PANDEMICS GALORE

Every year 15 million children die of hunger

Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger

In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty"

Every year 15 million children die of hunger

For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years

Throughout the 1990's more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could be prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days!

The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving- Since you've entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will die this year.

One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. United Nations Food and Agriculture

please get your swine flu shots as soon as possible so the elitists can get rid of you faster then less people on planet less starving. get it? pandemics ahoy!!!!!!!!!!!

more than 3000 African children dying daily. massive pandemics?

25 April 2003 | NAIROBI/GENEVA/NEW YORK -- The Africa Malaria Report, released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), says the death toll from malaria remains outrageously high - with more than 3000 African children dying daily.

w00t?

An estimated 20 per cent of the world's population — mostly those living in the world's poorest countries — is at risk of contracting malaria. Malaria causes more than three hundred million acute illnesses and kills at least one million people every year. Ninety per cent of deaths due to malaria occur in Africa, south of the Sahara, and most deaths occur in children under the age of five.

"Malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds,

Maybe its been cured by now after all its like 5 years later and the world is always on the lookout for massive pandemics right?

20,000 to 36,000 -- the average number of people who die from influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) per year.

Flu Kills Far More Than Thought, CDC Reports

Study revealed 16,000 additional flu deaths

Dateline: 01/14/03

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reported greatly underestimating the yearly number of deaths resulting from influenza in the United States.

Citing "new and improved" statistical models, scientists at CDC have increased by 16,000 deaths -- from 20,000 to 36,000 -- the average number of people who die from influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) per year. RSV is a virus that that causes upper and lower respiratory tract infections primarily in young children and older adults. According to the CDC study, most RSV-related deaths occur in elderly persons.

36,000/365 days in a year = 98 dead bodies every day from flu, in the fookun USA. worldwide? Typically, in a year's normal two flu seasons (one per hemisphere), there are between three and five million cases of severe illness and up to 500,000 deaths worldwide, wake me up when the hyperbolic bullshit game is really at pandemic purportions!

There is an H1N1 human strain in this year’s shot, and all H1N1 flus are descendants of the 1918 pandemic strain.

U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: April 26, 2009

Responding to what some health officials feared could be the leading edge of a global pandemic emerging from Mexico, American health officials declared a public health emergency on Sunday as 20 cases of swine flu were confirmed in this country, including eight in New York City.

I'm calling suspicious, the nature of the reporting, the timing and the actual reality of any "pandemic". I call a contrived sack of diversionary bullshit.

Roscooler p. Bacon lover

CDC to mix avian, human flu viruses in pandemic study

Robert Roos News Editor

Jan 14, 2004 (CIDRAP News) – One of the worst fears of infectious disease experts is that the H5N1 avian influenza virus now circulating in parts of Asia will combine with a human-adapted flu virus to create a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world.

That could happen, scientists predict, if someone who is already infected with an ordinary flu virus contracts the avian virus at the same time. The avian virus has already caused at least 48 confirmed human illness cases in Asia, of which 35 have been fatal. The virus has shown little ability to spread from person to person, but the fear is that a hybrid could combine the killing power of the avian virus with the transmissibility of human flu viruses.

Now, rather than waiting to see if nature spawns such a hybrid, US scientists are planning to try to breed one themselves—in the name of preparedness.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will soon launch experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affect animals. The goal is to assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus will emerge and how dangerous it might be.

CDC officials confirmed the plans for the research as described recently in media reports, particularly in a Canadian Press (CP) story.

Two ways to make hybrids
The plans call for trying two methods to create hybrid viruses, CDC spokesman David Daigle told CIDRAP News via e-mail. One is to infect cells in a laboratory tissue culture with H5N1 and human flu viruses at the same time and then watch to see if they mix. For the human virus, investigators will use A (H3N2), the strain that has caused most human flu cases in recent years, according to the CP report.

The other method is reverse genetics—assembling a new virus with sets of genes from the H5N1 and H3N2 viruses. Reverse genetics has already been used to create H5N1 candidate vaccines in several laboratories, according to Daigle. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said recently it would soon launch a clinical trial of one of those vaccines.

Of the two methods, the co-infection approach was described as slower and more laborious, though closer to what happens in nature.

Any viable viruses that emerge from these processes will be seeded into animals that are considered good models for testing how flu viruses behave in humans, according to Daigle. The aim will be to observe whether the animals get sick and whether infected animals can infect others.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been "pleading" for laboratories to do this research, because it could provide some evidence to back up the agency's warnings about the risk of a flu pandemic, according to the CP report.

Klaus Stohr, head of the WHO's global influenza program, was quoted as saying that if none of the hybrids caused disease, the agency might be inclined to dial down its level of concern. But if the experiments produce highly transmissible and pathogenic viruses, the agency will be more worried, he said.

Safety precautions
Because of the obvious risks in creating viruses with the potential to spark a pandemic, the work will be done in a biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory at the CDC in Atlanta, Daigle told CIDRAP News.

"We recognize that there is concern by some over this type of work. This concern may be heightened by reports of recent lab exposures in other lab facilities," he said. "But CDC has an incredible record in lab safety and is taking very strict precautions."

Daigle said the US Department of Agriculture requires that highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses be treated as "Select Agents" and that research on them must be done in BSL-3 labs with "enhancements." These include "special provisions to protect both laboratory workers and the environment."

BSL-3 is the second highest level of laboratory biosecurity. It is used for work with pathogens that may cause serious or potentially lethal disease if inhaled, such as tuberculosis or St. Louis encephalitis, according to the CDC.

CDC experiments with HPAI viruses have to pass reviews by the agency's Institutional Biosafety Committee and Animal Care and Use Committee, Daigle said. The facilities involved are inspected by the USDA and the CDC's Office of Safety and Health, and staff members who work with Select Agents require special clearance.

It's been done before
The upcoming experiments will not break entirely new ground for the CDC, the CP story revealed. The agency already has made hybrid viruses with H5N1 samples isolated from patients in Hong Kong in 1997, when the virus first caused human disease.

The results of that research have not yet been published, and the CDC has said little about them. In the CP report, Dr. Nancy Cox, head of the CDC's influenza branch, commented only, "Some gene combinations could be produced and others could not."

Daigle added little to that. He said, "The reassortment work with the 1997 isolate was intermittently interrupted with SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] and then the 2004 H5N1 outbreak. We are currently concentrating our efforts on understanding the pathogenicity of the 2004 strains (non-reassortants) in mammalian models."

He said the CDC hopes to prepare a report on that research "in the near future."

