"War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships." --George Orwell (1903-1950)[Thanks to Alex Constantine @ http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/]
reached a common approach on the amendment of the Framework Decision on combating terrorism proposed by the Commission on 6 November 2008. [sic ?] The amendment up-dates the Framework Decision making public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, recruitment and training for terrorism punishable behaviour, also when committed through the Internet [emphasis added]....In apparent anticipation of that announcement, French politicians had promulgated one day earlier an "oh-so-very-Parie" legal interpretation of the new European terrorist provocation statue: jail anyone "behind anorexia-promoting websites."
The Council Framework Decision of 13 June 2002 on combating terrorism constitutes a key tool in the fight against terrorism. It harmonises the definition of terrorist offences in all Member States and ensures that they establish for natural and legal persons having committed or being liable for such offences penalties and sanctions, which reflect the seriousness of such offences. It sets out jurisdictional rules to guarantee that terrorist offences may be effectively prosecuted....
According to Reuters news service, the Lower House of the French National Assembly late last weekadopted a bill aimed at criminalising "incitement to excessive thinness by publicising of any kind". The bill carries a penalty of up to three years in jail and a fine of €45,000.The bill now must be approved by the Senate before becoming law. A Higher House spokesperson said officials there were awaiting testimony (and comping) by lobbyists from the French food industry's chocolate, truffles and escargot divisions before voting on the measure.A number of websites publish advice and encouragement to people, mostly young women, who want to be dangerously thin. These are targetted by the French bill in order to protect the 40,000 anorexics living in France.
The law is aimed at sites which provoke a person to excessive weight loss by encouraging prolonged restriction of food, risking death or directly compromising the person's health.
"Giving young girls advice about how to lie to their doctors, telling them what kinds of food are easiest to vomit, encouraging them to torture themselves whenever they take any kind of food is not part of liberty of expression," health minister Roselyne Bachelot told parliament, according to the Reuters news agency....
Companies involved in the French fashion industry signed a voluntary charter last week to help promote healthy body images but the French government stopped short of imposing a compulsory ban on using models considered to be too thin.
"Mad Cow and hog wastrel diseases that my USDA commissioner tells me are rampant in US beef and pork products will achieve the same result will giving the illusion of sound nutrition. Here in America--"It's what for dinner."-- increased meat sales to France would enrich a critical segment of my corporate base," President Bush told the Associate Press yesterday between bites of Mama Mavis Davis's Down Home Barbecue luncheon for the Southern League of Bulimic Buddhism held in the White House Rose Garden.ABORIGINAL children were injected with leprosy treatments in a medical testing program that used members of the Stolen Generation as guinea pigs, a Senate Committee has heard.In 1932, the US Public Health Service initiated a similar "medical apartheid" program among 600 poor, illiterate black males partitioned into two study groups-- "399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease"-- at Alabama's all-Black Tuskegee Institute.
Greens Senator Bob Brown said he was "shocked and alarmed" by the claims, heard today by the Senate legal and constitutional committee's inquiry into a Stolen Generation Compensation Bill 2008.
On the first day of hearings in Darwin today, Kathleen Mills from the Stolen Generations Alliance said the public did not know the full extent of what happened to some children.
And efforts to obtain records that support the claims, such as that children were injected with serums to gauge their reaction to the medication, had been hampered, she said.
"These are the things that have not been spoken about," Ms Mills told the inquiry.
"As well as being taken away, they were used ... there are a lot of things that Australia does not know about."
Outside the inquiry, Ms Mills said her uncle had been a medical orderly at the Kahlin Compound in Darwin.
She said he told her that children were used as "guinea pigs" for leprosy treatments....
Ms Mills said information to do with the testing would be in health department archives and she called on the Government to assist "opening Pandora's box".
