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

Unreported or Underreported Real Pandemics, Not Fake Ones Like Avian and Swine Flu

by Stephen Lendman

Global Research, May 4, 2009

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In his April 29 Global Research.ca article, F. William Engdahl discussed "Flying Pigs, Tamiflu and Factory Farms" and shed light on the current swine flu hysteria - hyped by the same folks who engineered the 2006 (H5N1) Avian Flu scare that had more bark than bite. But it proved hugely profitable for drug makers like Roche and Gilead Sciences, the company Donald Rumsfeld led as chairman from 1997 - 2001 and remains a major shareholder. Although he won't discuss his "private finances," he's likely benefitting handsomely from the current panic. Earlier Avian Flu reports were like the following: -- numerous ones from public health journalists saying governments are "thoroughly unprepared" for a pandemic flu outbreak; as a result, it could lead to potential "societal breakdown, chaos, and panic;" -- Robert Madelin, the EU's health and consumer protection department director-general, cited scientists' predictions of a potential two - seven million death toll worldwide, then saying: "It's when and not if;" -- the World Bank estimating that an Avian Flu (H5N1) outbreak could kill up to 70 million worldwide and cause $2 trillion in economic losses; and -- a scary July 2006 consumeraffairs.com report citing information like the above and more, then concluding: "There have so far been no known cases of H5N1 (Avian Flu) in the US." When all was said and done, the global tempest was no more than a teapot maximum few hundred deaths, but, according to Engdahl, a Pentagon-initiated biowarfare project threatens something far graver. In an August 2008 article titled "The Pentagon's alarming project: Avian Flu Biowar Vaccine," he cited "alarming evidence" of a cooperative pharmaceutical industry-Pentagon effort to genetically weaponize the H5N1 virus, then unleash a "selective pandemic through the process of mandatory vaccination(s) with an alleged vaccine" offered as protection. If today's Swine Flu scare is for this purpose, indeed it is worrisome, but that remains to be seen. What's known is what Engdahl reported in his April 29 article: that "In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1 (and) budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the drug Oseltamivir, sold under the name Tamiflu. (At the time, George Bush asked) Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks." This drug "is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy side effects" that potentially can kill. Nonetheless, during the current panic, its sales have skyrocketed, and that alone worries some enough to wonder what's more dangerous - the flu or the combination of the FDA approving potentially deadly drugs like Tamiflu, the dominant media hyping a non-existant threat, public health organizations terrifying people with heightened alerts, and government officials like Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano saying: "We are proceeding as if we are preparatory to a full pandemic" even though: -- no evidence suggests one; -- flu epidemics are extremely rare, certainly global ones with the potential to kill millions; -- influenza (flu) is a common viral illness; -- it exists in numerous strains; -- most remain infectious for about a week and produce symptoms including fever, coughing, nausea and at times vomiting - annoying but rarely life-threatening; and -- simple good health practices are more effective than dangerous drugs, including frequent hand washing, use of disinfectants and detergents, and abstaining from high-risk foods like all GMO ones as well as beef, poultry, and pork - raised under unsanitary conditions on factory farms that "are notorious breeding grounds for toxic pathogens." That said, major unreported or underreported pandemics abound, real ones. None, however, make headlines or arouse public or media concern. Below are some. Wars, Massacres, Genocide, and Violence Wars indeed are reported but not their toll, human or otherwise. In the past century alone, scores of millions died and even greater numbers of survivors suffered horrendously. Currently, and in recent years alone, wars and conflicts continue globally, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Occupied Palestine, Pakistan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Kashmir, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Southern Nigeria, Colombia, and elsewhere plus the mounting "war on terrorism" toll that's totally blacked out in news reports. Gideon Polya edits the Body Count web site, and in 2007 published a book titled: "Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950." As a biological scientist, he calls it "a carefully researched (country by country)" estimate totaling about 1.3 billion needless human deaths, including 140,000 under-five American infants in the last seven years alone according to UN demographic data. Globally 16 million avoidable deaths occur annually, including 10 million under age-five ones. Polya states: "There is no public discussion of the actual human cost of First World policies" that are the chief cause of global carnage in all forms, including wars, other conflicts, massacres and genocide, starvation and famine, disease, as well as preventable poverty and neglect. He adds: "An apocalyptic quartet of violence, deprivation, disease and LYING (including suppressing the truth) is responsible for the continuing carnage. Polya defines avoidable mortality as "the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently governed country with the same demographics." His main source was UN Population Division data for "essentially every country in the world since 1950 - (for) population, death rate, birth rate, population breakdown, (and) under-5 infant mortality rate." As violent occupiers, offending countries include: -- Britain responsible for 727 million deaths in dozens of countries, including Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq; -- France responsible for 142 million deaths in many countries, including Algeria, Vietnam, Haiti, and Ivory Coast; -- the US responsible for 82 million deaths in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere; and -- Israel responsible for 24 million deaths in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. Polya calls the occupations of Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq (among others) genocide as defined under Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that states: "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Post-1967, Palestine sustained 300,000 avoidable deaths. Post-1990, Iraq had about four million, up to half that number since March 2003, and since 2001, Afghanistan suffered three to seven million. These tolls mount daily, yet are virtually blacked out in news reports. Numerous other pandemics abound as well, mostly below the radar. Preventable Deadly Chronic Diseases They're numerous and include heart disease, cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, HIV/AIDS, stroke, and many others, the result of major risk factors like obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, poor diet, stress, lack of exercise, poverty, deprivation, and inadequate, unavailable, and/or poor quality public health. In two October 2005 articles titled "The neglected epidemic of chronic disease" and "Preventing chronic diseases: how may lives can we save," The (UK-based) Lancet (medical journal) stated that many of them often "remain marginal to the mainstream of global action on health," yet they "represent a huge proportion of human illness" and deaths. In 2005, around 35 million people died from heart disease, cancer, stroke, lower respiratory infections, and numerous other illnesses for lack of prevention, control, or effective effort to treat them. Annually, over a half million women die unnecessarily in childbirth, and for every death another 20 suffer injury, infection or disease for lack of available, affordable quality care - affecting about 10 million women in total. As a result, one million children are left motherless each year and become 10 times more likely to die within two years of their mothers' death. The great majority of maternal deaths would be preventable if a working health system were available to save lives. A 2005 World Health Report cited almost 11 million deaths among children under five from largely avoidable causes, including four million babies who don't survive their first month of life. Why aren't world governments addressing this and acting to save lives! Why don't the major media explain it! Including all chronic diseases, a mere 2% annual death reduction "would avert 36 million deaths by 2015" or the equivalent of about "500 million years of life over the 10" year span from 2006 - 2015, mostly in low and middle income countries, and under half will be for people younger than 70 years. By 2015, The Lancet projects around 64 million deaths categorized under three major groupings: -- communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritional; -- chronic, non-communicable; and -- injuries. In 2005, chronic diseases accounted for 72% of the global total for the older-30 aged population. The Lancet concluded that "the serious consequences of chronic diseases and their (preventable) risk factors are not recognised by the international health community," at least in terms of financial commitment or concern. Further, although high-risk behavior (smoking, poor diet, etc.) takes its toll, low-income countries experience a larger problem, especially for the population segment without easy access to good lifestyle choices, including the availability of quality health care. An "insidious myth" is that these conditions aren't preventable because people bring them on themselves. "The reality could hardly be more different" with numerous factors playing a part, including environmental and economic pressures that take a huge toll on human health. Differences between high and low income countries are marked and show the successful effects of intervention. From 1970 - 2000, around 14 million heart disease deaths were averted in America alone. Overall, a relatively small number of "modifiable risks" account for more than half of all chronic disease deaths. Reducing them would have a dramatic effect through: -- individual interventions; -- population-based ones; and -- macroeconomic ones with enough desire and fiscal allocations to do it. The combination of all three are needed for chronic disease prevention and control plus one more - widespread dominant media promotion the same way it spreads fear by hyping scams like Avian and Swine Flu. The Lancet also stated: "Our vision for the future extends beyond measuring risk behavior and counting the dead, and instead encourages all sectors of society (including the media) to contribute effective ways of reducing health risks and promoting longer, healthier lives." It's for those sectors to get on with the task instead of acting counterproductively, pursuing profits at the expense of human health, and ignoring the global pandemic of preventable illnesses and diseases. Other global pandemics include: -- 1.3 billion people live on less than $1 dollar a day, including over 500 million existing in "absolute poverty" according to the World Bank; another three billion survive on about $2 a day; poverty this extreme kills; -- starvation and famine kill about 15 million children annually; -- according to the World Health Organization (WHO), one-third of the world population is ill-fed and another one-third is starving; malnutrition affects one in twelve people, including 160 million children under age five; in America, one-sixth of the elderly population is ill-fed, and one out of eight children under 12 endures daily hunger; -- global hunger, starvation and famine persist in spite of a plentiful world food supply; -- five million annual smoking-related deaths occur; -- two million annual alcohol-related deaths; -- about one million annual suicides; -- 400,000 annual auto and truck accident deaths; -- 200,000 annual illicit drug-related deaths; two - three times that number die from legal drugs; -- about 30,000 annual US gun-related deaths; -- unknown annual tens of thousands of deaths from pollution, food and water contamination, nuclear radiation exposure, and domestic violence, especially to women, children and the elderly; and -- according to the World Health Organization: "The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the end of the International Classification of Diseases (code Z59.5) -- extreme poverty." These are real preventable pandemics, not fake ones like Swine Flu being hyped for profit, to spread fear, and divert public attention from real problems like the above-listed ones, the deepening global economic holocaust, the systematic looting of national wealth, and the steady path America is on to becoming a militarized banana republic police state. Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13461