See also:

CDC information on biosafety levels
http://www.cdc.gov/od/ohs/symp5/jyrtext.htm

Baxter working on vaccine to stop swine flu,

Baxter working on vaccine to stop swine flu, though admitted sending live pandemic flu viruses to subcontractor
By Lori Price, www.legitgov.org 26 Apr 2009

The OMFG moment of the century: Illinois-based Baxter working on vaccine to 'stop' swine flu outbreak in Mexico 25 Apr 2009 Specialty drug maker Baxter International Inc. will work with the World Health Organization to develop a vaccine that could stem [foment] an outbreak of a deadly swine flu strain in Mexico. Baxter spokesman Christopher Bona said Saturday that the Deerfield, Ill.-based company has asked the WHO for a sample of the flu strain. He says Baxter has patented technology that allows the company to develop vaccines in half the time it usually takes -- about 13 weeks instead of 26. [Is Baxter International taking a page from the Blackwater playbook? Just as Blackwater/Xe keep on killing to justify their multi-billion dollar contracts to provide 'security' in Iraq and Afghanistan, Baxter International is poised to make *billions* to vaccinate people against their pandemic.]

Are you ready? Wait for it...

Virus mix-up by lab could have resulted in pandemic [Uh, it apparently f*cking *did.*] 06 Mar 2009 It's emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab [the Austrian branch of US vaccine company, Baxter] last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.

'This was infected with a bird flu virus.' Viral Pandemic H5N1 flu threat: Illinois-based Baxter contaminates European labs by error 25 Feb 2009 According to the scientific network PROMED, Baxter International Inc. in Austria "unintentionally contaminated samples with the bird flu virus that were used in laboratories in 3 neighboring countries, raising concern about the potential spread of the deadly disease". As PROMED reports, the contamination has been discovered when ferrets at a laboratory in the Czech Republic died after being inoculated with vaccine made from the samples early this month. "The material came from Deerfield, Illinois-based Baxter, which reported the incident to the Austrian Ministry of Health, Sigrid Rosenberger, a ministry spokeswoman, said today in a telephone interview", the network-alert-system is quoting. "This was infected with a bird flu virus," Rosenberger said. "There were some people from the company who handled it."

'That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created.' Baxter admits sending live avian flu viruses to subcontractor --People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled [!] in the Orth-Donau facility. 27 Feb 2009 The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses. And an official of the World Health Organization's European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International's research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria. [Source: The Canadian Press]

Spectre of pandemic 26 Apr 2009 The new strain contains gene sequences from North American and Eurasian swine flus, North American bird flu and North American human flu, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of Mexico's dead were young, healthy adults, and none was aged older than 60 or or younger than three, the World Health Organisation said. This has alarmed health officials... Pandemic flus - like the 1918 Spanish flu and the 1957 and 1968 pandemics - often strike young, healthy people the hardest. Mexican officials promised a huge immunisation campaign in the capital this week. [The deadly vaccine program *ensures* a pandemic!]

CLG: Flu Kills The Torture Memos --In a 'Holy convenience, Batman!' moment, a 'unique' flu virus (one likely concocted in US Army labs) overtakes media coverage of revelations that the highest levels of the US government instructed the CIA (and private contractors) to torture terror suspects. By Lori Price 26 April 2009 Guess where the first swine flu outbreak occurred? That's right, Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 1976. Thirteen soldiers died, leading the US government to force a questionable vaccine on the population -- backed by a legal liability escape clause mandated by and for the pharma-terrorists. Next, people started dying not from the flu -- but from the *vaccine.* [See compendium of key flu articles here.]

DoD to carry out 'military missions' during pandemic, WMD attack

DoD to 'augment civilian law' during pandemic or bioterror attack

*****

Is Big Pharma trying to heal us or kill us ?

Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries

• Is Big Pharma trying to heal us or kill us ? Toronto Sun reports :
  
  The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses.
  
  And an official of the World Health Organization’s European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International’s research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria.
  
  “At this juncture we are confident in saying that public health and occupational risk is minimal at present,” medical officer Roberta Andraghetti said from Copenhagen, Denmark.
  
  “But what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility in Orth-Donau.” The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company. The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.
  
  The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn’t die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses.
  
  Public health authorities concerned about what has been described as a “serious error” on Baxter’s part have assumed the death of the ferrets meant the H5N1 virus in the product was live. But the company, Baxter International Inc., has been parsimonious about the amount of information it has released about the event.
  
  On Friday, the company’s director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected. “It was live,” Christopher Bona said in an email.
  
  The contaminated product, which Baxter calls “experimental virus material,” was made at the Orth-Donau research facility. Baxter makes its flu vaccine — including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly — at a facility in the Czech Republic.
  
  People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the Orth-Donau facility. That is a dangerous practice that should not be allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted. Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences.
  
  While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people. That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created. There is no suggestion that happened because of this accident, however. “We have no evidence of any reassortment, that any reassortment may have occurred,” said Andraghetti.
  
  “And we have no evidence of any increased transmissibility of the viruses that were involved in the experiment with the ferrets in the Czech Republic.”
  
  Baxter hasn’t shed much light — at least not publicly — on how the accident happened. Earlier this week Bona called the mistake the result of a combination of “just the process itself, (and) technical and human error in this procedure.” He said he couldn’t reveal more information because it would give away proprietary information about Baxter’s production process.
  
  Andraghetti said Friday the four investigating governments are co-operating closely with the WHO and the European Centre for Disease Control in Stockholm, Sweden.
  
  “We are in very close contact with Austrian authorities to understand what the circumstances of the incident in their laboratory were,” she said.
  
  “And the reason for us wishing to know what has happened is to prevent similar events in the future and to share lessons that can be learned from this event with others to prevent similar events. … This is very important.”
  
• Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor writes in Vaccines as Biological Weapons? Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries :
  
  Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The “mistake” (if you can call it that, see below…) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community as health experts asked the obvious question: How could this have happened?
  ……..
  Or, put another way, Baxter is acting a whole lot like a biological terrorism organization these days, sending deadly viral samples around the world. If you mail an envelope full of anthrax to your Senator, you get arrested as a terrorist. So why is Baxter — which mailed samples of a far more deadly viral strain to labs around the world — getting away with saying, essentially, “Oops?”But there’s a bigger question in all this: How could this company have accidentally mixed LIVE avian flu viruses (both H5N1 and H3N2, the human form) in this vaccine material?
  