Until the study ended, the costs that withheld medical treatment for the men had had on their wives and children were not assessed.From 1932 to 1972, 399 poor black sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis and deceived by physicians of the United
The Study continues to cast a long shadow over the relationship between African Americans and the biomedical professions; it is argued that the Study is a significant factor in the low participation of African Americans in clinical trials, organ donation efforts, and routine preventive care.States Public Health Service. As part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, designed to document the natural history of the disease, these men were told that they were being treated for “bad blood.”In fact, government officials went to extreme lengths to insure that they received no therapy from any source. As reported by the New York Times on 26 July 1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was revealed as “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.”
By 1975, 50 wives of participants had been tested for syphilis; 27 were found to be positive. Although the exact source of their infection cannot be ascertained, they may have contracted it as a direct result of the denial of treatment to their husbands. The federal government has acknowledged this possibility and since 1975, has provided lifetime medical benefits to 22 wives, 17 children, and two grandchildren who have syphilis (New York Times. May 12, 1997:A1).The now-infamous Tuskegee Experiment was theoretically based in a body of concepts called eugenics (from the Greek, literally "well born") that originated in 1863 with Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's math-savant cousin. After startling revision, this line of thinking soon resonated among America's wealthiest white families concerned by the turn of the 20th century with socially and genetically deleterious effects from upheaveals linked to nonwhite immigrants. In American minds,
Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a [blonde haired, blue-eyed] Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states....While families such as the Carnegies and Harrimans eagerly funded eugenics-based US social activism, it was the Rockefeller Foundation that actually "helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz" to implement Hitler's "Final Solution" for ridding Europe of "parasitic" Jews.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
...[The Nordic ideal] alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.
After World War II, prominent scientists serving the Nazi cause were secretly brought into the US, rather than face prosecution for war crimes in newly liberated Germany. The US government's "Operation Paperclip"In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state [California]," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."
was a postwar and Cold War operation carried out by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA). Operation Paperclip’s code name was said to have originated because scientific recruits’ papers were paperclipped with regular immigration forms.In some cases, the Nazi scientists who illegally entered the US via Paperclip even reproduced their human experimentation studies for US government agencies, to include radiation experimentation on poor, dependent American children.
The JIOA was a special intelligence office reporting to the Director of Intelligence in the War Department, comparable to the intelligence chief of today’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Paperclip had two aims:
1) to exploit German scientists for American research;
2) to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union.
At least 1600 scientists and their dependents were recruited and brought to the United States by Paperclip and its successor projects through the early 1970s.
In recent years, it has been alleged that many of these individuals were brought to the United States in violation of American government policy not to permit the entrance of "ardent Nazis" into the country, that many were security risks, and that at least some were implicated in Holocaust-related activities.
The government’s human radiation committee looked at 21 cases of experimentation on children involving over 800 subjects, a number they themselves admit I just small proportion of what went on. One of the cases they concentrated on was dietary research conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the staff of Walter E. Fernald School. A residential institute for boys.
Former residents, some of whom ended up there simply because their families didn’t want them any more, describe the school as being dirty and brutal. In 1946, researchers set up a ‘science club’ at the school, enticing boys to join with such perks as a quart of milk a day and the occasional chance to leave the building.
In return, the boys were to eat a special ‘rich’ diet breakfast food ‘enriched’ with radioactive iron and to submit to regular blood tests. Letters to the boys’ parents implied that the testing would improve their health. The research, along with a later experiment at the school involving calcium, was funded by the National Institute of Health, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oaks Company [uuummmmm]
The government report ends its section on ‘non-therapeutic’ tests on children with:"Today, fifty years after the Fernald experiments, there are still no federal regulations protecting institutionalized children from unfair treatment in research involving human subjects.”
One ex-Fernald boy, Charlie Dyer, who has fathered two daughters with severe birth defects, said recently: “Get to the truth fast before the government hides everything and you can’t find nothing out. Because that’s what the government does, putting it in boxes and crates and hiding everything from the public.”
Happy Patriots Day
Courtesy of Jules Crittenden.
Patriots Day may be the least known American holiday, and the day most deserving of our recognition. Observed in Massachusetts and Maine only. Don't know it? It marks the day, April 19, 1775, on which Americans took up arms against their king, and bled, at the crack of terrible dawn.