Stephen Lendman is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Stephen Lendman

"Gaza II" unfolding in Sri Lanka - Mossad fingerprint?

"Gaza II" unfolding in the East

The current offensive by the Sri Lankan government against thr Tamil Tiger or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebel movement has trapped tens of thousands of refugees in a coastal strip still held by the rebels. Sri Lanka's military has been accused by human rights organizations of using massive firepower against the guerrillas that is resulting in civilian casualties. The comparison between Israel's brutal attack on the Gaza Strip and its killing over over 1000 civilians and the wounding of many thousands of others and the Sri Lankan assault on a 3-mile long coastal strip controlled by the Tamil Tigers have been made by a number of observers, including Australia's Green-Left Online in a May 2 article by Sean O Floinn & Emma Clancy: "A largely defenseless people struggling to survive and hemmed in on a narrow strip of land, facing indiscriminate air strikes, assault from gun boats and cluster bombs by a well-equipped army, conjures up the image of the recent Israeli invasion of Palestine’s Gaza Strip."

However, there is more to the comparisons between Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip and Sri Lanka's attack on the narrow strip of the Jaffna peninsula. In May 2000, a day after India refused to give Sri Lanka any military assistance in its war against the Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka and Israel resumed diplomatic relations. Although the corporate media is focusing on Sri Lanka's military assistance from China, little mention is being made of the island nation's military links with Israel.

After the establishment of diplomatic ties between Jerusalem and Colombo, Israeli military technicians arrived to maintain Sri Lanka's Israeli-made Kfir fighter-bombers and Russian MiG-27 aircraft and provided Sri Lanka with Dvora fast naval attack craft. Israeli arms and ammunition also began flooding into Sri Lanka.

Soon, Israeli military advisers and "consultants" were regular visitors to Colombo's new Access Lanka Building, owned by relatives of Sri Lanka's top military officers. Among Israel's security exports to Sri Lanka was state-of-the-art electronic and imagery surveillance equipment. Israeli air force pilots reportedly flew Sri Lankan attack aircraft against Tamil Tiger targets on the Jaffna peninsula. Israeli military personnel were also reported to have taken part in Sri Lankan military attacks on Tamil units.

Due to Israel's military assistance to Sri Lanka, Palestinians reportedly began aiding the Tamils in the 1980s. It is also believed that Israel's Mossad recrtuited agents among Sri Lanka's large contingent of foreign workers in the Persian Gulf Arab states. There were also reports that Israelis were also providing weapons and training to Tamil guerrillas in order to maintain a "market" for Israeli arms suppliers in the civil war-wracked island nation.

On March 2, 2007, WMR reported: "WMR visited Phnom Penh, Cambodia and discovered that the Mossad and Cambodian criminal syndicate allies continue to obtain bought-back Cambodian weapons from Cambodian government warehouses and are selling them to guerrilla groups throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, anti-Laotian Hmongs, the small anti-communist Free Vietnam Movement, and Burmese tribal guerrilla groups. WMR photographed a number of Zim shipping containers portside along the Mekong River in Phnom Penh. From this and other port facilities, including the port of Sihanoukville, bought-back Cambodian weapons, some originally provided to the Khmer Rouge by [Israeli tycoon Shaul] Eisenberg and the Chinese, are making their way to insurgent groups around Asia, possibly including Iraqi guerrillas battling U.S. forces in Iraq."