  Was the viral contamination intentional?
  The shocking answer is that this couldn’t have been an accident. Why? Because Baxter International adheres to something called BSL3(Biosafety Level 3) - a set of laboratory safety protocols that prevent the cross-contamination of materials. As explained on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosaf…):
  
  “Laboratory personnel have specific training in handling pathogenic and potentially lethal agents, and are supervised by competent scientists who are experienced in working with these agents. This is considered a neutral or warm zone. All procedures involving the manipulation of infectious materials are conducted within biological safety cabinets or other physical containment devices, or by personnel wearing appropriate personal protective clothing and equipment. The laboratory has special engineering and design features.”
• It is bad enough that governments all over the world have been warning about the likely pandemic flu. Now we find out we cannot trust Big Pharma to handle such bio-hazardous material in a safe manner.
• Who knows whether it was intentional? But I sure would like to know what really happened? And I sure would like to see the people responsible fired!
  
• Paul J. Watson adds in ‘Accidental’ Contamination Of Vaccine With Live Avian Flu Virus Virtually Impossible :
  
  Czech newspapers are questioning if the shocking discovery of vaccines contaminated with the deadly avian flu virus which were distributed to 18 countries by the American company Baxter were part of a conspiracy to provoke a pandemic.
  
  The claim holds weight because, according to the very laboratory protocols that are routine for vaccine makers, mixing a live virus biological weapon with vaccine material by accident is virtually impossible.
  
  “The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses,” reports the Canadian Press.
  
  Baxter flu vaccines contaminated with H5N1 - otherwise known as the human form of avian flu, one of the most deadly biological weapons on earth with a 60% kill rate - were received by labs in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Slovenia.
  
  Initially, Baxter attempted to stonewall questions by invoking “trade secrets” and refused to reveal how the vaccines were contaminated with H5N1. After increased pressure they then claimed that pure H5N1 batches were sent by accident. This was seemingly an attempt to quickly change the story and hide the fact that the accidental contamination of a vaccine with a deadly biological agent like avian flu is virtually impossible and the only way it could have happened was by wilful gross criminal negligence.
  ….
  According to a compiled translation from Czech newspaper stories, the media over there is asking tough questions about whether the contamination was part of a deliberate attempt to start a pandemic.
  
  “Was this just a criminal negligence or it was an attempt to provoke pandemia using vaccination against flu to spread the disease - as happened with the anti-B hepatitis vaccination with vaccines containing the HIV virus in US? - and then cash for the vaccines against H5N1 which Baxter develops? How could on Earth a virus as H5N1 come to the ordinary flu vaccines? Don’t they follow even basic precautions in the american pharma companies?” states the translation.
  
  The fact that Baxter mixed the deadly H5N1 virus with a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses is the smoking gun. The H5N1 virus on its own has killed hundreds of people, but it is less airborne and more restricted in the ease with which it can spread. However, when combined with seasonal flu viruses, which as everyone knows are super-airborne and easily spread, the effect is a potent, super-airbone, super deadly biological weapon.
  ….
  Spreading bird flu would create an instantaneous surge of demand for bird flu vaccines. The profits that vaccine companies such as Baxter International could reap out of such a panic are astronomical.
  
  In addition, as we have previously reported, those that have a stake in the Tamiflu vaccine include top globalists and BIlderberg members like George Shultz, Lodewijk J.R. de Vink and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
  
  Authorities in both Europe and the U.S. have openly detailed plans for martial law, quarantine and internment should a bird flu pandemic occur.
  
  The other motivation, as we have exhaustively documented on this website for years, is the fact that elites throughout history have openly stated that they want to see a world population reduction of around 80 per cent. Shocking stories like this take the plausibility of that narrative out of the realms of conspiracy theory and into the dangerous reality of conspiracy fact.
  …..
  This is not the first time that vaccine companies have been caught distributing vaccines contaminated with deadly viruses. In 2006 it was revealed that Bayer Corporation had discovered that their injection drug, which was used by hemophiliacs, was contaminated with the HIV virus. Internal documents prove that after they positively knew that the drug was contaminated, they took it off the U.S. market only to dump it on the European, Asian and Latin American markets, knowingly exposing thousands, most of them children, to the live HIV virus. Government officials in France went to prison for allowing the drug to be distributed. The documents show that the FDA colluded with Bayer to cover-up the scandal and allowed the deadly drug to be distributed globally. No Bayer executives ever faced arrest or prosecution in the United States.
  

Are the depopulation freeks (peak oilers) running a test?

Whats all the sudden hoopla about a flu ? honest to fuck only a few people control all the medias around the world. Now they are all up in arms of 67 dead messicans and a flu spreading? I bet tens of hundreds die from flu every day around the world, wtf is the big alarm bell for? propaganda? cover over something else ? a fucking diversion? for next giant scandal or "terror attack"? its smells bad from here I say its a cocked up test run at something even more sinister than they have ever done to us before...... or its nothing, go back to you homes nothing to see here....

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N25473389.htm

New flu has spread widely, cannot be contained-CDC

25 Apr 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, April 25 (Reuters) - An unusual new flu virus has spread widely and cannot be contained, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed on Saturday. "It is clear that this is widespread. And that is why we have let you know that we cannot contain the spread of this virus," the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat told reporters on a conference call. The strain of swine flu is suspected of killing as many as 68 people in Mexico and infecting more than 1,000 more, including eight in the United States. (Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Patricia Zengerle)

Obama’s Visit

The first case was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16. Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported. The newspaper didn’t confirm if Solis had swine flu or not.

why reconstitute the spanish flu of 1918? wtf for? was sars and bird flu earlier test runs? was swine flu mass vaccinations in 70's a test run? stay tuned my fellow rats in a cage......

Top of the Heap: The Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

I love Chris Floydianisms!!!!!!!!!!!! Written by Chris Floyd

Could it really have ended any other way? As the New York Times reports, Barack Obama and the Democratic Establishment are coming down hard and fast to quell any incipient movement toward accountability for the Bush Regime's torture system.

These "leaders" continue to advance the bizarre and bogus argument that the nation has too many "urgent priorities" to bother with following its own laws. Obama told the Democratic poobahs from Congress that a "full inquiry" into the torture system would "steal time and energy from his policy agenda," the Times reports. But this argument -- indeed the entire issue of some sort of "commission" to investigate the high crimes -- is simply a cynical bait and switch.

It is really very simple. Ample, credible evidence of violations of federal law have been produced by a plethora of reputable sources -- including the United States Senate and even the Pentagon. It is the function of the Justice Department to investigate possible violations of federal law, and, if warranted, prosecute them. Barack Obama would not -- could not -- carry out such a criminal investigation or direct the prosecution. The United States Congress would not carry out such a criminal investigation or direct the prosecution. Not a single government official now involved in dealing with the wars, with foreign policy, with the economy and the bailout, with health care, with employment and housing, with the environment, with the budget, with immigration -- in short, with any single activity of governing whatsoever -- would have their "time and energy" taken up by a straightforward criminal investigation undertaken by the Justice Department. [I see that Paul Krugman is making this same point in the New York Times. So now, even "serious" people can't pretend not to have heard it.]