Reacquaint yourself with history, recalling as you surrender 40% or more in various income taxes, that our fight for independence was begun over a 3% tax on tea.
Labels: overtaxed, underpaid in Amerika
An examination of the Bhutto assassination videos that many are now comparing to the analysis of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination is raging internationally, challenging the government's official explanations of the assassination.The UK's Channel 4 News broke this story the day before. Below is that 7 minute 41 sec report via YouTube.com.An examination of the Bhutto assassination videos that many are now comparing to the analysis of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination is raging internationally, challenging the government's official explanations of the assassination.
The Pakistani government is holding to the official theory that Bhutto was not hit by the bullets fired but was killed when her head hit the sun roof lever as she was thrown back into the SUV by the concussion from the suicide bomb.
An earlier government claim, now disavowed, was that shrapnel from the suicide bomb killed Bhutto.
Under mounting criticism, the Pakistani government also has released X-rays that allegedly show no bullet hit Bhutto in the head.
This official explanation is challenged, not just by the newly released video, but by many in-person witnesses whose accounts of three pistol shots, at least one of which hit Bhutto, appear more consistent with the newly released video.
"The hospital was made to change its statement," Rehman claimed.
"I believe the interior ministry is saying that she died from some concussion that may have taken place against the sunroof," she said. "This is ridiculous, dangerous nonsense because it is a cover-up of what actually happened."
America where are you now?Since the sixties, musicians have been outspoken and powerful proponents for social change, making them a threat to those eager to maintain the status quo. Typically fond of drugs, they also make easy targets for investigation and exploitation. In this comprehensive look at more than a dozen suspect rock star deaths, conspiracy researcher Alex Constantine delves into the secrets that the record industry, organized crime, and even the FBI and CIA don't want uncovered. Unearthing recent - and successful - assassination plots against Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. as well as new information on the tragic deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and John Lennon, this long-overdue report offers disturbing evidence that there may be more behind these deaths than accident, psychosis, and indulgence.Since the Bush White House just celebrated its fifth anniversary in Iraq compared to the 30-year commitment made by earlier US administrations--Truman (1945-1953), Eisenhower (1953-1961), Kennedy (1961-1963), Johnson (1963-1969), Nixon (1969-1973) and Ford (1973-1975)--to a similarly contrived horse shit war in Vietnam*, I deemed it a pros pro to reprise Steppenwolf's 1970 anti-war song "Monster" (lyrics below the YouTube player).
... The initial false picture [of the Vietnam War's origin] is of a peace-loving America reluctantly drawn into Asia through a series of "responses" to various acts of aggression by "socialist" countries, such as: a "massive" North Vietnamese invasion of Laos in 1959, an impending invasion of Thailand in 1962, an unprovoked attack on two US destroyers in 1964 [the Gulf of Tonkin incident after which the US Congress gave LBJ war powers] and an imminent invasion of South Vietnam from Cambodia in 1970. Today every single one of these separate allegations is now generally recognized to be untrue, and their refutation (in Chapters Two, Three, Four and Seven) need not delay us here. They will, however, not be understood until they have been seen in their context as part of a process or syndrome, the repeated use of intelligence agencies and their allies to prepare the conditions for escalation. This covert preparation, through provocation, connivance and deceit, is the process which, at the risk of oversimpliying, I have called "the war conspiracy."--"Introduction," The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. xv. (partially cited here)
January 4, 2008
Jane Harman and Liberty's Lost Light
Thinking for Yourself is Now a CrimeBy PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
What was the greatest failure of 2007? President Bush's "surge" in Iraq? The decline in the value of the US dollar? Subprime mortgages? No. The greatest failure of 2007 was the newly sworn in Democratic Congress.
The American people's attempt in November 2006 to rein in a rogue government, which has committed the US to costly military adventures while running roughshod over the US Constitution, failed. Replacing Republicans with Democrats in the House and Senate has made no difference.
