If the leaked accounts of Harman’s phone conversation with someone acting on behalf of Israeli intelligence are accurate, the congresswoman clearly knew her Israeli intelligence contact well and might have had similar conversations with him or her previously. She agreed to attempt to influence a reduction in the charges in the trial of accused AIPAC spies Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. In return, Harman’s contact promised to support her bid to become chairman of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence by pressuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi through threats to withhold political contributions from Israeli billionaire Haim Saban if Harman was not given the position. Harman was later spoken of as a possible candidate to become director of central intelligence and, without the FBI wiretap, which became known to Pelosi, she might have obtained either position, or possibly both in succession.

Harman has denied that she did anything wrong, and she has tried to turn the tables by accusing the government of illegally recording her conversation, a red herring introduced by those trying to minimize the significance of the affair. Make no mistake, Harman was on the receiving end of an intelligence operation. Her phone conversation was recorded because she was talking to someone who was working with Israeli intelligence, which was the target of the investigation. Intelligence officers highly prize an agent of influence, which is a well-placed politician or media figure who will do one’s bidding, and they seek to obtain that cooperation by trading favors that both they and the target know are illegal. It was illegal for Harman to promise to interfere in a court case, something that her contact clearly was aware of. It was illegal for the agent of a foreign government to pressure the speaker of the House to promote Harman. Once such favors are exchanged, the intelligence officer has leverage to demand more because his new agent will cooperate rather than have the illegal details of the relationship revealed. That is how covert operations are taught at the CIA training center and every other intelligence school in the world. There should be no uncertainty about what was taking place, even if the mainstream media and Harman’s colleagues in government don’t get it. At last report, Harman is not being investigated, she has not been criticized by anyone in the government or in either party, and she just spoke at the AIPAC convention in Washington. So much for equal justice under law.

If the Freeman and Harman affairs taken together do not provide convincing proof that Israel and its advocates are no true friends to the United States, then it is difficult to imagine what else can be used to make the case. It is time to end the special relationship and treat Israel like every other country. If Israel sends its intelligence officers to America to break the law, they must be caught, exposed, and punished, just as if they were Chinese or Russian. If they spy on the U.S. and corrupt its politicians, they must pay a price. It is almost certainly too late to give justice to Chas Freeman or to give Jane Harman the punishment she so richly deserves, but it is time for the United States to send a clear signal that while it is prepared to be a good friend to Israel, it will not stand for any more interference with our politicians and government officials.

AIPAC strives for political indoctrination for college and El-Hi students

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) might learn a thing or two from Lyndon Johnson's famous quote about FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, "Its probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."

Having received no word back from AIPAC on receiving credentials to cover their annual policy conference at the Washington Convention Center, this editor set out to pick up as many side conversations and abandoned AIPAC literature from the attendees' hotel venues.

This year's AIPAC policy conference's theme is "Relationships Matter."

At a luncheon event at the Hyatt Hotel across from the convention center, 193 student government association presidents from colleges and universities across the nation, including a fair number of historically African American universities, were treated to a right-wing message of unbridled U.S. support for Israel. Although AIPAC's website states that College Democrats of America were invited to the luncheon in addition to the College Republican National Committee, the AIPAC message was clearly conservative in nature. One student, upon leaving the luncheon, said to his colleagues that he was encouraged by the luncheon's theme of "spreading the conservative message on campus."

For AIPAC, that message is ensuring that campus student organizations toe a pro-Israel line and that all campus initiatives to disinvest in Israel are defeated.

But it is not just America's college students who are being subjected to AIPAC's right-wing propaganda blitzkrieg. This editor overheard a conversation by another AIPAC attendee about continued non-profit funding for a network of summer camps to stress support for Israel and "Jewishness" among the generation following in the footsteps of college students and the generation following that. Clearly understood in the conversation was that the effort was planning for thirty years into the future.

Speakers already featured at AIPAC's policy conference are those who represent a "Who's Who" of Israel's influence peddling in Washington: former CIA director James Woolsey; Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) executive director Robert Satloff (who replaced Dennis Ross, who now serves as a Middle East policy adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton); and former Coalition Provisional Authority press spokesman Dan Senor of the Council on Foreign Relations (and the husband of CNN's Campbell Brown. At CNN, with the examples of Campbell Brown and John King, it is best under the tutelage of CNN Washington bureau chief and former AIPAC press spokesman Wolf Blitzer to marry Jewish and convert to Judaism or possible run the risk of losing your job).