If anyone -- politician, pundit, pal at the water cooler -- gives you the argument that torture can't be investigated because it would be a "distraction" from other government business, they are either lying to your face, or else ignorantly repeating a lie that's been filtered down from the elite. The argument about "distraction" is ludicrous, and insulting, on its face. It is exactly like saying, "Oh, we can't investigate these murders by Al Capone and his mob, because the mayor and city council have a lot on their plates right now, with this Depression and all. This is a time for looking forward, not retribution."

We don't need a "truth commission." We don't need to "wait for the facts to be gathered," as that walking conglomeration of craven servility and moral corruption, Harry Reid, insists. There are enough clearly established, copiously documented, credibly supported facts already in the public domain to warrant a full-scale criminal investigation by federal law enforcement officials.

It has nothing to do with "retribution" or "criminalizing policy disagreements" or "witch hunts" or any other of the weasel-word phrases being disgorged by our Establishment grandees in their panicky attempt to bury the crimes -- and in some cases, the dead bodies -- of the nation's bipartisan leadership.

And here we come to the crux of the matter. There will be no genuine accounting (or, apparently, not even any ersatz accounting, with a couple of scapegoat scalps paraded before the rubes) on the question of torture by the United States government for two simple reasons. First, the Democratic leaders of Congress are themselves thoroughly complicit in the torture system, about which they were often briefed by the Bush Administration itself. And if the Bush Administration withheld information about many of its atrocities in these official briefings (which is highly likely), detailed revelations of what was really going on has been readily available for years from a number of, again, credible and respectable sources, from human rights organizations to U.S. government agencies.

Any full and genuine investigation of the torture system would reveal the shocking extent of Democratic complicity with it. And certainly a criminal investigation -- which could not be steered and hobbled by a "blue-ribbon" panel of Establishment grandees -- would be even more dangerous in that regard. A genuine, independent probe of the Bush torture system would also doubtless lead back to covert tortures countenanced by Democratic and Republican administrations going back for several decades, as Bernard Chazelle noted recently.

The second reason why Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership are resisting, with all their might, a full investigation for the torture system is that they want to uphold what is perhaps the central principle of the American state today: the unaccountability of the ruling elite. [Glenn Greenwald speaks to this point here.] They want to retain the freedom of action to do "whatever it takes" (that tough-guy phrase so beloved by "savvy" insiders and their sycophants in the press) to maintain themselves and their cronies and their class in a position of dominance, wealth and privilege. The law is not for them; the law is for the rubes, the suckers, the rabble, the losers -- for you and me, in other words.

I don't want to make a fetish of the law. Laws are generally devised by the powerful to serve and protect their own interests. As we noted here yesterday, most of the atrocities committed by the Germans in World War II were "legal" under the laws of the Nazi regime. The ringing phrase, "rule of law," is not a magic talisman that solves all ills.

But as Billy Kid said to Alamosa Bill, in Sam Peckinpah's eccentric western about the ever-shifting legal and moral lines in human affairs: "The law's a funny thing, ain't it?" Once it has been fashioned, it can be used in ways its elitist framers might never have intended: against them, for example. For whatever reasons, the United States government has adopted the UN Convention against Torture as the law of the land. All of the leaders of the United States government claim to be sworn upholders of the law; indeed, they certainly apply rigorously, even ruthlessly, to those of us in the lower orders.

So now we come to what is called, in the treacly, touchy-feely parlance of our day, a "teachable moment." Here is one of the most clear-cut points of national decision and self-definition that can be imagined. Clear, credible evidence of atrocity and conspiracy has been produced. The course prescribed by law is clear: criminal investigation and, if warranted, prosecution. If, as you claim, your state is founded upon the rule of law, then there simply is no choice in the matter: the torture program and all of its perpetrators, facilitators and instigators must be subjected to the due process of law, without fear or favor.

If this does not happen, then your state, however modernized and sophisticated, is nothing but a gilded barbarism, a gangland, where the brute force of money, privilege and power hold tyrannical sway. There is no law, only the triumph of the will of corrupt and criminal factions as they preen and jostle for position atop a fetid heap of blood and filth.

President Barack Obama and the Democratic leaders have now openly joined the long-time Republican resistance to applying the law of the land to the torture program. What lesson, then, are we to take from this "teachable moment"? What does this decision, this act of self-definition, say about the true nature of the American system of government today? Where does it put our righteous, noble, God-professing leaders?

Why, on top of that stinking heap, of course!

Notes From Underground: Prosecution, Power and the Poison Chalice

Written by Chris Floyd

A reader writes in about yesterday's post:

There might be another reason [why Obama is not calling for prosecutions on torture]: a desire to win the case that’s built against the former administration and not taint or discredit it by inappropriate pressure to prosecute. As has been widely pointed out, it is not up to Barack Obama to decide when and what to prosecute – and any attempt to do so on his part would be unethical, if not criminal. (It’s the same principle that goes to the heart of what was so desperately corrupt about the Bush Administration’s involvement with the Department of Justice.)

Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor who has been calling for criminal investigations of the Bush Administration for years, has written an excellent article posted at truthout.org. In it she writes:

“No smart lawyer who secretly wanted this entire issue to disappear would have released those torture memos. From a prosecutor's point of view, the release of those memos with their authors' names in full view was pretty much the same as releasing their photographs with bloody knives in hand. The president and the attorney general may not have said much, but what they did was quietly flip the switch on a searing bright light.”

And whatever else you have to say about Barack Obama, he is a smart lawyer. It’s obvious he has parsed his words with extreme care. Although I can not see into Obama’s heart or character any more clearly than you, it’s my belief that he is actually more of a “radical” than you give him credit for. Indeed, I think it's possible he’s even more radical than you give yourself credit for. He may actually want to make inroads into the system, not just righteously rail against it from the outskirts.

A response from the outskirts:

An interesting viewpoint. But the idea of Obama's calculated "non-interference" in the decision-making process on prosecutions for torture seems hard to square with his very public, very forthright statements that none of the actual, physical perpetrators of the torture under question -- the CIA agents -- will face prosecution for their actions. Could this not be construed -- by some cynic, perhaps, or by some ranter from the outskirts -- as "inappropriate pressure" on the aforesaid decision-making process? [For more background, see this piece.]