The assault on the US Constitution by the Democratic Party is as determined as the assault by the Republicans. On October 23, 2007, the House passed a bill sponsored by California Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, chairwoman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, that overturns the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly.
The bill passed the House on a vote of 404-6. In the Senate the bill is sponsored by Maine Republican Susan Collins and apparently faces no meaningful opposition.
Harman's bill is called the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act."When HR 1955 becomes law, it will create a commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas. The commission will hold hearings around the country, taking testimony and compiling a list of dangerous people and beliefs. The bill will, in short, create massive terrorism in the United States. But the perpetrators of terrorism will not be Muslim terrorists; they will be government agents and fellow citizens.
We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract.
Who will be on the "extremist beliefs" list? The answer is: civil libertarians, critics of Israel, 9/11 skeptics, critics of the administration's wars and foreign policies, critics of the administration's use of kidnapping, rendition, torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions, and critics of the administration's spying on Americans. Anyone in the way of a powerful interest group--such as environmentalists opposing politically connected developers--is also a candidate for the list.
The "Extremist Beliefs Commission" is the mechanism for identifying Americans who pose "a threat to domestic security" and a threat of "homegrown terrorism" that "cannot be easily prevented through traditional federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts."
This bill is a boon for nasty people. That SOB who stole your girlfriend, that hussy who stole your boyfriend, the gun owner next door--just report them to Homeland Security as holders of extreme beliefs. Homeland Security needs suspects, so they are not going to check. Under the new regime, accusation is evidence. Moreover, "our" elected representatives will never admit that they voted for a bill and created an "Extremist Belief Commission" for which there is neither need nor constitutional basis.
That boss who harasses you for coming late to work--he's a good candidate to be reported; so is that minority employee that you can't fire for any normal reason. So is the husband of that good-looking woman you have been unable to seduce. Every kind of quarrel and jealousy can now be settled with a phone call to Homeland Security.
Soon Halliburton will be building more detention centers.
Americans are so far removed from the roots of their liberty that they just don't get it. Most Americans don't know what habeas corpus is or why it is important to them. But they know what they want, and Jane Harman has given them a new way to settle scores and to advance their own interests.
Even educated liberals believe that the US Constitution is a "living document" that can be changed to mean whatever it needs to mean in order to accommodate some new important cause, such as abortion and legal privileges for minorities and the handicapped. Today it is the "war on terror" that the Constitution must accommodate. Tomorrow it can be the war on whomever or whatever.
Think about it. More than six years ago the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. The US government blamed it on al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission Report has been subjected to criticism by a large number of qualified people--including the commission's chairman and co-chairman.
Since 9/11 there have been no terrorist attacks in the US. The FBI has tried to orchestrate a few, but the "terrorist plots" never got beyond talk organized and led by FBI agents. There are no visible extremist groups other than the neoconservatives that control the government in Washington. But somehow the House of Representatives overwhelmingly sees a need to create a commission to take testimony and search out extremist views (outside of Washington, of course).
This search for extremist views comes after President Bush and the Justice (sic) Department declared that the President can ignore habeas corpus, ignore the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency. Of course, none of these "patriotic" views are extremist.
The search for extremist views follows also the granting of contracts to Halliburton to build detention centers in the US. No member of Congress or the executive branch ever explained the need for the detention centers or who the detainees would be. Of course, there is nothing extremist about building detention centers in the US for undisclosed inmates.
Clearly the detention centers are not meant to just stand there empty. Thanks to 2007's greatest failure--the Democratic Congress--there is to be an "Extremist Beliefs Commission" to secure inmates for Bush's detention centers.
President Bush promises us that the wars he has launched will cause the "untamed fire of freedom" to "reach the darkest corners of our world." Meanwhile in America the fire of freedom has not only been tamed but also is being extinguished.
The light of liberty has gone out in the United States.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Labels: failed 110th Congress, fascism, lost civil liberty
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