Also speaking at AIPAC was Representative Jane Harman (D-CA), who was identified by National Security Agency (NSA) "Stellar Wind" wiretaps trying to get an espionage case dropped against former AIPAC officials Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman in exchange for landing the coveted job as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The espionage case against Rosen and Weissman was dropped by the Obama administration prior to the AIPAC conference. Harman is but one of Israel's and AIPAC's many water carriers in the U.S. Congress.

Hasidics brave the wet weather to protest at the AIPAC conference: they can be counted on to be there every year. They expected more of their collegues to be arriving from New York in time for the May 4 banquet event.

This editor recently spoke briefly to former Representative Paul Findlay (R-IL), who was driven from office by AIPAC money for refusing to bow down to Israel's dictates. Findlay later wrote a book titled, "They Dare to Speak Out" about the power of the Israel Lobby in Washington. A former top U.S. diplomat recently told this editor that at a luncheon, Rosen once told him that AIPAC was so powerful that by the end of the afternoon, Rosen could have seventy signatures of U.S. senators, with no questions asked, on a napkin he was holding up.

AIPAC conference attendees were greeted by this mobile billboard across from one of the conference hotels.

AIPAC insists that it is a private lobbying organization funded through private donations. From the license plates pulling into the convention center and hotels it appears that much of AIPAC's support comes from New York. However, given the presence of Israel's top government, military, diplomatic, parastatal, and intelligence leadership at the AIPAC policy conference, it appears that AIPAC is running afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938, which requires lobbying organizations that represent foreign governments to register with the Justice Department.

FARA was originally enacted to combat Nazi German propaganda in the United States. Given AIPAC's indoctrination of college students, and summer camp-age children in their political dogma, it would appear that the Israelis and their American supporters are taking a page right out of the Nazi playbook that resulted in the passage of FARA. But AIPAC claims FARA does not apply to it. However, FARA was enacted when it became apparent that Berlin was funding the German American Bund and two camps for the indoctrination of young people, Camp Nordland in New Jersey and Camp Siegfried in New York. It all sounds very familiar.

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

If you flip over the rock of American foreign
policy of the past century, this is what crawls out...

invasions ... bombings ... overthrowing
governments ... suppressing movements
for social change ... assassinating
political leaders ... perverting
elections ... manipulating labor unions ...
manufacturing "news" ... death squads ...
torture ... biological warfare ...
depleted uranium ... drug trafficking ...
mercenaries ...

It's not a pretty picture.
It is enough to give imperialism a bad name.

Read the full details in:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II.

by William Blum

"Far and away the best book on the topic."
Noam Chomsky

"I enjoyed it immensely."
Gore Vidal

"I bought several more copies to circulate to
friends with the hope of shedding new light
and understanding on their political outlooks."
Oliver Stone

"A very valuable book. The research and organization
are extremely impressive."
A. J. Langguth, author, former New York Times Bureau Chief

"A very useful piece of work, daunting in scope,
important."
Thomas Powers, author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

"Each chapter I read made me more and more angry."
Dr. Helen Caldicott, international leader of
the anti-nuclear and environmental movements