Tamil guerrillas have claimed to have destroyed an Israeli-made Sri Lankan fast naval attack craft, perhaps reminiscent of Hezbollah's destruction of the INS Hanit, a Saar-V class missile corvette, which was deployed off the Lebanese coast during the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, with a C-802 Iranian-made Noor missile.

Although Sri Lanka suspended diplomatic ties with Israel in 1970 over the failure of the Israelis to withdrawal from illegally-occupied Palestinian territory, However, operating an Interests Section within the U.S. embassy in Colombo, Israeli-Sri Lankan ties began to grow closer in the mid-1980s. Israel provided Sri Lanka with military advisers and established a special commando unit for the Sri Lankan police.

In 1990, Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa ordered the Israeli Interests Section at the U.S. embassy to close its doors and two Israeli diplomats in Colombo were ordered t leave. Premadasa was said to have come under pressire from Muslim ministers in his government. In 1990, Premadasa also ordered a government investigation of charges that Mossad was training both Sri Lankan and Tamil guerrilla forces. On September 25, 1991, Reuters reported from Colombo: "Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, fighting against a campaign to have him impeached, yesterday accused the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad of plotting against him because he closed the Israeli interests section in the U.S. embassy. He spoke at the opening session of parliament."

On May 1, 1993, Premadasa was assassinated in Colombo during May Day festivities by a suicide bomber said to be a Tamil guerrilla. Twenty three other people were killed in the blast. On May 28, 1993, Abdul Hameed Mohammed Azwer, Sri Lankan minister of state for Muslim affairs, said in Jeddah: "Israel was enraged by when they were expelled from Sri Lanka by Premadasa and I suspect the Mossad was behind the dastardly murder of this respected leader."

Those behind Premadasa's assassination remains an Asian "cold case." On September 23, 1997, Attorney General Sarath Silva released 18 Tamil suspects in the assassination of the president, citing lack of evidence. Silva declared the case would be officially deemed as "unsolved."

During a March 2009 trip to Israel by Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake, talks were held with Israel's leading arms suppliers on increased military aid by the Israelis to Sri Lanka.

Israel continues to supply Sri Lanka with arms and military training even after the United States and Britain cut off military supplies to Sri Lanka over the government's human rights violations.

New evidence that Hariri assassination was ordered in Washington and Jerusalem

On April 29, 2009, UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon pre-trial Judge Daniel Fransen ordered the release from prison of four Lebanese generals who had been implicated in the 2005 car bombing assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The special tribunal convened on March 1 of this year and the UN took over the case against the four generals from the Lebanese government.

The four generals, who are considered pro-Syrian, were thought by the initial UN investigators and the Lebanese government to have been involved in a conspiracy hatched by Damascus to kill Hariri. However, as WMR previously reported, the evidence against Syria in the assassinations of Hariri and other leading Lebanese politicians was always flimsy. In fact, the assassinations of Lebanese leaders was cooked up by the Bush administration neo-conservatives and their allies in Jerusalem to force the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.

In 2005, under pressure from the Bush administration, a UN investigative committee charged that Syrian and Lebanese intelligence were behind Hariri's assassination. Prior to the release of the four generals, Mohammad Zuhair al-Siddiq, a former Syrian intelligence officer, was arrested in the United Arab Emirates as a suspect in Hariri's assassination.

The four Lebanese generals released were Jamil Sayyad, the chief of Lebanese General Security under the Syrian occupation; Ali al-Hajj, the former chief of the Internal Security Forces; Raymond Azar, the former head of Lebanese Army intelligence; and Mustafa Hamdan, the chief of the Presidential Guard under then-President Emile Lahoud. They were held for four years in prison without charges being brought or even being questioned by prosecutors.

Chief UN prosecutor Daniel Bellemare asked Fransen to drop the case against the "four generals" because a key witness against them retracted his testimony, causing the case to collapse.

Lebanon's Hezbollah welcomed the release of the four generals.

In December 2008, the UN Special Tribunal in a report to the UN Security Council, stated: "Those responsible for the attacks were professional and took extensive measures to cover their tracks and hide their identity. Much of the Commission's activity at this point . . . focuses on piercing this smokescreen to get at the truth."

On October 24, 2006, WMR reported: "A senior French DGSE -- Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure-- intelligence officer has told WMR that Lebanon's ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was killed in a car bombing arranged by Israel's Mossad. The revelation from French intelligence is significant as the French government of Jacques Chirac joined the Bush administration and the neo-con policy establishments in Washington and Israel in blaming Syria for the attack. According to the DGSE officer, Israel and its American backers wanted to blame Syria for the assassination of the popular Lebanese leader in order to blame Syria for the attack thus forcing the popular Lebanese revolt that saw the withdrawal of Syrian forces. That left Lebanon defenseless for the 'Clean Break' attack launched by Israel, with US support, against Hezbollah and Lebanon's infrastructure. WMR was one of the first to report Israeli and American involvement in the assassination of Hariri, as well as those of Elie Hobeika, George Hawi, and other Lebanese politicians."

On March 28, 2008, WMR reported: "A UN panel headed by former Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare has concluded that former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a 'criminal networK' and not by either Syrian and Lebanese intelligence or Lebanese Hezbollah as proffered by the neocon propaganda mill operating out of Washington, DC and Jerusalem. The UN panel said that a 'Hariri Network' had the ex-Prime Minister under surveillance before the Beirut massive car bombing that killed Hariri and 22 other people in November 2005. WMR previously reported that the 'criminal network' was composed of Lebanese and rogue Syrian intelligence agents connected to Israel's Mossad and a White House operation run by National Security Council senior staff member Elliott Abrams, the formerly convicted Iran-contra figure."

It is not yet known whether al-Siddiq, the former Syrian intelligence agent arrested in the UAE, is thought to be a member of the criminal network, described by the UN, that killed Hariri.

On March 28, 2008, WMR also stated: "Although for political reasons the UN refrained from identifying the members of the 'criminal element,' WMR has reported it included rogue Syrians, Druze, and Palestinian intelligence operatives in Lebanon, as well as mercenaries linked to now jailed international arms smuggler Viktor Bout and members of the Russian-Israeli 'organizatsiya' criminal syndicate. WMR was criticized by the neocon press when it first reported on the actual elements behind Hariri's assassination and charges of 'anti-Semitism' were the rule rather than the exception."

On November 1, 2005, WMR reported: "WMR has obtained the Confidential version of the Mehlis Report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Mehlis is the Senior Public Prosecutor in the Attorney General's Office in Berlin. He was named Commissioner of the UN International Independent Investigation Commission into the Hariri assassination. Mehlis is a darling of neocons who served in the Reagan administration. It was his investigation of the 1982 La Belle Discotheque bombing in West Berlin that was used as justification by Reagan to launch a 1986 bombing attack on Libya. Mehlis concluded that Libya was behind the attack conveniently at the same time that pro-Israelis in the Reagan administration, including Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Scooter Libby, and others were calling for an attack on Muammar Qaddafi. The Mehlis Report, dated October 19, 2005, states the Commission 'focused on the crime scene, technical aspects of the crime, analysis of telephone intercepts, the testimony of more than 500 witnesses and sources, as well as the institutional context in which the crime took place.' The confidential copy indicates that certain information, all of which implicates Syria and pro-Syrian Lebanese officials, was added just before the report was issued."

The dropping of all charges against the four generals is yet additional proof that the Mehlis Report was a neocon fraud aimed at destabilizing Lebanon in 2005, forcing the withdrawal of the Syrians from the country, sending Syria a warning to close its border with Iraq to prevent fighters from entering Iraq to fight U.S. occupation troops, and leaving Lebanon wide open for a brutal Israeli attack in 2006. WMR's November 1, 2005 report concluded: "Given all the bogus intelligence emanating from the neo cons and their Israeli, British, Italian, and Iraqi allies prior to the invasion of Iraq, the 'intelligence' contained in the Mehlis Report, which may have been placed therein by unconfirmed US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton and his staff, makes the charges against Syria highly dubious."

The dropping of the charges against the four generals is seen as a boost the electoral chances for Hezbollah in June elections. Currently, Lebanon is governed by a pro-U.S. and anti-Syrian government led by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. The nationalistic and anti-Israeli opposition primarily consists of the Shi'a-dominated Hezbollah and an influential Christian faction led by retired General Michel Aoun.

On April 1, 2005, the a U.S. State Department neocon propaganda unit, referring to this editor as a "self-described journalist," attacked the reports about Hariri being assassinated by U.S. and Israeli interests. The Obama administration continues to maintain the Bush-era State Department propaganda website that attacks journalists who cite American crimes and malfeasance in other countries.