What's more, the very torture statutes under which any prosecution would take place very specifically rule out Obama's justification for not prosecuting the CIA agents, i.e., "We were only following orders," or "The higher-ups said it was OK." The laws on torture preclude such a defense. After all, the commandants and guards at Nazi death camps could say the same; their acts were ordered from above, and were indeed "legal" under the Nazi system.

In any case, by going to CIA headquarters and making a very public avowal that no one there would have to face justice for the "mistakes" of the past, it seems to me that Obama is very clearly exerting pressure on the decision-making process. The White House is also telling the New York Times that prosecutions against the instigators of the torture system will not be pursued.

Certainly the president of the United States can say publicly that he believes that any and all credible allegations of torture involving officials of the U.S. government should be pursued to the full extent of the legal process. Such a simple, straightforward statement would in no way constitute undue "pressure" -- anymore than a president saying, for example, that he believes that the perpetrators of some school shooting or massive fraud or drug smuggling or any other crime should be brought to justice. By your logic, no president could ever express any opinion at all on any criminal activity.

And since you express a rightful concern for the due process of law, let us note that Obama was legally bound by court order to release those memos. The "debate" over their release was not whether or not to exert crafty and subtle pressure on the legal process by divulging this "smoking gun" evidence -- rather, the debate was whether or not to comply with the law or not.

In addition, the memos in question did not suddenly "expose" the torture lawyers to light. They merely added some detail to what has long been known about officials whose names have also long been known.

Also, the comparison of this case to the Bush Adminstration's perversion of the Justice Department does not hold water. Here, we are not talking about "politicizing" the justice system in any way; we are dealing with glaring, credible evidence of actual crimes that have been committed. In any normal, non-political circumstance, the law should be allowed to take its course against any and all perpetrators of these crimes. The Bush Administration was manufacturing cases where the alleged crimes were either completely non-existent or worked up from speciously applied technicalities by prosecutors and judges with clear partisan bias. The only "politicization" involved in prosecuting the torture case has come from Obama's specific offers of protection from prosecution for the CIA and the Bush White House.

To sum up: Obama released memos that he was legally required to release, while at the same time making very public claims that the CIA perpetrators of the torture would not be prosecuted, and quieter, "deep background" claims to favored press outlets that the officials who ordered the torture would not be prosecuted either. You find this a "radical" course of action that will "make inroads into the system." I'm afraid I disagree.

Note too that we are dealing here with only a miniscule aspect of the entire torture program, which was by no means confined to the CIA's "high-profile detainees." Thousands of Terror War captives remain in U.S. custody, including many in black-hole sites in Afghanistan -- captive whom Obama is, at this very minute, seeking to strip of every single vestige of legal redress. And many of these captives were not even taken in Afghanistan, but were "renditioned" there after having been kidnapped or seized -- without charge or warrant -- in other countries. And many of these captives are subject to the "harsh interrogation techniques" that are still "allowed" by the Army Field Manual.

Couple this with Obama's recent court moves seeking not only to defend but to expand Bush's claim of authoritarian executive power -- including "sovereign immunity" from any lawsuit over illegal surveillance by the government -- along with his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his further extension of that war into Pakistan, and his economic "bailout" plan which has shovelled trillions of dollars into the coffers of the very fools and fraudsters who caused the crisis in the first place, etc. So we have an expanding war, an expanding military, an even-more entrenched and coddled oligarchy, the reach for even more draconian executive powers. Where exactly are the radical "inroads into the system" in all of this?

You can focus on this one narrow issue of the release of the memos, and parse its possible ramifications in every possible way that casts Obama in a good light. And you might even be correct; Obama and Holder might well be preparing to seize upon the Bush lawyers as scapegoats for the whole enterprise -- a possibility which we duly noted here the other day, just as we have always said that an Obama administration would indeed offer some minor mitigations of the worst excesses of the system in certain areas: no small thing in the individual lives of those affected by the mitigations. But you cannot wish away the undeniable fact that Obama has willingly and happily embraced the rotten core of the system -- militarism, oligarchy, covert action, draconian executive power. He doesn't want to change the essential nature of this brutal, outsized, inhumane system; he believes in it, he celebrates it -- as he did at CIA headquarter the other day.

Yes, I am "on the outskirts," with the railers, the ranters, the unimportant, unwashed rabble -- far from the center of power, where all the "smart lawyers" and "serious" players and real people are. But even if I were smart and serious and real and central, I would not pick up the poison chalice that Obama has eagerly put to his lips. I would not kill innocent human beings with drone strikes on distant villages. I would not guarantee the deaths of thousands more innocent human beings by expanding a mindless, pointless war. I would not laud a monstrous war crime that has killed a million innocent human beings as "an extraordinary achievement." I would not excuse and protect the perpetrators of torture and call them noble defenders of our civilization. I would not place trillions of dollars of debt on the shoulders of my children and grandchildren in order to save rich, rapacious bastards from the consequences of their fraud and greed.

I would prefer to remain on the "outskirts" with the despised and meaningless herd than sup such blood-flecked poison with the high and mighty. In this, I stand with Thoreau, who said:

"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

And with Solzhenitsyn, who said:

"It is impossible that evil should not come into the world; but take care that it does not enter through you."

And with Eugene Debs, who said:

“As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Mole Hunt .

An expert on U.S.–Israeli relations reveals details from his recent visit with the FBI

Jason Vest and Laura Rozen | September 3, 2004

In May, Stephen Green was hard at work campaigning for a seat in Vermont's House of Representatives when he got a phone call. The last person the 64-year-old former United Nations official, then preoccupied with health-care policy issues, expected to hear from was an FBI agent, who asked if he could come to Washington to chat with him about the history of Israeli espionage efforts against the United States.

As the author of two books on U.S.-Israeli relations, Green knew something about the subject. Still, the phone call seemed to come out of the blue. Green quickly discovered, however, that the FBI had a keen interest in the subject. Federal agents were involved in an investigation into an alleged Israeli "mole" in the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy.

Early reports suggested that the FBI had wiretap evidence that a veteran Iran analyst working in Feith's office at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Larry Franklin, may have passed a classified draft of a National Security Presidential Directive on Iran to an official working for the pro-Israel lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Members of the organization, in turn, were said to have passed the document on to Israel. (AIPAC officials strongly deny the accusations.)

But as Green spoke with investigators, he realized the agents were investigating far more than Franklin.

"Larry Franklin's name never came up, but several others did," he said.

Green, as the FBI agents knew, had a special expertise in the field of Israeli espionage in the United States. In the 1980s, he had taken time off from his job at the UN to look into the U.S.–Israeli "special relationship." He spent years combing through public records, filing and litigating Freedom of Information Act requests, and tracking down current and retired government officials. He eventually wrote two books, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With Israel and Living By The Sword: America and Israel in the Middle East. The Times of London and Foreign Affairs commended his work, describing it as "praised by those who believe the United States has damaged its own security, and Israel's too, by uncritical and often secret support of Israel's actions, no matter how extreme." Yet, as Foreign Affairs reported, Green's work also caused "sputter[ing] with indignation" among "those who believe… that American and Israeli interests are identical."

Green returned to the UN in 1990 and followed the subject from there. Earlier this year, he published a piece in the newsletter CounterPunch, recapping previously reported -- though long-forgotten -- government investigations of prominent neoconservatives for their suspected espionage or improper information-sharing with Israel. And that's where the FBI comes in.

According to the FBI agents who contacted Green, as he recounts, the article had come to their attention when one of Green's sources -- a retired national security official they were interviewing -- shared it with them.

And so on June 22, Green found himself sitting across an oval-shaped conference table from two FBI agents at an undisclosed northern Virginia venue. The meeting lasted nearly four hours.

"They were extraordinarily well-informed; it was apparent they've been at this for awhile," Green says. "I asked them if there was a current reason for them asking questions about things that go back over 30 years, and they sort of looked at each other and said, 'Yes, it's a present issue,' but wouldn't say specifically what. Though they did ask very specific questions about one individual in particular."

Green said the agents asked about several current or former Pentagon officials such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and Stephen Bryen.

"The tenor of their questions was such that it defined where these people were in terms of the nature of their focus," Green says. "They also asked about a couple other Office of Special Plans people, including Harold Rhode. Ironically, about the only name that didn't come up was Larry Franklin."

Regardless of the status of the investigation, something seemed a bit fishy. After all, Israel -- one of the United States' closest allies, with deep support in the Bush Administration and especially at the Defense Department -- hardly needs a Pentagon-embedded spy to get access to interagency debates about U.S. policy to Iran, as observers have pointed out. And compared with the information on arms shipments that former US Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard passed on to Israel in the 1980s, a draft of a document about U.S. policy toward Iran would hardly seem like the crown jewels.

Yet, as Newsweek has reported, Franklin had come to the FBI's attention a year and a half ago, when he walked in on a lunch with an Israeli diplomat and an AIPAC lobbyist, both of whom were under FBI surveillance for a year. In addition, Newsweek reported that when news of the investigation surfaced, Franklin had already been cooperating with the FBI for several weeks and had reportedly led FBI agents to those who may have received information from him.

The previous FBI investigation came into focus only on September 1, when The Washington Post reported that for two years, the FBI has conducted a counterintelligence investigation into whether AIPAC has forwarded “highly classified materials from the National Security Agency . . . to Israel.” The Post piece describes Franklin's alleged role as merely “coincidental” to the larger FBI probe of alleged intelligence-passing through AIPAC to Israel.

Both AIPAC and Tel Aviv vehemently deny any wrongdoing. And indeed, the Israeli diplomat who acknowledges meeting with Franklin and AIPAC -- Naor Gilon, the Israeli embassy's No. 3 official and a specialist on Iran's nuclear program -- returned to Washington on August 29 from a summer vacation in Israel. He admits that he met with Franklin, but insists he's done nothing wrong.

A source familiar with the investigation told The American Prospect that when news of the investigation broke, the Justice Department had been preparing a request to the State Department to have an Israeli diplomat -- by implication Gilon -- declared persona non grata for allegedly having received classified U.S. intelligence from AIPAC sources.

Furthermore, a September 1 report by NBC speculated that the reason the Israelis may have broken their declared post-Pollard policy of not spying on the United States is because of Israel's preeminent concern about Iran's nuclear program, and its view that the United States may not be prepared to act assertively enough to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Post piece seems to imply that Franklin is more of an anti-Tehran zealot than anything else and wasn't engaging in espionage per se. But as the Post article and the June meeting between Green and the FBI seem to indicate, the FBI is looking into the possibility there's been communication between Israeli elements and U.S. officials, including several who work for Feith and have access to sensitive intelligence on Iran and its nuclear program.

Jason Vest is Prospect senior correspondent. Laura Rozen reports on national security issues from Washington, D.C. and for her weblog, War and Piece.

Philip Taubman = Sayanim

Times confirms Democrat tried to stop wiretapping story, possibly before 2004 election

By John Byrne

Published: April 21, 2009
Updated 3 hours ago


The New York Times confirmed late Monday that a top Democratic congresswoman called the paper in 2004 and tried to keep it from publishing an article exposing the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program — possibly helping to sway the balance in the 2004 presidential election.

The New York Times exposed the warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, revealing that the National Security Agency had engaged in the interception of thousands of American and foreign calls without a warrant as part of a program intended to disrupt terrorist plots. Upon running the story, they also admitted that they had withheld the article for a year at the urging of Bush Administration officials.

But buried in a Times article published Tuesday is the revelation that the top Democratic congresswoman on the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman (D-CA), called the paper’s Washington, D.C. editor in “October or November” of 2004 in an effort to quash the story.

“Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement Monday that Ms. Harman called Philip Taubman, then the Washington bureau chief of The Times, in October or November of 2004,” the Times writes. “Mr. Keller said she spoke to Mr. Taubman — apparently at the request of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A. director — and urged that The Times not publish the article.”

“She did not speak to me,” Keller said in a statement, “and I don’t remember her being a significant factor in my decision.”

In addition, “Shortly before the article was published more than a year later, in December 2005, Mr. Taubman met with a group of Congressional leaders familiar with the eavesdropping program, including Ms. Harman. They all argued that The Times should not publish,” they Times reporters added.

At the time of her calls in 2004, Harman was part of the Gang of 8 — one of eight powerful members of Congress who are briefed on heavily classified intelligence matters. She was the most senior Democrat in the House dealing with intelligence affairs, and was sidelined after the 2006 congressional elections.

“October or November” 2004 would have been the month before, or the month of, respectively, of the election that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) lost to then-incumbent President George W. Bush.

The paper did not give the exact date of Harman’s call. An email message to the Times’ spokesman was not immediately returned.

Harman’s role in the wiretapping scandal emerged after a story Sunday in Congressional Quarterly, which disclosed that the California Democrat had been caught on an NSA wiretap promising an Israeli agent that she’d lobby to get the charges for two Israeli lobbyists accused of espionage reduced. The Times expanded on the story today.

An “official with access to the transcripts said someone seeking help for the employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, was recorded asking Ms. Harman, a longtime supporter of its efforts, to intervene with the Justice Department,” the paper wrote. “She responded, the official recounted, by saying she would have more influence with a White House official she did not identify.

“In return, the caller promised her that a wealthy California donor — the media mogul Haim Saban — would threaten to withhold campaign contributions to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was expected to become House speaker after the 2006 election, if she did not select Ms. Harman for the intelligence post,” the paper added.

The full Times story is available here.

Sayanim : volunteer spys = Jane Harmen

deny all you fuckin want but you scum are in on it and you fuckin know it.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Sayanim (Hebrew: helpers, assistants) is a term used to describe a loose network of Jews living outside Israel who volunteer to provide assistance to the Mossad.^[1]

According to former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky and author Thomas Gordon, the sayanim provide assistance of various kinds to Mossad officers operating in foreign countries. This assistance can include facilitating medical care, money, logistics, and even overt intelligence gathering. However, sayanim are not directly involved in the intelligence operation in question, and are only paid for their expenses.

No official number is known, but estimates put the number of sayanim in the thousands.

The existence of this large body of volunteers allows the costs of intelligence gathering to be greatly reduced, and may be one reason why the Mossad operates with fewer case officers than fellow intelligence agencies.

Jane Harman Israeli Spy helper? fuck yes!

Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports at 8:50 AM on April 20, 2009.

Harman was allegedly heard saying she'd 'waddle into' the AIPAC case in return for support for her bid to become chair of the Intelligence Committee.

This is a huge story: Representative Jane Harman, a hawkish, influential “Blue Dog” Democrat “was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington,” according to a report from CQ Politics:

Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

The case, known as the AIPAC espionage scandal centers around allegations that at least two AIPAC staff members passed sensitive US intelligence on Iran, provided by Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin, to Israel. In early 2006, Franklin pled guilty to espionage-related charges and was sentenced to 13 years in prison. The case against two indicted AIPAC staffers, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, is ongoing.

Allegations that Harman intervened in this case in an effort to win the spot as chair of the Intelligence Committee have been widespread since 2006, but an FBI investigation into Harman was dropped for “lack of evidence.” As CQ Politics reports:

What is new is that Harman is said to have been picked up on a court-approved NSA tap directed at alleged Israel covert action operations in Washington.

And that, contrary to reports that the Harman investigation was dropped for “lack of evidence,” it was Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush’s top counsel and then attorney general, who intervened to stop the Harman probe.

Why? Because, according to three top former national security officials, Gonzales wanted Harman to be able to help defend the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about break in The New York Times and engulf the White House.

When Justice Department officials reviewed the transcript of the wiretaps on Rep. Harman, its attorneys determined she had committed a “completed crime,” which, according to CQ Politics is “a legal term meaning that there was evidence that she had attempted to complete it.” The Justice Department attorneys wanted to open a case on her, but they needed the green light from top intel officials to confirm it rightly constituted a national security investigation. Porter Goss, who was then the CIA director reportedly approved the investigation and was preparing to notify then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and House Speaker Dennis Hastert and, through them, Harman herself:

But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.

According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.

Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program

He was right.

On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”

Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.

And thanks to grateful Bush administration officials, the investigation of Harman was effectively dead.

On his Salon blog today Glenn Greenwald points out:

Jane Harman, in the wake of the NSA scandal, became probably the most crucial defender of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, using her status as “the ranking Democratic on the House intelligence committee” to repeatedly praise the NSA program as “essential to U.S. national security” and “both necessary and legal.” She even went on Meet the Press to defend the program along with GOP Sen. Pat Roberts and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and she even strongly suggested that the whistleblowers who exposed the lawbreaking and perhaps even the New York Times (but not Bush officials) should be criminally investigated, saying she “deplored the leak,” that “it is tragic that a lot of our capability is now across the pages of the newspapers,” and that the whistleblowers were “despicable.” And Eric Lichtblau himself described how Harman, in 2004, attempted very aggressively to convince him not to write about the NSA program.

There may be some who attempt to portray Harman as a victim of blackmail by Gonzales (and the wiretapping of members of Congress—and other Americans— should be thoroughly investigated) but Harman is a right wing Democrat who was often in sync with the heinous policies of the Bush administration. Over at TalkingPointsMemo, Josh Marshall raises some interesting issues on this story, particularly relating to the wiretap itself:

Among the many questions the story raises are some that Harman should probably answer, but not all. High on my list would be finding out more about the circumstances under which a member of Congress ended up having her phone conversations recorded by the NSA. The article suggests it was a by-the-books wiretap — part of a highly-classified probe of Israeli agents in the US, which led to the indictments of two AIPAC employees — and not one of the ‘warrantless’ ones. But we’ve seen so much funny business on that front that I’m not sure that’s enough information.

In a prepared statement, Harman said: “These claims are an outrageous and recycled canard, and have no basis in fact… I never engaged in any such activity. Those who are peddling these false accusations should be ashamed of themselves.”

Divide And Conquer

They are workin it, pretending tax protests were about left and right! i say fuck off.

and who is running shit up our flagpoles that says we want to be taxed out of our homes and like it? jeeeezuz fuck shut up there aint a one of us out here wants it!
ask the obama nominees that had tax evasion in their background.

And people aint buying guns and ammo like crazy for armed revolutions dumb asses, they are buying them for protection from the motherfuckin zombies that are attacking with ever increasing frequency.
you can't fucking wait for 911 guy to show up to protect you! fuck no, you best protect yerdamnselves as it happens and wait for the tasering motherfuckers to show up later and beat yer head in under cover of law........................fuck off and good night

"We don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem,

their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover-up."

hahaha fuckers! i'm tellin ya this newest mess is not an accident, again like 911 okc etc etc etc its all prepackaged ops to fuck you and me over!!!!!!!!!!!.
there are too many mother fuckin useless eaters on the planet and slowly these fuckin reptilian mofos are going to create thier final solution!!

A fraud that makes Madoff look small time

Ron Smith

April 10, 2009

Since Bernard L. Madoff was handcuffed and taken from his office by FBI agents, we have been made well aware of the nature of Ponzi schemes, fraudulent investment opportunities that pay off early participants with money from newcomers, not from returns on legitimate stock or bond holdings. Mr. Madoff, once a highly respected member of the Wall Street establishment, has admitted to defrauding investors of as much as $50 billion in such a manner. When asked by the agents who arrested him if he could explain what he'd done, he reportedly said, "There is no innocent explanation."

According to the man who may be the leading expert on banking fraud, there is also no innocent explanation for the events leading to the current economic crisis. Last week on his PBS show, Bill Moyers interviewed William K. Black, the senior regulator during the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s. Mr. Black, who wrote a book based on his experiences and called it The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, said the fraud and deceit that resulted in the world banking system's dire distress makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker. In fact, says Mr. Black, who is the former director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, what we have experienced was caused by "calculated dishonesty" on the part of corporate CEOs, aided and abetted by politicians and regulators who tore down the barriers to financial shenanigans - perhaps the most important example being the repeal of the Great Depression-inspired Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial banking from investment banking. This cleared the stage for the fraudulent investments that made a lot of people very, very rich in what we can now see was an immense Ponzi scheme, many times the size and scope of the scam pulled off by Mr. Madoff.

Consider that one company, the now-defunct IndyMac - which specialized in making liar's loans - in a single year (2006) sold $80 billion of these toxic things to other companies. IndyMac lost more money than all the lending institutions involved in the S&L crisis of the 1980s. And those at the helm of this firm and the others we've heard so much about - A.I.G., Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, etc. - knew what they were doing. Mr. Black believes they dealt in investment instruments they knew were created fraudulently.

So, why haven't we seen the people responsible for this hauled off in handcuffs the way Bernie Madoff was? Or at the very least, how come the CEOs of the banks involved in this scheme haven't been made to walk the plank like Rick Wagoner of General Motors? Because, says Mr. Black, "We don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover-up."

When asked by Mr. Moyers whether he was alleging that Timothy F. Geithner and others in the administration, and the banks, are engaged in a cover-up to keep us from knowing what went wrong, Mr. Black said, "Absolutely." The rulers are frightened to admit that many of the large banks are insolvent. They have ignored the proven methods for dealing with bank fraud and have instead adopted what they used to laugh at when the Japanese did it: covering up bank losses by lying about them and injecting money into failed institutions. Even though it's working exactly as one would expect - just as it did in setting Japan into a long, deep recession - they don't know what else to do. To take effective action would reveal what they believe cannot be revealed. The lurid facts must be hidden.

So much for the vaunted transparency the new president promised us.

Ron Smith can be heard weekdays, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., on 1090 WBAL-AM and WBAL.com. His column appears Fridays in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is rsmith@wbal.com.

Chop Shop Economics and Stealth Zionism

Believe it or stuff it mofo's they are out for themselves and you can fuck off as far as these gangsters are concerned. let em whine anti semite, these fuckers are in it for thier own and fuck you..........creating crisis is thier bussiness and then wrapping you further in their enslavement debt net. creating crashes and then buying up tons of assets on the cheap, destroying competition. on and on, go find out yer ownself i din make it up

Chop Shop Economics and Stealth Zionism

Karin Friedemann

14 April 2009

Causing $64 trillion of liquidity to vanish from the world financial system and then manipulating the US government to reward the perpetrators with bailout money requires the presence of the “right people” in government, academia, and finance industries.

In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein argues that Milton Friedman or Chicago School influenced policy makers routinely used catastrophes to facilitate rewriting of national economic rules to benefit a select subset of the world’s hyperwealthy.

President Obama, whose economic background is all Chicago School, brought the Friedmanites including National Economic Council Director Larry Summers back into government.

Summers came under recent public scrutiny because 2008 White House financial disclosure reports reveal he collected favours from the very financial institutions that received huge taxpayer bailouts. “The document provided for Summers, who serves as one of the president’s closest confidants, underscores just how close some of these officials are to the industry over which they now have oversight,” writes Sam Stein in the Huffington Post.

J.P. Morgan Chase, which received $25 billion in government bailout funds, had paid Summers $67,500 for a single speaking engagement. Citigroup, which received $50 billion in “emergency” taxpayer aid, had paid Summers $99,000. Goldman Sachs, which received a $12 billion bailout, had paid Summers $202,500.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon explains that people like Summers and friends “shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting.”

During the Clinton administration, as Secretaries of the Treasury, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers deregulated derivative trading. After leaving government service, Rubin became a Citigroup director and used deregulation to ruin that Bank by recommending investments in derivatives like 
CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations). For eight years of service Rubin received approximately $126 million in cash and stock.

Investors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE were effectively swindled out of billions as Citigroup value crashed because of the CDO meltdown during the Bush administration. Larry Summers became president of Harvard University in 2001. Rubin was Summers’ main booster at the Harvard Corporation, which chooses the president.

Summer’s Harvard presidency erupted into scandal when the US government accused Summers’ associate, economics professor Andrei Shleifer of financial improprieties during work on a Harvard USAID grant to create a Russian stock market. The government suspected Shleifer’s wife Nancy Zimmerman of insider stock trading.

Because Shleifer put Harvard in breach of Federal regulations regarding grant money, Harvard had to pay $27 million to the US government while Summers protected Shleifer and his job. Additional questions arose over the management of the Harvard endowment, employee compensation, and suspected middle market restraint of trade involving university real 
estate acquisitions.

During this turbulent period in his career, Summers worked hard to improve his Jewish credentials. He badmouthed anti-Israel divestment activists on campus but supported Darfur-related divestment.. He dumped his Christian wife Victoria Perry for Holocaust Literature professor Elisa New, a close friend of Jewish Studies professor Ruth Wisse, whose husband is chairman of board of directors of CAMERA, a professional Israel advocacy organisation.In a disastrous blow to Harvard’s academic stature, Summers rejected former UAE president Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s $2 million donation for an Islamic Studies chair at the Harvard Divinity School under pressure from Rachel Fish of the David Project, which is another Israel advocacy group with connections to CAMERA.

The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences twice voted “no confidence” in Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 amidst rumours of refusal to testify in an internal investigation of financial fraud. Shortly thereafter the D.E. Shaw hedge fund hired Summers with Rubin’s recommendation and paid Summers $5.2 million for approximately 50 working days.

Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel trod a similar career path perhaps more quickly because of superior Jewish Zionist credentials resulting from an Irgunist father and civilian IDF service during Iraq War I.

Boutique investment bank Wasserstein Perella, whose founder Bruce Wasserstein is heavily involved in Zionist politics, hired Emanuel in 1999 and paid him $16 million for two years of work, despite his having zero background in economics or finance.

Now this corrupt network is pushing through Congress another huge gift for their friends: the Summers-Geithner Plan, which enables banks to make their own valuation of toxic assets and then buy them with taxpayer money without restoring the lost liquidity.

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, “In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities.”

Dean Baker of Truthout points out: “Some hedge and equity fund managers could make hundreds of millions or even billions off the Geithner plan.” This Plan looks like a premeditated attempt to loot and destroy the US 
financial system.

Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle East affairs and US politics
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