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. China - 1945 to 1960s: Was Mao Tse-tung just paranoid?
2. Italy - 1947-1948: Free elections, Hollywood style
3. Greece - 1947 to early 1950s: From cradle of democracy to client state
4. The Philippines - 1940s and 1950s: America's oldest colony
5. Korea - 1945-1953: Was it all that it appeared to be?
6. Albania - 1949-1953: The proper English spy
7. Eastern Europe - 1948-1956: Operation Splinter Factor
8. Germany - 1950s: Everything from juvenile delinquency to terrorism
9. Iran - 1953: Making it safe for the King of Kings
10. Guatemala - 1953-1954: While the world watched
11. Costa Rica - Mid-1950s: Trying to topple an ally - Part 1
12. Syria - 1956-1957: Purchasing a new government
13. Middle East - 1957-1958: The Eisenhower Doctrine claims another backyard for America
14. Indonesia - 1957-1958: War and pornography
15. Western Europe - 1950s and 1960s: Fronts within fronts within fronts
16. British Guiana - 1953-1964: The CIA's international labor mafia
17. Soviet Union - Late 1940s to 1960s: From spy planes to book publishing
18. Italy - 1950s to 1970s: Supporting the Cardinal's orphans and techno-fascism
19. Vietnam - 1950-1973: The Hearts and Minds Circus
20. Cambodia - 1955-1973: Prince Sihanouk walks the high-wire of neutralism
21. Laos - 1957-1973: L'Armée Clandestine
22. Haiti - 1959-1963: The Marines land, again
23. Guatemala - 1960: One good coup deserves another
24. France/Algeria - 1960s: L'état, c'est la CIA
25. Ecuador - 1960-1963: A text book of dirty tricks
26. The Congo - 1960-1964: The assassination of Patrice Lumumba
27. Brazil - 1961-1964: Introducing the marvelous new world of death squads
28. Peru - 1960-1965: Fort Bragg moves to the jungle
29. Dominican Republic - 1960-1966: Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy
30. Cuba - 1959 to 1980s: The unforgivable revolution
31. Indonesia - 1965: Liquidating President Sukarno ... and 500,000 others
East Timor - 1975: And 200,000 more
32. Ghana - 1966: Kwame Nkrumah steps out of line
33. Uruguay - 1964-1970: Torture -- as American as apple pie
34. Chile - 1964-1973: A hammer and sickle stamped on your child's forehead
35. Greece - 1964-1974: "Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution," said
the President of the United States
36. Bolivia - 1964-1975: Tracking down Che Guevara in the land of coup d'etat
37. Guatemala - 1962 to 1980s: A less publicized "final solution"
38. Costa Rica - 1970-1971: Trying to topple an ally -- Part 2
39. Iraq - 1972-1975: Covert action should not be confused with missionary work
40. Australia - 1973-1975: Another free election bites the dust
41. Angola - 1975 to 1980s: The Great Powers Poker Game
42. Zaire - 1975-1978: Mobutu and the CIA, a marriage made in heaven
43. Jamaica - 1976-1980: Kissinger's ultimatum
44. Seychelles - 1979-1981: Yet another area of great strategic importance
45. Grenada - 1979-1984: Lying -- one of the few growth industries in Washington
46. Morocco - 1983: A video nasty
47. Suriname - 1982-1984: Once again, the Cuban bogeyman
48. Libya - 1981-1989: Ronald Reagan meets his match
49. Nicaragua - 1981-1990: Destabilization in slow motion
50. Panama - 1969-1991: Double-crossing our drug supplier
51. Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991: Teaching communists what democracy is all about
52. Iraq - 1990-1991: Desert holocaust
53. Afghanistan - 1979-1992: America's Jihad
54. El Salvador - 1980-1994: Human rights, Washington style
55. Haiti - 1986-1994: Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?
56. The American Empire - 1992 to present
Notes
Appendix I: This is How the Money Goes Round
Appendix II: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945
Appendix III: U. S. Government Assassination Plots
Index
_______________________________________________________________

The Anti-Empire Report: Some thoughts about torture. And Mr. Obama.

The Anti-Empire Report

May 4th, 2009
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org

Some thoughts about torture. And Mr. Obama.

Okay, at least some things are settled. When George W. Bush said "The United States does not torture", everyone now knows it was crapaganda. And when Barack Obama, a month into his presidency, said "The United States does not torture"¹, it likewise had all the credibility of a 19th century treaty between the US government and the American Indians.

When Obama and his followers say, as they do repeatedly, that he has "banned torture", this is a statement they have no right to make. The executive orders concerning torture leave loopholes, such as being applicable only "in any armed conflict"² What about in a "counter-terrorism" environment? And the new administration has not categorically banned the outsourcing of torture, such as renditions, the sole purpose of which is to kidnap people and send them to a country to be tortured. Moreover, what do we know of all the CIA secret prisons, the gulag extending from Poland to the island of Diego Garcia? How many of them are still open and abusing and torturing prisoners, keeping them in total isolation and in indefinite detention? Total isolation by itself is torture; not knowing when, if ever, you will be released is torture. And the non-secret prisons? Has Guantanamo ended all its forms of torture? There's reason to doubt that.³ And what do we know of what's happening now in Abu Ghraib and Bagram?

And when Obama says "I don't believe that anybody is above the law", and then acts in precisely the opposite fashion, despite overwhelming evidence of criminal torture — such as the recently leaked report of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Bush Justice Department "torture memos" — it's enough to break the heart of any of his fans who possess more than a minimum of intellect and conscience. It should be noted that a Gallup Poll of April 24/25 showed that 66% of Democrats favored an "investigation into harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects". If the word "torture" had been used in the question, the figure would undoubtedly have been higher.

Following the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, President Bush went on TV to warn the people of Iraq: "War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, I was just following orders."⁴

"Objectively, the American public is much more responsible for the crimes committed in its name than were the people of Germany for the horrors of the Third Reich. We have far more knowledge, and far greater freedom and opportunity to stop our government's criminal behavior," observed James Brooks in the Online Journal in 2007.

On February 10, the Obama Justice Department used the Bush administration's much-reviled "state secrets" tactic in a move to have a lawsuit dismissed — filed by five detainees against a subsidiary of Boeing aircraft company for arranging rendition flights which led to their torture. "It was as if last month's inauguration had never occurred", observed the New York Times.⁵

And when Obama says, as he does repeatedly, "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards", why is it that no one in the media asks him what he thinks of the Nuremberg Tribunal looking backwards in 1946? Or the Church Committee of the US Senate doing the same in 1975 and producing numerous revelations about the criminality of the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies that shocked and opened the eyes of the American people and the world?

We're now told that Obama and his advisers had recently been fiercely debating the question of what to do about the Bush war criminals, with Obama going one way and then another and then back again, both in private and in his public stands. One might say that he was "tortured". But civilized societies do not debate torture. Why didn't the president just do the obvious? The simplest? The right thing? Or at least do what he really believes.

The problem, I'm increasingly afraid, is that the man doesn't really believe strongly in anything, certainly not in controversial areas. He learned a long time ago how to take positions that avoid controversy, how to express opinions without clearly and firmly taking sides, how to talk eloquently without actually saying anything, how to leave his listeners' heads filled with stirring clichés, platitudes, and slogans. And it worked. Oh how it worked! What could happen now, as President of the United States, to induce him to change his style?

The president and the Director of the CIA both insist that no one at the CIA who was relying on the Justice Department's written legal justification of methods of "enhanced interrogation" should be punished. But the first such approval was dated August 1, 2002, while many young men were arrested in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the previous nine months and subjected to "enhanced interrogation". Many were sent to Guantanamo as early as January 2002. And many others were kidnaped and sent to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and other secret prisons to be tortured beginning in late 2001. So, at least for some months, the torturers were not acting under any formal approval of their methods. But they still will not be punished.

I love that expression "enhanced interrogation". How did our glorious leaders overlook calling the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki "enhanced explosive devices"?

Lord High Dungeon Master Richard Cheney is upset about the recent release of torture memos. He keeps saying that the Obama administration is suppressing documents that show a more positive picture of the effectiveness of interrogation techniques, which he claims produced very valuable information, prevented certain acts of terrorism, and saved American lives. Hmmm, why am I skeptical of this? Oh, I know, because if this is what actually happened and there are documents which genuinely and unambiguously showed such results, the beleaguered Bush administration would have leaked them years ago with great fanfare, and the CIA would not have destroyed numerous videos of the torture sessions.

But in any event, that still wouldn't justify torture. Humankind has aspired for centuries to tame its worst behaviors; ridding itself of the affliction of torture has been high on that list. There is more than one United States law now prohibiting torture, including a 1994 law making it a crime for US citizens to commit torture overseas. This was recently invoked to convict the son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. There is also the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, ratified in 1949, which states in Article 17:

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

Thus it was that the United States has not called the prisoners of its War on Terror "prisoners of war". But in 1984, another historic step was taken, by the United Nations, with the drafting of the "Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment" (came into force in 1987, ratified by the United States in 1994). Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back. If today it's deemed acceptable to torture the person who supposedly has the vital "ticking-bomb" information needed to save lives, tomorrow it will be acceptable to torture him to learn the identities of his alleged co-conspirators. Would we allow slavery to resume for just a short while to serve some "national emergency" or some other "higher purpose"?

If you open the window of torture, even just a crack, the cold air of the Dark Ages will fill the whole room.

"I would personally rather die than have anyone tortured to save my life." - Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who lost his job after he publicly condemned the Uzbek regime in 2003 for its systematic use of torture.⁶

With all the reports concerning torture under the recent Bush administration, some people may be inclined to think that prior to Bush the United States had very little connection to this awful practice. However, in the period of the 1950s through the 1980s, while the CIA did not usually push the button, turn the switch, or pour the water, the Agency ...

• encouraged its clients in the Third World to use torture;
• provided the host country the names of the people who wound up as torture victims, in places as bad as Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram;
• supplied torture equipment;
• conducted classes in torture;
• distributed torture manuals — how-to books;
• was present when torture was taking place, to observe and evaluate how well its students were doing.⁷

I could really feel sorry for Barack Obama — for his administration is plagued and handicapped by a major recession not of his making — if he had a vision that was thus being thwarted. But he has no vision — not any kind of systemic remaking of the economy, producing a more equitable and more honest society; nor a world at peace, beginning with ending America's perennial wars; no vision of the fantastic things that could be done with the trillions of dollars that would be saved by putting an end to war without end; nor a vision of a world totally rid of torture; nor an America with national health insurance; nor an environment free of capitalist subversion; nor a campaign to control world population ... he just looks for what will offend the fewest people. He's a "whatever works" kind of guy. And he wants to be president. But what we need and crave is a leader of vision.

Another jewel in the crown, Miss Hillary

During the presidential campaign much was made of Obama's stated promises to engage in direct talks with Iran, as opposed to the Bush administration's refusal to speak to the Iranians and threatening to attack them and bomb their nuclear facilities. This was one more example of the much-vaunted "change" that Obama was going to bring. But, in actuality, it wouldn't be much of a change. Mid-level American officials did in fact occasionally meet with Iranian officials, most notably after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and in mid-2003 after the US invasion of Iraq. These meeting were always in secret.⁸ There were also at least three publicly-announced meetings between the US and Iran in 2007, primarily dealing with the fighting in Iraq. And now that Obama is in power, what do we find? We find his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, testifying April 22 before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and stating:

"We actually believe that by following the diplomatic path we are on [speaking to Iran], we gain credibility and influence with a number of nations who would have to participate in order to make the sanctions regime as tight and as crippling as we would want it to be."

Would it be unfair to say that she's implying that a reason for talks with Iran is that the US could get more international support when it decides to cripple that country? Is crippling a country the United States is at peace with supposed to be part of the "change" in US foreign policy? Is Iran expected to be enthusiastic about such talks? If the talks collapse, will the United States use that as an excuse for bombing Iran? Or will Israel be given the honor?

Later in the hearing, Clinton declared: "We are deploying new approaches to the threat posed by Iran."

I would love to have been a member of the House committee so I could have had the following exchange with the Secretary of State:

Cong. Blum: Do we plan to impose sanctions on France?

Sec. Clinton: I don't understand, Congressman. Why would we impose sanctions on France?

Cong. Blum: Well, if we impose sanctions on Iran on the mere suspicion of them planning to build nuclear weapons, it seems to me we'd want to impose even stricter sanctions on a country which already possesses such weapons.

Sec. Clinton: But France is an ally.

Cong. Blum: So let's make Iran an ally. We can start with ending our many sanctions against them and calling off our Israeli attack dogs.

Sec. Clinton: But Congressman, Iran is a threat. Surely you don't see France as a threat? What reason would France have to use nuclear weapons against the United States?

Cong. Blum: What reason would Iran have to use nuclear weapons against the United States? Other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide.

If Congressman Blum had pursued this line of questioning, it might well have culminated in some Orwellian remark by dear Hillary, such as the one she treated us to a few days later when speaking to reporters in Iraq. As the Washington Post reported it: "Clinton played down the latest burst of violence, telling reporters she saw 'no sign' it would reignite the sectarian warfare that ravaged the country in recent years. She said that the Iraqi government had 'come a long, long way' and that the bombings were 'a signal that the rejectionists fear Iraq is going in the right direction'."⁹

So ... the eruption of violence is a sign of success. In October 2003, President George W. Bush, speaking after many resistance attacks in Iraq had occurred, said: "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react."¹⁰

And here is Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaking in April 2004 about a rise in insurrection and fighting in Iraq over nearly a two-week period: "'I would characterize what we're seeing right now as a — as more a symptom of the success that we're having here in Iraq,' he said ... explaining that the violence indicated there was something to fight against — American progress in building up Iraq."¹¹

War is Peace ... Freedom is Slavery ... Ignorance is Strength. I distinctly remember when I first read "1984" thinking that it was very well done but of course a great exaggeration, sort of like science fiction.

Clinton was equally profound on May 1, speaking to an assemblage of State Department employees. Discussing Venezuela and Bolivia, she said that the Bush administration "tried to isolate them, tried to support opposition to them, tried to turn them into international pariahs. It didn't work. We are going to see what other approaches might work." Oh ... uh ... how about NOT trying to isolate them, NOT supporting their opposition, NOT trying to turn them into international pariahs? How about the National Endowment for Democracy, the Agency for International Development, and the US Embassy NOT trying to subvert their revolutions? And when she says "It didn't work", one must ask: Work to what end? To return the two countries to their previous condition of client-states? Perhaps like with Nicaragua, about whom the Secretary of State said improving relations was important to counter Iran's growing influence. She noted that "the Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua. You can only imagine what it's for."¹² I can only imagine what Ms. Clinton imagines it's for. What is the new American Embassy in Iraq — the biggest embassy in the entire history of the world, in the entire universe — What is that for? Another example of Obamachange that means no change. What is it with American officials? Why are they so insufferably arrogant and hypocritical?

Notes

1. Washington Post, February 24, 2009 ^↩
2. See, for example, "Executive Order – Ensuring Lawful Interrogations", January 22, 2009 ^↩
3. See The Observer (London), February 8, 2009 for an account of how conditions were still very awful at Guantanamo as of that date. ^↩
4. Video of Bush ^↩
5. New York Times, February 10, 2009, plus their editorial of the next day. In April, a federal appeals court ruled that the detainees' lawsuit could proceed. ^↩
6. Testimony before the International Commission of Inquiry On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, session of January 21, 2006, New York City ^↩
7. See William Blum, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower", chapter 5. ^↩
8. The Independent (London), May 27, 2007 ^↩
9. Washington Post, April 26, 2009 ^↩
10. Washington Post, October 28, 2003 ^↩
11. New York Times, April 16, 2003 ^↩
12. Associated Press, May 1, 2009 ^↩

–

William Blum is the author of:

• Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
• West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
• Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

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Flying Pigs and the WHO - Tamiflu and Factory Farms part II

Flying Pigs and the WHO Flying Pigs, Tamiflu and Factory Farms Part II: by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, May 4, 2009

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WHO takes a page from a Michael Crichton Novel As the late great American poet Yogi Berra might have put it, ‘this just gets absurder and absurder.’ The international agencies supposedly responsible for monitoring worldwide dangers of new pandemic threats, the WHO and CDC are acting like the directors of a Hollywood ‘B’ grade sci-fi movie or the author of a copycat version of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain novel. The global panic over outbreak of a new human-to-human Swine Flu pandemic is increasingly revealed as a likely operation in mass psychological terror whose only beneficiaries are the few global pharmaceutical giants that are in the business of peddling so-called ‘antiviral’ drugs—Roche, SmithKlineGlaxo and Novavax most prominently. The losers are the rest of us normal folks. The own releases of the WHO in Geneva and the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the central coordinating agencies in this production, are worth careful study. On April 30 the CDC issued a detailed report with the alarming title, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City. The report described in detail a school in New York City where, ‘As of April 28, approximately half (45) of all U.S. cases of S-OIV infection had been confirmed among students and staff members.’ The CDC called these cases all ‘genetically similar to viruses subsequently isolated from patients in Mexico.’1 We are not told in scientific terms what ‘genetically similar to’ means, but it sure sounds ominous. At that point, the CDC claimed 109 victims of confirmed Swine Flu in the United States. Forty five of the 109 came from this New York School. The TV news channels were flooded with panic messages of the uncontrolled spread of Swine Flu. On April 29, the next day, the WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, upgraded their Swine Flu Pandemic alert status from a Phase 4 event to Phase 5, a step below full global Pandemic Alert. According to WHO, Phase 5 indicates that there is evidence of the virus being spread from human-to-human in at least two countries in one WHO region. Phase 6, the pandemic phase, is characterised by increased and sustained transmission in the general population. In her announcement of the upgrade, Dr Chan made an unfortunate panic-making added comment that was predictably grabbed onto by CNN and the world media: ‘After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.’2 Note the WHO Director-General had not declared a Pandemic Phase 6 alert, but in a speech in Geneva in an apparent side comment, merely made the self-evident observation that ‘during a pandemic’ all humanity is under threat.’ A press release by the Atlanta-based CDC stated, ‘On May 3, CDC is scheduled to complete deployment of 25 percent of the supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to all states in the continental United States. These supplies and medicines will help states and US territories respond to the outbreak. In addition, the Federal Government and manufacturers have begun the process of developing a vaccine against the novel H1N1 flu virus.’3 The pandemic response apparatus was going into high gear. The 45 New York City school children the CDC solemnly reported were ‘confirmed cases of swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus (S-OIV) infection,’ ninety-five percent of whom reported to the health authorities symptoms that included ‘fever plus cough and/or sore throat, meeting the CDC definition for influenza-like illness (ILI).’ OK. Better to be cautious when dealing with a new form of Andromeda Strain. But cough? Sore throat? Fever? Aren’t these pretty vague ordinary symptoms? Not for CDC apparently. The 45 kids were immediately added to the growing ‘confirmed cases’ statistics, fuelling emergency responses, statements by the President of the United States, economic catastrophe to the fragile Mexican economy as tourism dried up overnight, and worldwide fears of a new Black Death or at least a new version of the 1918 Spanish Flu plague. The CDC hastened to add the note, ‘symptoms in these patients appear to be similar to those of seasonal influenza.’ For those bothering to read through three detailed pages of the CDC New York report, they found near the end that, ‘on April 27, 37 patients (84%) reported that their symptoms were stable or improving, three (7%) reported worsening symptoms (two of whom later reported improvement), and four (9%) reported complete resolution of symptoms. Only one reported having been hospitalized for syncope and released after overnight observation.’ The CDC adds, ‘To date, this school-based outbreak is the largest cluster of S-OIV cases reported in the United States.’ 4 In addition to the 109 ‘confirmed cases’ reported in the United States, including one death of a Mexican boy in Texas, the CDC reported as of April 29, ‘a total of 57 confirmed cases had been reported, including seven deaths (in Mexico). By country, the following numbers of cases had been reported: Mexico (26); Canada (13); United Kingdom (five); Spain (four); Germany and New Zealand (three each); Israel (two); and Austria (one).’5 Is this another case of ‘Chicken Little’ crying the sky is falling? A revealing name change Now, not only are the alleged victims in New York of the worst plague since the Black Death showing signs of remarkable recovery after only days, but the WHO also announces a name change in the middle of the worldwide events. By May 1 the WHO, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health in Maryland all announced the name Swine Flu was no longer appropriate, that, despite the fact that according to Dr. Raul Rabadan, a professor of computational biology at Columbia University, six of the eight genetic segments are purely swine flu and the other two segments are bird and human, but have lived in swine for the past decade.6 We instead are told to call it Influenza A (H1N1). That’s a catchy name. The name change came following a heavy lobbying campaign by the US pig industry to drop the Swine Flu label as it was apparently cutting into pork sales. The largest US and world pig producer, Smithfield Foods of Virginia, was most certainly among those lobbying CDC and the WHO for the name change. They won their wish. But name change or not, the swine production process of Smithfield Foods and other industrialized Factory Farms or as they are technically known, CAFOs—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation—bears closer scrutiny. As I detailed in Part I, the Mexican Swine Flu deaths and illness first were recorded in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico, where local residents had for weeks prior to the official announcement been protesting the dangers of the huge Smithfield Foods pig CAFO in the village. Children and adults alike were reported having a rash of symptoms in the vicinity of the vast pig waste linked to the site. Smithfield Foods is the world’s largest industrialized pig meat producer. It also has one of the most egregious health and safety records. Pig feces and other niceties Feces is the Latin term for what most of the world terms shit, the waste product of human or animal digestion. Pigs are world champion waste producers. An average pig produces some three times in weight the amount of fecal matter that an adult person does. As GRAIN, an agricultural organization reports, ‘the rise of large-scale factory farms in North America has created the perfect breeding grounds for the emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of influenza.’7 The pig fecal waste product is at the center of the problem, something the CDC name change conveniently tends to obscure. As the GRAIN study notes, because concentrated animal feeding operations tend to concentrate large numbers of animals close together, they are ideal breeding grounds for toxins and virulent pathogens. In 2003 Science magazine warned that swine flu was ‘on a new evolutionary ‘fast track’ due to the increasing size of factory farms and the widespread use of vaccines in these operations.’8 It’s the same story with bird flu, where huge industrial CAFO Factory Farms with tens of thousands of chickens breed toxic waste galore. Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest hog butcher and CAFO owner has an impressive track record of violations of health and safety including water safety laws. In the USA, the world’s largest pig CAFO is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. According to local reports the town could easily be renamed Pig Waste, N.C. given the scale of fecal waste and combined matter Smithfield Foods’ Tar Heel CAFO emits locally. As Jeff Tietz, in an analysis of the pig waste problem calculated, ‘the best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.’9 Tietz adds, ‘So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.’10 The problem, he and other critics of CAFO pollutants stress, is not just normal pig waste, but waste combined with staggering volumes of antibiotics and toxic chemicals used by Smithfield Foods and similar industrial CAFO operations to maximize ‘efficiency.’ Tietz notes, ‘A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.’11 The degrees of concentration in the Smithfield Foods vertically integrated pig meat concentrations have little to do with traditional hog farming. In facilities now spread around the world, Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. As Tietz notes, ‘Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.’12 He continues on the toxic CAFO conditions: ‘They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush sprite-like through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.’ 13 Jeff Tietz is not the only one who has noticed the gargantuan scale of the Smithfield Foods CAFO pig waste problem. The United States Government Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has repeatedly fined Smithfield Foods for damage to local water supply with discharge of its pig waste from its CAFOs at Tar Heel and elsewhere across the USA. In Virginia, its home state, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA, for waste generated during the hog-slaughtering and meat processing operations.14 There was little convincing evidence the fines changed their practice of waste disposal in any significant way. Smithfield Foods has spread its hog CAFOs to other countries where environmental regulations are presumably less strict, including Romania, Poland, and of course, rural Mexico. Several years ago the Smithfield pig CAFO in Romania was focus of major accusations by local and Government health officials. Smithfield refused to let local authorities enter its pig farms after residents complained of the stench coming from hundreds of dead corpses of pigs left rotting for days at the farms. ‘Our doctors have not had access to the American [company's] farms to effect routine inspections,’ stated Csaba Daroczi, assistant director at the Timisoara Hygiene and Veterinary Authority in Romania. ‘Every time they tried, they were pushed away by the guards. Smithfield proposed that we sign an agreement that would oblige us to warn them three days before each inspection.’ It later emerged that Smithfield had been covering up a major outbreak of classical swine fever on its Romanian CAFO farms.15 The Drug Cartel comes in Rather than order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu. On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, ‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’ The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company claimed, ‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.’16 On April 24, the WHO issued a press release stating that ‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir…’ Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided, ‘to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a determination and declaration of emergency.’17 That suggests that the US Government has or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir). With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic. In a fantasy section titled ‘Sometime in the future…’ the WHO wrote four years ago, Rumours of an outbreak of unusually severe respiratory illness in two vil- lages in a remote province reach the ministry of health in one of the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Member States. A team is dispatched to the province and learns that the outbreak started about a month earlier. The team is able to identify at least 50 cases over the previous month. All age groups have been affected. Twenty patients are currently in the pro- vincial hospital. Five people have already died of pneumonia and acute respiratory failure. Surveillance in surrounding areas is increased, and new cases are identified throughout the province. Respiratory specimens col- lected from several patients are tested at the national laboratory and are found to be positive for type A influenza virus, but they cannot be further subtyped. The isolates are sent to the WHO Reference Centre for Influ- enza for further characterization, where they are characterized as influ- enza A(H6N1), a subtype never isolated from humans before. Gene sequencing studies further indicate that most of the viral genes are from a bird influenza virus, with the remaining genes derived from a human strain.18 If one changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current situation. That 2004 WHO fictional scenario reads as if it were the handbook for what has unfolded since late April in the US Mexico and beyond. It leads to serious question whether the world is being submitted to a giant psychological warfare game aimed at inducing them to take massive doses of dangerous drugs to counter a danger that does not actually exist as claimed. With the reported cases in Mexico clearly dropping off at present and little sign of the feared repeat of the 1918 Spanish Flu or worse as officials were warning only days earlier, it is well beyond time to launch a full-scale worldwide health inquiry into the toxic conditions of CAFO pig and other animal Factory Farm concentrations, and to end the official coverup of what has become a colossal health danger. F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca), and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His latest book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press), is due to be released later this month. He may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. Notes: 1 Centers for Disease Control, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City, April 2009, April 30, 2009. Accessed in http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm58d0430a1.htm. 2 Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General, quoted in Murray Wardrop, Swine flu All of humanity under threat WHO warns, Daily Telegraph, London, April 30, 2009. 3 CDC, H1N1 (Swine Flu), accessed in http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/. 4Centers for Disease Control, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City… Op. Cit. 5 Ibid. 6 Seth Borenstein, Swine flu name change? Flu genes spell pig, AP, May 1, 2009, accessed in http://www.physorg.com/news160371024.html. 7 GRAIN, A food system that kills: Swine flu is meat industry’s latest plague, April 2009, accessed in http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=48. 8 Bernice Wuethrich, Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu, Science, Vol. 299, 2003. 9 Jeff Tietz, Pork’s Dirty Secret: America’s Top Hog Producer is also one of America’s Worst Polluters, Rolling Stone, December 14, 2006. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 EPA, UNITED STATES SUES SMITHFIELD FOODS FOR POLLUTING VIRGINIA WATERWAYS, Press Release, December 16, 1996. 15 Mirel Bran, Swine Plague: Romania Criticizes American Group’s Attitude, Le Monde, 15 August 2007, translated by Leslie Thatcher, cited in GRAIN Op Cit.. 16 Tricia J. Richardson, NOVAVAX Announces Publication of a Preclinical Study Demonstrating that a Virus-like Particle Vaccine Provided Protection Against Highly Pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza Strains, April 14, 2009, Rockville, Md. Press Release. 17 FDA News, FDA Authorizes Emergency Use of Influenza Medicines, Diagnostic Test in Response to Swine Flu Outbreak in Humans, April 27, 2009. 18 WHO, WHO checklist for influenza pandemic preparedness planning, November 2004, accessed in http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:XuupgF1uNAIJ:www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/influenza/FluCheck6web.pdf+who+influenza+pandemic+preparedness+checklist&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de&client=firefox-a.

Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl