Activist Post

12 Preparedness Tips for Families with Children

2012-02-23T08:08:00.002-08:00

Gaye Levy, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Something I have not given much thought to is how to deal with survival and preparedness matters when there are young children in the household. Perhaps it was watching the children on Doomsday Preppers that set me on this path, or perhaps it was just something I started thinking about on my own.

Whatever the reason, I have always treated young children as mini-adults, able to rationalize and understand and feel the emotions and body language of the adults around them. And I love kids. Even though I don’t have any of my own, I recognize and love that they are fresh and unspoiled by life and its failures. For no other reason, I wish to share my thoughts on preparedness for families with little ones under the roof.

A Dozen Preparedness Tips for Families

1. Include children in family preparedness discussions. Explain what you are talking about in a calm, assured manner and answer questions honestly and simply. Focus the conversation on the safety issues that will ensure their survival.

2. Regardless of their age, teach young children to memorize their basic personal information such as full name, address, telephone number, and the names of their parents or guardians. This will be invaluable in the event they become separated from their family following a disaster.

3. Learn the disaster response policies of you child’s school or daycare center. Be sure to establish a backup plan so that someone is available to pick them up and/or care for them if you are unable to do so. A good idea would be to have the backup person check on them, regardless, just to be sure. (After all, you may be hurt and unable to call the backup person yourself.)

4. Make sure the school or daycare center always has current emergency contact information for your children. They should also have a list of persons authorized to pick your children up from school. The last thing you want is for a kidnapper to take advantage of the chaos and snatch your child away for some nefarious reason.

5. Establish more than one family meeting site and make sure you child knows where it is. This will help if you can not return to your home.

6. Establish an out-of-state contact person and make sure that your child and the school knows how to reach this person. Remember that although local phone lines may be down, long-distance circuits often will be working following a disaster.

7. Teach your children how to use 9-1-1 and practice what they should say to the dispatcher when they do call.

8. Educate your children regarding the need to stay away from downed trees, downed utility poles and any wires that may be lying on the ground. Also teach them to recognize the small of gas and – this is important – to tell an adult they smell gas even if they are not 100% sure. Include instructions to get outdoors and leave the home or building if they even think they smell gas.

9. Practice evacuation strategies and evacuation routes as a family project. Make an outing of it; and while you don’t want to diminish the importance of the practice mission, make it fun as well.

10. If you live in an earthquake or other natural disaster zone teach them basic responses such as Drop, Cover and Hold or Stop, Drop and Roll.

11. Prepare a mini Go-Bag for each child. Include a family picture, a toy, and a game, book or puzzle to keep him or her occupied. Also include some treats.

12. In the adult/family Go-Bag, include copies of the children’s birth certificates, recent photos and additional kiddie comfort foods.

The Final Word

One thing I used to hate when I was a child was the grown-ups talking about something and assuming that I was either not interested; or worse, unable to understand. In reality, I had an innate curiosity and even though I only understood half of what the adults were saying, I still soaked it up like a sponge.

With that in mind, I cannot think of a better situation for including your children than a family discussion about planning for an emergency of survival situation.

Read other articles by Gaye Levy here.

Enjoy your next adventure through common sense and thoughtful preparation!

Gaye Levy, the SurvivalWoman,grew up and attended school in the Greater Seattle area. After spending many years as an executive in the software industry, she started a specialized accounting practice offering contract CFO work to emerging high tech and service industries. She has now abandoned city life and moved to a serenely beautiful rural area on an island in NW Washington State. She lives and teaches the principles of a sustainable, self-reliant and stylish lifestyle through emergency preparation and disaster planning through her website at BackdoorSurvival.com. SurvivalWoman speaks her mind and delivers her message with optimism and grace, regardless of mayhem swirling around us.

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Police Use Laws To Paint Cold Med Buyers as “Meth Heads”

2012-02-23T07:10:00.002-08:00

image source

Heather Callaghan

Activist Post

When does a trip to the drugstore become a trip to the slammer?

Apparently anytime...especially in an increasing number of states where law enforcement are tracing and cracking down on users of cold medication.

One Indiana grandmother was arrested and jailed in 2009 for purchasing Zyrtec-D and Mucinex D medicines for her husband – in the same week.

The other grandma in question was recently busted over one box of Sudafed bought at the behest of her scuba instructor for sinus issues underwater. Her nightmare is only beginning. “I keep thinking I'm going to wake up, but I never do,” said Diane Avera.

Commenting on the crackdowns, her husband Keith aptly describes her as an innocent “prisoner of the drug war going on inside America.”

Details about Diane Avera, age 45, while traveling to Florida with her son, his girlfriend, and their sons:

Did not get prescription; pharmacist told her to go to Alabama where it's legal to by Sudafed.
Went to Walmart in Demopolis, AL; she, her son, & his girlfriend bought & signed for Sudafed.
Sgt. Tim Soronen pulled her over right after and questioned her.
Avera told him her intentions; he informed her it was against the law to cross state lines to buy pseudoephedrine – wrong! It's not legal to bring it back to MS from another state.
Truck & purse were searched; son's methadone for former drug problem was found and his stash of paraphernalia, hidden in truck without mom's knowledge.
Cop accused Avera & son of being drug users: “Thought you don't do drugs,” he said. “I don't do drugs,” Avera replied.
Soronen offered to call Dept. of Human Resources to “pick up these kids” -- referring to her now-crying grandchildren.
She begged the officer to not take them away and offered to admit to anything to keep the children with the parents.
He coerced Avera to then make confessions that all the Sudafed was hers, which put her over Alabama's limit, and to add that she was going to make crystal meth.
Jailed for intent to make crystal meth – legs & hands handcuffed to chair for 17 hours.
Convicted of second-degree intent to manufacture methamphetamine.
Opposing District Attorney is claiming she also tampered with drug tests and admitted to using meth with her daughter during the last two years – Avera and her attorney hold that this isn't true.
If she doesn't win her appeal to the Alabama Court of Appeals she must serve a year in jail.

“When common household medications and disinfectants are now illegal to possess, I believe we have gone overboard with the drug laws,” husband Keith said.

As cases like this show, even medications that are legal to possess can ruin people's lives from just one extrapolated accusation.

Police are also reportedly searching people's homes and using common household cleaners as grounds for “conspiracy to create drugs.”

The director of Mississippi's Narcotics Bureau claims the stricter laws have led to a 67% decline in meth labs and subsequent child endangerment. He says that law enforcement doesn't target people who bring pseudoephedrine back to Mississippi unless they have previous arrests. “The last thing we want to be responsible for is targeting grandma.”

But that's exactly was is happening in full force. A grandma who doesn't do drugs, with no previous arrests, tried to go scuba diving and now faces prison time over a box of medicine.

Some Tips:

Never allow police to search anything without a warrant.
If a legitimate warrant is obtained, have moral support witnessing the search -- and record everything.
Never admit to anything – plead the 5^th if necessary.
Talk to an attorney before discussing the situation with authorities.
Use the line “It's against my policy.” Repeat as many times as necessary.

Source:

http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20120205/NEWS/202050350/Woman-says-innocent-trip-Ala-spirals-into-meth-charge

Read other articles by Heather Callaghan here.

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Air Marshal Whistleblowers Reveal a Federal Aviation Culture of Discrimination, Abuse, and Incompetence

2012-02-23T06:30:00.004-08:00

Joe Wright
Activist Post

Two training supervisors, Tom Feeney and Matt Ryan, have been exposed by 5 current and former air marshals as having created a discriminatory board game that was particularly disparaging of gays, lesbians, African-Americans, and veterans.

The whistleblowers say that the board game is actually a reflection of a system-wide attitude by Federal Air Marshal management that should make fellow workers concerned, as well as the flying public.

In the words of one whistleblower who revealed his identity, Steve Theodoropoulos, the investigation was a whitewash and nothing more than a review, not a true investigation:

The general public ought to be concerned the largest federal racist discrimination case in the history of federal law enforcement is going on and it's being covered up. (Source)

More worrisome is that the blatant discrimination is merely the tip of a very large iceberg of unimaginable proportions of corruption and abuse.

The five individuals called for an investigation by the Office of Inspector General, backed by Senators and Congressmen. After 21 months, the Office concluded that there was no evidence demonstrating a system-wide attitude, but rather was contained only to immediate training staff in one office.

Beyond the blatant discrimination, however, the whistleblowers also have pointed out the general incompetence and wastefulness that is endemic within the Air Marshal service, leading to massive cost overruns due to layers of desk bureaucrats, as well as compromised safety and service for the flying public.

What's more is that the Federal Air Marshal service is not filled with low-wage, poorly trained personnel such as the TSA where horrendous behavior can be written off more easily. Federal Air Marshals, according to Theodoropoulos, comprise mostly retired secret service personnel, making their disdain for the public that much more threatening.

Three of the whistleblowers want to remain anonymous, indicating that there is indeed established retaliation for concerns about racism, as well as a lack of efficiency and transparency that will protect the flying public, which is what the taxpayer believes they are actually funding.

Theodoropoulos appears in the video below with the Jeopardy-style game board in question that he suggests has become part of the Federal Air Marshal culture, and serves as a glaring example of discrimination. He also drops some other bombshells regarding both Barack Obama and Janet Napolitano, as well as a mountain of evidence showing TSA abuse, incompetence, and criminality of every stripe engaged from the top of the Federal Air Marshal structure to the bottom level of the TSA.

The federal aviation security apparatus is apparently even more corrupt and abusive than the public could have imagined:

Other sources:
http://news92fm.com/abc-national-news/abc-news-radio/air-marshals-speak-of-sexism-suicide-bigotry-within-community/

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Read other articles by Joe Wright here.

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Hey Rick Santorum, What's The 4th Amendment?

2012-02-23T05:14:00.001-08:00

We Are Change

After reminding Rick Santorum that he said he doesn't agree that the Patriot Act violates the 4th Amendment, Luke Rudkowski of We Are Change asks Rick Santorum to tell us what exactly the 4th Amendment is.

The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Please help support We Are Change so they can do more road trips across the country and ask the questions that are never asked. Follow them below:
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Internet Freedom Killer ACTA Suspended for Questionable Legality

2012-02-23T04:48:00.001-08:00

Youtube - RT

The EU has suspended the ratification of a controversial anti computer piracy agreement, questioning its legality. It will now be investigated to see if the document is compatible with human rights and freedoms.

Known as ACTA, the bill has been heavily criticised by web freedom activists, sparking multiple protests across Europe. If passed, the legislation will allow customs officers at airports to examine all devices that may contain pirated data. The authorities will also gain unlimited access to private digital information. So far, 22 EU countries have signed up to the deal which was negotiated in secret.

Bob Beschizza, from the online magazine and blog Boing Boing believes the law punishes those who use sources legally, while failing to battle online piracy.

RT on Twitter http://twitter.com/RT_com
RT on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/RTnews

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USDA to Give Monsanto’s New GMO Crops Special ‘Speed Approval’

2012-02-23T04:13:00.003-08:00

Anthony Gucciardi
Activist Post

If you thought Monsanto’s lack of testing on their current GMO crops was bad before, prepare to now be blown away by the latest statement by the USDA.

Despite links to organ damage and mutated insects, the USDA says that it is changing the rules so that genetically modified seed companies like Monsanto will get ‘speedier regulatory reviews’.

With the faster reviews, there will be even less time spent on evaluating the potential dangers. Why? Because Monsanto is losing sales with longer approval terms.

The changes are expected to take full effect in March when they’re published in the Federal Register. The USDA’s goal is to cut the approval time for GMO crops in half in order to speedily implement them into the global food supply. The current USDA process takes longer than they would like due to ‘public interest, legal challenges, and the challenges associated with the advent of national organic food standards‘ says USDA deputy administrator Michael Gregoire.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, problems like public interest (activist groups attempting to bring the dangers of GMO crops to light), legal challenges (farmers suing Monsanto over genetic contamination), and national food standards are all getting in the way of their prime goal — to help Monsanto unleash their latest untested GMO creation. In fact, the concern is that Monsanto may be losing cash flow as nations like Brazil speed genetically modified seeds through laughable approval processes.

Steve Censky, chief executive officer of the American Soybean Association, states it quite plainly. This is a move to help Monsanto and other biotechnology giants squash competition and make profits. After all, who cares about public health?

'It is a concern from a competition standpoint,' Censky said in a telephone interview.

The same statements are re-iterated by analyst Jeff Windau in an interview with Bloomberg:

'If you can reduce the approval time, you get sales that much faster,' said Windau.

If you can reduce the approval time, as in the time it takes to determine if these food products are safe, then you can get sales much faster.

Is the USDA working for the United States consumer, or is it working for Monsanto?

Explore More:

This article first appeared at Natural Society, an excellent resource for health news and vaccine information.

Non GMO Heirloom Seed Bank

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15 Ways Politics Steals Our Energy

2012-02-23T00:53:00.000-08:00

Politics is Exhausting – And That’s Exactly the Point

Wiki image

Dylan Charles
Activist Post

From grade school on we are taught to appreciate the American government and its civic processes as the cornerstone of freedom in the world, the ‘shining beacon on the hill.’ We are taught how to pledge allegiance to and revere a flag. We are told that goodness will prevail if we all just participate heartily and enthusiastically, playing by the rules.

We grow up believing that a basic responsibility of being born a human on planet earth is to participate in all of this political activity, and likewise, we are taught that non-participation is irresponsible, lazy, deplorable even. And so as good citizens do, many of us participate.

So, perhaps you’ve donated money to a political campaign or ran for public office. Maybe you’ve staffed for a political party or organized at the grass roots level. Maybe you’ve even joined the electoral process as a delegate, gone to your County or State convention, or just showed up with signs at the polls. Perhaps you’ve written your Congressman once or twice.

But is all this frenzy of well-intentioned activity doing our society any good or providing hope for a better future for our posterity?

Is it possible that our electoral system is cleverly designed to exhaust our positive, community-minded energies and to pacify our violent human will to live the prosperous and peaceful lives we deserve?

Could it be that the resources and energy we have applied to this social mechanism have been squandered in one of the greatest opportunity costs of all time?

Actually, when looking at politics as a drain on society, it becomes rather easy to conclude that we may be indeed wasting our greatest potential for societal progress in this endless game of ego satiation and public parade. Furthermore, it appears that the hidden costs of our political efforts have been quite vast, and have had many detrimental effects to our collective psyche and identity.

Consider this:

Politics devours time, energy and resources that could be spent elsewhere.
Politics creates widespread division amongst the populace by providing us with few choices and then positioning those choices as mutually exclusive enemies.
Politics nullifies the value of society’s potentially most effective members by forcing passionate, community-oriented individuals into a rigid arena that demands conformity and ultimately defers to entrenched power cliques.
Politics falsely empowers the thoughtless by providing an arena for people to believe they are positively impacting the world by simply pressing a button or checking a box when told to do so.

Politics erodes our natural idealism by fragmenting our grandest ideas for our future into single-issue chunks that make little sense when taken out of context. Then by ranking and marginalizing them in accordance with various political agendas, then, again, by prioritizing them against conflicting entrenched interests.
Politics gives us false impressions about what it means to be civilized. For example, it is not civilized to allow yourself to be raped by even the most polite of rapists, yet the success of politics relies on violated people being kind and patient with those who would selfishly saddle our futures with unbearable debts, endless wars and unacceptable restrictions to our personal liberty.
Politics prohibits us from ever reaching our highest societal potential. Because politics never concludes it is always dramatic and we learn to adjust our lives according to its highs and lows, thus our psychological development is trapped by the imposition of these never-ending patterns.
Politics protects society’s most heinous criminals by providing them the infrastructure, security apparatus, public platform, time and resources to obfuscate truth and protect themselves from meaningful prosecution. Election cycles, hearings, recalls, investigative committees and impeachments are an insult to justice when the accused are part of the government.
Politics demands that we become dishonest in order to gain advantage.
Politics consumes an absurd amount of financial and material resources.
Politics creates and exacerbates massive public cognitive dissonance between the prosperous and peaceful world we know we should have and the world that a corrupt political class can actually create for us. By repeatedly failing to deliver on its promises, the political system becomes so unbelievable that we have no choice but to believe it.
Politics severely limits society’s possibilities for meaningful and timely solutions to our most pressing problems by subjecting every opportunity for progress to the scrutiny, whim, and interests of largely corrupted and under-informed political bodies.
Politics insults our intelligence with its embarrassing pomp, flashiness, hubris, blatant rigging, hokey formatting, omissions, dumbing down and oversimplification of important complex issues.
Politics selfishly frames issues in terms of their impact upon people and fiat economics, largely disregarding our unmistakable dependence on the natural world for the gift we call life.
Politics exhausts our spiritual energy by claiming the authoritative role in our lives and diminishing our intuitive capacities and will to search for spiritual truth.

In the pursuit of a brighter future for ourselves, families, communities, and this Earth, we must be conscious of how we expend our personal energies, so as not to misallocate it or feed them to something that does us harm.

Politics is presently the status quo forum for setting the course for society’s future, but, as humankind evolves we must be ready, willing and able to leave behind designs of the past that have ceased being of any value to our future.

Our continued participation in this circus performance we call politics continues to feed the illusion of its legitimacy. By withdrawing our consent and participation in politics we may be freeing up considerable resources to apply toward the creation of a better world, while simultaneously helping to snuff out this energetic vampire that feeds heartily on our collective good will and positive energy.

This article first appeared on Waking Times. Dylan Charles is a former Ron Paul delegate, a black belt in many Eastern arts, and the founder and editor of WakingTimes.com

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McCain to introduce cybersecurity legislation giving even more domestic control to NSA, military

2012-02-22T16:19:00.002-08:00

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

During the Senate’s major hearing on cybersecurity last week, Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, announced that the Republicans in the Senate would introduce a bill to compete with S. 2105, also known as the Cybersecurity Act of 2012.

McCain seeks to give the NSA and the military previously unimaginable powers over civilian networks, even further expanding the ludicrous power over American citizens given to the military under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA).

This is similar to the conclusions drawn by a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which unsurprisingly had a long list of corporate “advisers” who would directly benefit from such a centralization.

Although, even the legislation as it is currently being considered follows the study’s recommendations by putting the power in the hands of DHS. McCain would apparently rather see that power in the military’s hands.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 is currently being supported by the chairmen of not only the Senate’s Homeland Security committee but also the chairs of the commerce and intelligence committees as well.

The current bill is cosponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent, Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat and Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California.

McCain spoke out against rushing the debate on this legislation and instead called for widening the role of the National Security Agency (NSA) in cybersecurity matters domestically.

On the February 16 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee McCain said that the fact that similar legislation has been introduced in the past by Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, in the past does not mean that this new bill should be rushed to a vote.

“To suggest that this bill should move directly to the Senate floor because it has ‘been around’ since 2009 is outrageous,” McCain said.

“First, the bill was introduced two days ago. Secondly, where do Senate Rules state that a bill’s progress in a previous congress can supplant the necessary work on that bill in the present one?”

McCain said that even though previous sessions of Congress had debated the bill, it was a different set of senators who must now consider the legislation.

This is quite a valid point given that just the homeland security committee alone has four Republicans who were not Senators back in 2009.

Instead of treating “the last Congress as a legislative mulligan by bypassing the committee process and bringing the legislation directly to the floor,” McCain says that Congress should be deliberating with transparency.

This includes holding markup sessions and open debate instead of circumventing the legislative process and just placing it on the calender immediately.

However, this is only part of McCain’s problems with the proposed bill.

He says that the legislation places most of the responsibility to protect American information systems on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), something which he believes to be a mistake.
McCain says that while the legislation would force the DHS to enlarge its mission and size in order to meet the mandates of the bill, the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) already have the resources and know-how to meet the mandates.

The problem here is that the NSA and the military, which USCYBERCOM is part of, currently do not have the legal authority to go in and secure civilian networks.

So, McCain seeks to introduce legislation to change that, giving the military even more unprecedented powers over civilians in the United States.

Following the hearing, Lieberman made a statement in which he nonsensically claimed that he “feels like it is September 10, 2001” and that “The system is blinking red — again. Yet, we are failing to connect the dots — again. We have come so far and in such a bipartisan way that we cannot allow this moment to slip away from us. We need to act now to defend America’s cyberspace as a matter of national and economic security.”

It seems quite clear to me that this is the typical fear mongering leveraged by our so-called representatives in order to suppress critical thinking and debate over policies like this.

“I am heartened that Republicans will offer their own cybersecurity proposal so that we can engage in rigorous debate and pass badly needed legislation this year,” Lieberman said, according to Homeland Security Today, although both proposals are far from acceptable in my humble opinion.

Both of the proposed bills take the power out of the hands of the American people and give it to centralized government agencies. The only significant difference is that McCain wants the NSA and the military to be in control and Lieberman and others want it to be the DHS with all the power.

It doesn’t make a bit of difference to me or anyone else who opposes giving the government even more power than they already have, especially when it comes to the private sector.

After all, if the government can’t even manage to keep their drone fleet secure, who in their right mind would task them with securing a sensitive civilian network?

The fear mongering being used by Lieberman is becoming almost sickeningly pervasive surrounding this legislation – and that is usually far from a good sign.

“The warnings of our vulnerability to a major cyber attack come from all directions and countless experts, and are underscored by the intrusions that have already occurred. Each day we fail to act, the threat increases to our national and economic security,” Collins said.

The second sentence of this statement from Collins is eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric that has been used time and time again to scare the American people into accepting federal tyranny.

Hopefully most of us are now able to see past their attempts to pull our heart strings and bypass all critical thinking faculties and thus reject any and all of this alarmist language.

McCain objected to the aspect of the cybersecurity legislation that tasks the DHS with carrying out risk assessments of businesses that they determine to be part of “critical infrastructure.”

While businesses would be allowed to appeal their designation, if they were deemed to be part of this critical infrastructure they would have to undergo annual re-certification of their cybersecurity standards.

As per usual, the program is incentivized in order to get companies to readily accept being controlled by the federal government.

In this case, companies who are deemed to be “in compliance with the regulations” would be given liability protection by the government for cyberattacks on their infrastructure so long as they maintain the standards set by the DHS.

McCain said that this process would be too burdensome for American companies, a position shared by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge who spoke on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce at the hearing on February 16.

During the hearing Ridge stated that more government regulation would simply be too costly and ineffective for protecting information systems, and I couldn’t agree more (something which I honestly thought I would never say in reference to Tom Ridge).

The government has proven time and time again that they are wildly incompetent at securing their own networks, so why would we ever allow them to have dominion over the civilian sector? It simply makes no sense whatsoever.

McCain then exploited the traditional free-market thinking in an attempt to make the American people think he is working for job creation and innovation, not instead to give the military as much control as possible.

“Additionally, if the legislation before us today were enacted into law, unelected bureaucrats at the DHS could promulgate prescriptive regulations on American businesses, which own roughly 90 percent of critical cyber infrastructure,” McCain said.

“The regulations that would be created under this new authority would stymie job creation, blur the definition of private property rights and divert resources from actual cybersecurity to compliance with government mandates. A super-regulator, like DHS under this bill, would impact free market forces, which currently allow our brightest minds to develop the most effective network security solutions,” he added.

McCain also claimed that making the DHS carry out the bill’s mandates would require growth of the agency which would thus cost more for the taxpayer, however, he failed to present evidence showing that the costs would be greater under the DHS or the NSA/military’s command.

Either option is unacceptable in my view, and this is one case where there is no lesser of two evils, really.

McCain claims that is legislation, which he plans to introduce soon, will be “fundamentally” different from the current bill.

He says that he will introduce it with other Republican senators including Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Charles Grassley of Iowa.

The fundamental difference seems to be essentially a rhetorical one, with McCain claiming that his legislation would create a collaborative relationship with businesses focusing on the sharing of information, whereas he characterizes the currently proposed bill as creating an adversarial relationship through regulations.

While the bill will not be introduced until the senators return from recess, it includes many more provisions than just increasing information sharing between the NSA/military and the private sector.

McCain claimed it will also act to reform the Federal Information Security Management Act, funnel more federal investments towards cybersecurity and even update the criminal code regarding cybercrime (likely increasing the penalties and punishments, one would assume).

All in all, this is really like choosing between chugging a glass of cyanide or having your head blown off with a 12 gauge shotgun. Either way, you’re screwed but if someone tried hard enough they might be able to convince you that one way is better than the other.

In my view, both of these proposed bills are wholly unacceptable and we should do everything to resist more power being put in the hands of criminal agencies like the DHS, NSA and the ever-more-powerful military.

The last thing we need is for the American people to be even more controlled by centralized agencies.
What do you think? Did I miss something? Want to tip me off to another story? Email me at Admin@EndtheLie.com with whatever information you have.

This article first appeared at EndtheLie.com. Read other contributed articles by Madison Ruppert here.

Madison Ruppert is the Editor and Owner-Operator of the alternative news and analysis database End The Lie and has no affiliation with any NGO, political party, economic school, or other organization/cause. He is available for podcast and radio interviews. Madison also now has his own radio show on Orion Talk Radio from 8 pm -- 10 pm Pacific, which you can find HERE. If you have questions, comments, or corrections feel free to contact him at admin@EndtheLie.com

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Revealed: US Government Program Secretly Injected Citizens with Plutonium, Uranium

2012-02-22T16:19:00.000-08:00

Anthony Gucciardi
Activist Post

In a secret program that is now admitted to be true, the United States government injected unknowing human ‘participants’ with highly toxic plutonium.

It sounds like a bizarre torture scenario that you’d expect to see blamed on illegal terror organizations, but the individuals behind this crime are actually doctors working for the United States government. Disregarding the health of innocent citizens, the government testers were eager to see how unknowing participants suffered as a result of secret plutonium injection.

It began in 1945, when an employee at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility was in a car accident. Ebb Cade survived, but was taken in as a human participant in a disturbing study he did not consent to.

It is important to note that this man was a fifty-three-year-old African American, as previous government trials have singled out African Americans and other minorities. The racist sterilization programs occurred between 1929 to 1974 under an admitted eugenics programs that officials claimed were ‘creating a better society’. Most victims were poor, black women who were ‘deemed unfit to be parents’. Individuals as young as 10 were sterilized simply for not getting along with schoolmates or being promiscuous, and many parents were misled into sterilizing their children.

Ebb Cade was taken and bound to a bed with a broken arm and leg, where doctors interviewed him regarding his current state of health. After determining he was in a state of proper health, doctors secretly injected him with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium on April 10th. It is still unknown who exactly ordered the program within the U.S. government, as they have managed to disassociate themselves with the entire nefarious program.

At the time of the injection, scientists were perfectly aware of the negative effects associated with radiation. With cancers and radiation sickness on the rise, these scientists knew exactly what they were doing — examining the effects of plutonium isotopes on living beings.

Prior to the tests on Cade, the scientists injected animals with plutonium and noted the severe adverse effects. In some cases, animals were even fed radioactive waste. In fact, one scientist received a face full of gas and required his stomach to be pumped along with a full face scrub in an attempt to eliminate the threat. The scientists made sure that they were given the full treatment after the exposure. Meanwhile, they were injecting individuals with plutonium.

Scientists took excretions from Cade over the next five days to see how much plutonium was retained in his body. They also refused to set his broken bones until April 15th, and cut samples from the bone before doing so to examine the plutonium content in his bone tissue. Fifteen of his teeth were pulled for testing.

After all of this, they never informed Cade what they were doing. One nurse said that the tortured Cade escaped in the middle of the night, and he was later found to die in 1953 of heart failure.

Sadly, Cade was not the last test experiment.

Three human experiments followed -- all were cancer patients seeking treatment. Instead of treatment, the patients were injected with deadly plutonium in order for government scientists to see the effects. A man in his sixties with lung cancer, a woman in her fifties with breast cancer, and a “young man” with Hodgkin’s lymphoma were all given the poison. Conveniently, the third patient’s records are not available. He was injected with fifteen times more than any other individual, at 95 micrograms.

What followed is further widespread testing. The University of Rochester joined the program, injecting patients with not only plutonium but radioactive isotopes like polonium and uranium. Other institutions like the University of California soon followed suit.

Perhaps most concerning is the fact that this disgusting disregard for human health is not an isolated incident. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is but one example of secret government human experiments that have run rampant throughout recent history. Taking place between 1932 and 1972, Tuskegee, Alabama, the U.S. Public Health Service knowingly infected poor black men with syphillis in order to test the effects. These men thought that they were receiving free healthcare by the U.S. government.

The list goes on with tests targeting minorities and the disabled in particular. From forced sterilizations to incognito injections, there is a lengthy history of government testing that shows the blatant disregard for your health by the United States government and elsewhere.

With this in mind, is it any wonder why the FDA keeps toxic substances like mercury unregulated among the food supply?

Explore More:

This article first appeared at Natural Society, an excellent resource for health news and vaccine information.

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Is The Federal Reserve Doing A Good Job?

2012-02-22T16:18:00.001-08:00

Dees Illustration

Michael Snyder, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Have you noticed that very few people in the mainstream media ever directly criticize the Federal Reserve? But why should that be the case? Criticizing top politicians from both major political parties has become a national pastime.

Most Americans love to throw mud at either the Republicans or the Democrats.

But we are told that the Federal Reserve is "above politics" and that it is absolutely vital that the Fed remain "independent". The reality is that the Federal Reserve has more control over the performance of the U.S. economy than the president even does, and yet most Americans never spend much time thinking about the Fed at all. It is almost as if someone has instructed us to "ignore the man behind the curtain," and most of us just blindly obey. With the economy in such a mess and with the national debt exploding so dramatically, isn't it about time that we had a national conversation about the performance of the Federal Reserve? Isn't it about time that we evaluated whether the Federal Reserve is doing a good job or not?

Today I came across a Bloomberg article that was full of endless praise for the secretive Jekyll Island conference in 1910 that developed the plan for the Federal Reserve system. The following is a very brief excerpt from that article:

Although it may seem shocking to watch the 112th Congress, there was a time when national leaders were swift and decisive in getting things done. In November 1910, in the space of less than two weeks, a group of government and business leaders fashioned a powerful new financial system that has survived a century, two world wars, a Great Depression and many recessions.

But has this "powerful new financial system" really performed well for the American people?

The Federal Reserve system has now been in place for about 100 years. That is certainly long enough to evaluate how well it has performed.

So has the Federal Reserve done a good job?

Well, one of the things that the Federal Reserve is charged with doing is to protect the value of our currency. In other words, they are supposed to keep inflation under control.

In that regard, the Federal Reserve has failed miserably. The U.S. dollar has lost 96.2 percent of its value since 1900, and almost 100 percent of that decline has come during the Federal Reserve era.

The other half of the Federal Reserve's "dual mandate" is to keep unemployment low.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Fed has failed there too.

In the United States today, there are less jobs than there were a decade ago even though we have added more than 30 million more people to the population since then.

The average duration of unemployment in the U.S. is about 40 weeks, and if you gathered together all of the unemployed people in America in one place, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.

So, no, the Federal Reserve is not doing a good job of keeping us all employed.

We are also told that the era before the Federal Reserve was created was a time when great "financial panics" happened on a regular basis and that the Federal Reserve was created to stop them from happening.

So has the Federal Reserve been effective at preventing financial panics?

Well, current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has openly admitted that the Federal Reserve helped cause the Great Depression of the 1930s. And there have been 10 separate economic recessions since 1950. So that is not a really great track record.

In addition, it seems very clear that the foolish low interest rate policies of the Fed fueled the massive housing bubble that plunged the U.S. economy into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression when it finally crashed.

Shouldn't the Federal Reserve receive some criticism for that?

Of course one of the biggest problems with the Federal Reserve is that it is a perpetual debt machine.

If you do not know where our money comes from in the United States, please see this article. The Federal Reserve system was designed to perpetually expand the money supply and to perpetually expand U.S. government debt. On both counts, it has performed brilliantly.

When the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. national debt was less than 3 billion dollars.
Today, it is more than 5000 times larger.

What is the appropriate word to use when something is 5000 times worse than it used to be?

When you simply look at performance, the truth is that it is really hard to deny that the Federal Reserve has been a complete and total nightmare for the United States.

But instead of shutting it down, Congress has been giving the Federal Reserve even more power. The Dodd-Frank bill gave the Fed significant new powers and substantial new responsibilities, and the Fed has been exercising those new powers in almost complete secrecy.

The following comes from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal:

While many Americans may not realize it, the Fed has taken on a much larger regulatory role than at any time in history. Since the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul became law in July 2010, the Fed has held 47 separate votes on financial regulations, and scores more are coming. In the process it is reshaping the U.S. financial industry by directing banks on how much capital they must hold, what kind of trading they can engage in and what kind of fees they can charge retailers on debit-card transactions.

The Fed is making these sweeping changes—the most dramatic since the Great Depression—almost completely without public meetings.

Does that sound very "democratic" to you?

Why should the Federal Reserve have more power over the economy than anyone else in America?

Why should the Federal Reserve be "above politics" and "above criticism"?

Unfortunately, central banking is one of the few things that almost every nation on earth can agree on.

Did you know that all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank?

Sadly, the vast majority of the people out there have no idea that central banking is just a giant money-making scam.

Central banks are allowed to create money out of thin air which is then lent to national governments. In turn, the citizens of those nations have to pay higher taxes in order to pay the interest on those debts.

Central banking is a way to systematically take wealth from the citizens of a nation and transfer it into the pockets of those that enjoy getting rich by lending money to governments.

When it comes to taking money out of the pockets of the American people, the Federal Reserve is definitely doing a good job.

Our entire economic system is based on debt, and such a system is inevitably going to fail eventually.

We need to shut down the Federal Reserve and quit using debt-based currency.

We need to educate the American people about where money comes from and about why central banking is so destructive.

Please share this article and other articles like it with as many people as you can.

Together, we can make significant difference.

This article first appeared here at the American Dream. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.

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Artificial Meat Not Without Health and Liberty Concerns

2012-02-22T16:18:00.000-08:00

test tube meat

Keelan Balderson, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Although news that scientists are beginning to develop artificial meat might be considered a step in the right direction for animal welfare, the concept is not without potential health and liberty concerns.

Debate aside about whether eating meat is right or wrong, the fact is people do eat a lot of meat, some 275 million tons in 2007 [1]. The problem, however, is people are eating a lot of bad meat…cows raised on unnatural corn, instead of grass; animals locked in dark cages and pumped with steroids, instead of wandering around in the grass or mud; cloned animals instead of nature's natural way. This has produced meat that is considerably higher in fat, considerably lower in nutrition, and an attitude considerably lacking in empathy.

A factory-farmed chicken in 2004 for example, contained more than twice as much fat as free range chicken in 1940 [2]. Farming has degenerated, not improved. On top of this we also have a food processing culture that takes this tortured sub-par meat and strips it even further of any healthy contents; mixing it with artificial flavors and preservatives, packing it with salt and sugar, until it’s no longer recognizable as the fresh food our grandparents once ate.

As the disastrous health effects of this frankenfood become more apparent, slowly we’re beginning to see a resurgence of good organic production methods. It’s a renaissance.

Whole Foods is booming in America and moving to the UK. Major supermarkets are being forced to offer organic free-range alternatives. Communities are having grass-fed beef and organic vegetable boxes delivered from local farms. Things are starting to feel natural again, and with innovation of sustainable farming, or, more accurately, fine tuning of farming to the ecosystem, there’s no need to destroy the earth.

Take the Polyface method [3], where the natural instincts and digestive needs of the animals are combined to create an efficient system where the cows eat the grass, then the chickens are moved in to scratch the dung and peck at the dropped grains and new grass sprouts, then their dung fertilizes the soil, and the pigs plow the soil in to fertile compost. All of it in tune with nature.

Enter lab-grown meat.

At this stage there are two main concerns with the introduction of meat grown in a laboratory. Firstly, for the foreseeable future it’s not likely to ever look, taste or contain the same level of nutrition as a normal joint of grass fed beef for example. It’s not a natural product. This means if it is to be profitable for the corporations, it’s going to have to be artificially enhanced in some way. This would include adding processed garbage like MSG; a neuro-toxin linked to a myriad of health problems [4].

The BBC reports how the thin strips of white muscle, grown from bovine fetus stem cells, “will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.[5]

Yay, burgers to save the world food problem!

It’s hardly the miracle they’re touting it to be.

Looking through the eyes of a cynic, it will probably just end up being a nice mush they can sell to McDonald's, putting real farmers out of business in the process.

While this may reduce the need for innocent cows to live a life of torture, it’s not necessarily going to benefit humanity in any way.

Secondly, the pretexts used to promote this “meat” are still themselves under contention.

Firstly, is the global food crisis. The implication being that we need to grow frankenburgers to feed the world. The trouble with the food crisis term is that it doesn’t really get to the root of the issue. There isn’t a food shortage, or a lack of land to cultivate crops; the issue is that developing countries don’t have food sovereignty…in other words the right to grow and manage their own food.

As explained by Human Rights Organization Africa Action:

What is most appalling is the fact that there is not a food shortage in the world. On the contrary, there was record cereal production in developed countries in 2008, as output was increased by 10%; on the other hand, developing countries barely registered a 1% increase. The prices of fertilizer have doubled and even tripled, making it too expensive for local farmers to grow high-yielding crops. As Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen observed, 'starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food.'

The current global food crisis has been variously attributed to natural disasters in major wheat-producing countries, food speculators, low grain reserves, high oil prices, more consumption in developing countries per capita, unfair trade barriers for developing countries, the high price of oil and the diversion of food items (such as corn or other cereals) to agro-fuel production.

While many factors have contributed to the most recent and visible episodes of mass hunger, at a global level, the situation represents a failure of the international economic system to allow Africa countries to achieve food sovereignty. According to the Declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty, food sovereignty is the 'right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.'

Instead of allowing markets and corporations to determine food prices and access, food sovereignty puts local producers, consumers and distributors at the center of food policies and systems. Food sovereignty means that a country’s citizens ensure that they have enough food and surplus to feed their nation based on their own efforts.

Food sovereignty operates under the premise that access to food is a basic human right and that there is no justification to be starving in the world today. Food sovereignty also has positive environmental implications as it steers production from large-scale industrial farming to smaller, more sustainable methods. This approach emphasizes the empowerment of women, local markets and the community.

Corporations control the world food market, causing great inequality; and now the corporations want to come in and offer unnatural solutions that will further benefit the corporations. The likes of Monsanto and Bill Gates are not friends of the Third World; they act as an apologist-facade for the Western elite, and line their own pockets for doing so. If these nations were given food sovereignty they could up their quality of life independently and would reduce their populations naturally. Instead, Bill Gates is ready with his vaccines, and Monsanto are on standby with their GMO seeds.

Gates, who wants to reduce the world’s population because Humans = CO2 [6], among other reasons, is a large investor in the GMO-producing juggernaut [7]. He claims Monsanto is needed to feed the world’s poor. And while the corporate media present him as some kind of savior, they fail to acknowledge that Monsanto is really a cutthroat monopoly that is patenting nature and actually bankrupting farmers in developing nations – even leading to mass suicide [8].

“Companies like Monsanto keep arguing that genetic modification will feed the world, but that is specious,” argues Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist at Yale University. “The financial benefits from genetic modification will flow mostly to the very largest agricultural producers, putting local agricultural economies at a tremendous disadvantage. That is really the central issue here.”[9] The poor can feed themselves if given the opportunity, there’s no need for them to be indebted to multi-nationals.

The next pretext is climate change. This new lab-grown meat is being touted as a way to reduce the emissions used to farm traditionally and in modern factory systems. The trouble with this is that AGW is still a contested theory that’s showing itself to be a mechanism for collectivist state and corporate control. In order to save the planet we’re being told to support global carbon taxes -- a state of arrested-development in the developing world, who are being pressured into "going green" before industrializing -- and the micro-management of our lives.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility to imagine a society where we’re forced to consume poor quality lab-grown meat, produced by a Monsanto-like monopoly and backed by loving Liberals like Bill Gates to allegedly reduce CO2 and to feed the poor – both deceptions. In fact an “anonymous and extremely wealthy benefactor who is a household name with a reputation for ‘turning everything into gold’,”[10] is backing the research in to laboratory meat. It seems like this would be right up Gates’ alley. If it’s not him, then there any number of other so-called philanthropists looking for a business opportunity that gives them a good PR image.

Before we jump for the Soylent Green, don’t write mother nature off. There’s a real chance that true sustainable, natural and organic living could hit the mainstream. Lets not stymie this potential by walking off the cliff in to corporately controlled frankenfood.

If developing nations are given back their food sovereignty, and if those in the West grow their own food and support local farmers, there will be more than enough for everyone.

It’s time to choose the path of natural sovereign freedom, not artificial controlled tyranny.

Keelan Balderson is an independent journalist, documentary filmmaker and Internet radio host from the UK. You can listen to his WideShut Webcast every Monday at 8pm GMT on Resistance Radio. Please support his work by visiting his website: WideShut.co.uk.

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White House blocking release of Monsanto-linked lobbyist’s email

2012-02-22T16:04:00.002-08:00

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

The Obama administration is now blocking a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by an environmental group, Public Employees for Environment Responsibility (PEER), which is attempting to uncover Obama’s connections to Monsanto-linked lobbyists.

Keep in mind, Monsanto’s products have been linked to some horrific effects on biological systems like the human body, not the least of which is creating necrosis and significant mutations in critical cell types.

Also quite noteworthy is the fact that Monsanto was actually recently found guilty of chemical poisoning in the case of a French farmer.

The group suspects the Obama White House of working with these lobbyists to defend genetically engineered (GE) crops and the attempts to get these GE crops planted in wildlife refuges across the United States.

Part of the information which is currently being withheld by the Obama administration is part of an email from January 2011 from a lobbyist to a top White House policy analyst.

This lobbyist was with the Biotechnology Industry Organization, or BIO, which regularly represents the interests of companies specializing in GE seeds like Syngenta and the infamous multinational giant Monsanto.

The White House claims that they had to block portions of the email because it contained information on BIO’s lobbying strategy.

They claimed that if this strategy was released, it could cause damage to the group’s competitiveness and those of the companies it represents.

“We suspect the reason an industry lobbyist so cavalierly shared strategy is that the White House is part of that strategy,” said Kathryn Douglass, the staff counsel for PEER.

Douglass is arguing that the email should be public record, adding, “The White House’s legal posture is as credible as claiming Coca Cola’s secret formula was ‘inadvertently’ left in a duffel bag at the bus station.”

PEER has been doing phenomenal work exposing the connections between our government and BIO lobbyists, including the release of internal emails last July.

The email release revealed that Peter Schmeissner, a senior science policy analyst and member of the biotechnology working group at the White House, actually had been corresponding with a BIO lobbyist about one of PEER’s legal challenges.

The lawsuit, filed by PEER and their allied groups, was quite successful in that it halted the planting of GE crops within the wildlife refuges across northeastern states.

PEER has obviously not given up and they continue to fight the planned plantings of GE crops across the nation.

In some of the emails obtained by PEER from 2010, it was found that Adrianne Massey, a biotechnology lobbyist for quite a while, asked Schmeissner if the “interagency working group” is addressing the legal challenges put forth by PEER.

In addition, Massey forwarded some of the environmental assessments of the proposed GE crop plots at other wildlife refuges across the United States. These assessments could supposedly protect GE crop plots in wildlife refuges from further legal challenges in the future.

The emails obtained by PEER spurred them to seek out information on the “interagency working group” referred to by Massey which is known as the White House Agricultural and Biotechnology Working Group via FOIA request.

The group boasts high-level officials from most of the Obama administration’s agencies that deal with agriculture and trade, even the State Department, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to PEER.

These discoveries have led PEER to file a lawsuit against the White House in an attempt to get the information which was withheld from their FOIA requests.

This would include not only the Massey email in question but the White House Agricultural and Biotechnology Working Group’s schedule, the items on their agenda and their work related to GE crops in general.

An attorney for BIO filed an affidavit which claims that the withheld portions of Massey’s email contain “mistakenly” forwarded trade secrets.

“BIO operates in an advocacy environment in which there are many organizations that oppose the use of biotechnology, particularly in the agricultural arena, and that seek to persuade federal, state and local agencies to restrict the technology’s use. If this information were released, competitors could imitate or seek to counteract BIO’s strategy and further their own contrary agendas at the expense of BIO and its members,” the attorney wrote.

The White House is also claiming that they withheld the information according to current disclosure law, but PEER isn’t buying it, and likely rightly so.

Jeff Ruch, PEER’s Director told Truth-Out that he believes that the withheld Massey email actually has the details of a concerted effort being made by BIO lobbyists to have the White House help make sure that the environmental assessments of the GE crops on wildlife refuges are so strong that they cannot be challenged on a legal basis in the future.

This is because groups like PEER regularly challenge the legally required environmental assessments in order to hold up projects like planting GE crops on wildlife refuges in court.

Deborah Rocque, an official with the United States Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS), claimed last year that the FWS had actually been allowing farming on refuges for years.

Rocque /1307539754" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">claims this is part of habitat restoration efforts and that the planting of herbicide-resistant GE crops would actually allow conservationists to grow ground cover while still killing unwanted weeds with herbicidal products.

However, even classifying these types of crops as “herbicide-resistant” is misleading, because in the case of “Roundup Ready” crops produced by Monsanto the crops actually still absorb all of the incredibly harmful Roundup but instead of dying, these crops are genetically engineered to be able to survive the herbicide.

This means that if these products are moved into the food supply, there are trace amounts of Roundup which actually make it to the dinner table.

The mere presence of herbicides in the environment is something that any true conservationist would avoid like the plague, so Rocque’s statement is laughably nonsensical.

PEER seems to realize the ulterior motive behind the effort to plant GE crops on wildlife refuges, which they see as an attempt by the Obama administration to boost exports of the crops.

While European countries remain relatively skeptical about the safety of genetically modified (GM) foods and some other countries have actually banned certain seeds, the United States government shares none of these concerns.

PEER says that the White House and its working group is trying to give trade partners the impression that the United States government thinks GE crops are so environmentally safe that they can even be planted on wildlife reserves.

Such a vote of confidence could increase the willingness of trade partners to import the GE crops, which have quite a long list of potential hazards associated with their use.

Truth-Out has been doing one of the best jobs of keeping track of the United States’ efforts to pressure foreign nations into accepting exports and GE crops, including countries like France and Spain.

Through the release of some WikiLeaks cables, it was found that essentially United States diplomats were working for companies like Monsanto by going around the world promoting their GE products.

The first legal challenge relating to the planting of GE crops on wildlife reserves came after PEER was contacted by biologists with the FWS who were opposed to the planting of GE crops on said reserves.

Later, PEER actually received an internal email which they believe shows that Tom Vilsack, Secretary of the USDA, actually was pressuring FWS to support GE crops.

In the email, dated January 14, 2011, David Hayes, the Interior Department Deputy Secretary, relayed to some of the top Interior Department and FWS officials that, “Apparently Vilsack is somewhat exercised that the Administration is not being consistent in supporting genetically modified crops.”

Of course when asked about this high-level pressure, Rocque claimed that she was completely unaware of any internal pressure coming from the upper levels of the Obama administration.

This is just more of the “I do not recall” plausible deniability nonsense.

Hopefully PEER’s legal challenges will be treated in a just manner and we will be able to get an accurate glimpse in the world of corporatism which is so egregiously damaging our nation.

The case of Monsanto and the American diplomats promotion of their products is just about the most perfect example of how corrupt our so-called government has really become.

Have something to add? Want to tip me off to another story? Email me at Admin@EndtheLie.com with the details!

This article first appeared at EndtheLie.com. Read other contributed articles by Madison Ruppert here.

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Iran Told it Must Open Military Base to Inspection; Why All Weapon Claims Are Baseless

2012-02-22T15:43:00.004-08:00

Keelan Balderson, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

The hypocrisy over Iran’s nuclear energy program continues today after IAEA officials were refused access to a military base in Parchin, where the West and Israel claim Iran is secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.

“It is disappointing that Iran did not accept our request to visit Parchin during the first or second meetings,” IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said in a statement today. “We engaged in a constructive spirit, but no agreement was reached.” The media and bizarrely the IAEA itself have ignored the fact that inspectors have already been to the site before, and found nothing.

Although it’s difficult for many in the West to get their heads around due to years of sensational headlines, the very concept of Iran building nuclear weapons is unfounded speculation, compounded by wild accusations and window-dressed intelligence by biased nations with ulterior motives. Why should Iran grant Western backed officials the right to gallivant around their country and snoop at military installations? Is Iran allowed to send officials to snoop around American military sites? Does the UN get to roll into Israel’s illegal nuclear facilities?

How exactly do we take an organization like the IAEA seriously, when it’s being pressured by a nuclear state that isn’t even a member of the Nuclear non-Proliferation treaty (Israel), and America, who has used nuclear weapons in the past and is involved militarily in hundreds of nations across the world [1]?

Iran is not a nation whose history is littered with covert operations, coups d'état, and illegal wars of aggression and mass murder.

Nor is it a country that obliterated hundreds of thousands of people and flattened an entire city like America did to Japan during WWII, or a nation that has a policy to use nuclear weapons in the future like Israel and its Samson Option [2]; a plan to go out all nukes blazing if significantly attacked itself.

The hysteria over the Parchin military complex is much ado about nothing. It’s not an evil James Bond villain hideout where Ahmadinejad sits stroking a cat. It has been well established for years as a testing ground for liquid-propellant engines and Ballistic missiles. The Russian and US intelligence community have been keeping tabs on the site since at least 1997 [3], and there’s absolutely no evidence that it suddenly, somehow morphed, without anybody noticing, in to a nuclear bomb factory.

According to the media, aerial photos show an evil bus-sized steel container [4], that they say may or may not have been there the whole time, and that may or may not be capable or playing a role in testing material related to a nuclear weapon. Although they assured us this would be documented in the coming IAEA report, the only report released was a 25-page summary with none of the photos [5].
Images shown by the media are not adequately labeled to know what we’re even looking at, and appear to be taken from Google Earth for visual stimulation rather than anything scientific.

Harretz’s Inside Look makes things very clear…not!

Although Iran says the the container is simply a toilet block [6], if we go along with the talking heads and assume it is some kind of testing tank, the IAEA report admits that it’s not direct evidence of a nuclear weapons program, and it may just be used for regular high explosives testing – the kind the complex has been conducting since 1997.

Where’s the evidence of warheads? Where’s the evidence of trucks shipping in uranium? If there was evidence of trucks shipping in uranium (which there isn’t) it would only be enriched to 20% as documented by the IAEA, which is some 70% short of the grade needed to develop a nuclear weapon.

If we play Devil’s advocate and make the baseless jump that it is testing nuclear material, does it look to be at any significant level? Where’s the fallout? Where are the radioactive craters in the desert? If it’s underground, hidden below the toilets, where’s the seismic activity?

To reiterate what the media clearly states, this is a bus-sized steel container. What exactly do you think they can be testing that is such a threat, from inside what amounts to a tin can?

Former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley agrees that the claim is crazy. “We’ve been led by the nose to believe that this container is important, when in fact it’s not important at all,” the ex-chief weapons inspector in Iraq told the Real News Network [7]. “You have to be crazy to do hydrodynamic explosives in a container,” he said. “There’s no reason to do it. They’re done outdoors on firing tables.”

The IAEA report notes that a foreign scientist helped develop the steel container. The media has universally fingered Russian, Vyacheslav Danilenko as that scientist. Danilenko on the other hand is having none of it. “I am not a nuclear physicist and am not the founder of the Iranian nuclear program,” he declared [8]. And it’s quite well established that he’s telling the truth.

Danilenko is in fact a world-renowned pioneer in the production of nanodiamonds, and has worked in this field his entire career according to all available documentation. CounterPunch notes [9]:

It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright, the director of the International Institute for Science and Security in Washington, who was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed 'Member State' on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background…The unnamed member state that informed the agency about Danilenko’s alleged experience as a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist is almost certainly Israel, which has been the source of virtually all the purported intelligence on Iranian work on nuclear weapons over the past decade.

Worryingly, there is no indication that the IAEA have done any independent verification on the matter. The entire report is based on intelligence from these unnamed UN member states. The equivalent of Chinese whispers.

However if we still play Devil’s advocate and assume that they are testing something, wouldn’t it actually be wise to test for the effects of a nuclear explosion? Considering there are several war-mongering countries in the world that do posses nuclear weapons, it would be in Iran’s best interest to learn how to protect itself from such attacks. Equally, since it has a nuclear power program wouldn’t it be forward thinking of them to do nuclear tests in case of a meltdown, bombing campaign against their reactors, or a natural disaster like Fukushima? There’s an endless list of non-weapon applications for handling and testing nuclear-related material. High schools and universities regularly carry out nuclear experiments. Is Iran somehow barred from pursuing scientific endeavor?

So why doesn’t Iran just let the IAEA in and be done with it?

They already did!

Even though Iran is under no obligation to allow inspectors to assess military bases under the Nuclear-Non-Proliferation Treaty (which Israel never signed up to), it opened its doors regardless, on January 13, 2005 after Bush began beating the war drum. The IAEA’s February 2006 report notes:

The Agency did not observe any unusual activities in the buildings visited, and the results of the analysis of environmental samples did not indicate the presence of nuclear material at those locations.[10]

The Mysterious Laptop:

The second main accusation, paraded throughout the media as evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapon intent, are documents alleging to show graphs and simulations relating to nuclear warhead design. The smoking gun, however, that these are crude fabrications is that the documents are written in English!
Ask yourself this: If Iran is conducting a secret nuclear weapons program would it really produce documents in a non-native language?

Nonproliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis of the New America Foundation noted how the documents were “utterly unconnected from reality.”

“Some of the reports indicated that some of the view graphs were done in PowerPoint, which suggested to me that the program was not terribly sophisticated,” he concluded [11].

Nobel Peace Prize winner and former head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, also saw through the propaganda. “I do not believe that the Iranians are actually producing nuclear weapons”, he said in 2010 [12]. “[The NPT] lost its legitimacy in the eyes of Arab public opinion because of the perceived double standard [with Israel].”[13]

As reported by the New York Times, in July 2005, the Bush administration briefed ElBaradei on the contents of the laptop, although experts weren’t convinced.

The session on July 18 on the top floor of the American mission in Vienna was a meeting of former rivals. Before the Iraq war, Dr. ElBaradei had attracted the wrath of the Bush administration by declaring that his agency had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program. And the administration had tried to oust Dr. ElBaradei, an Egyptian, from his post, partly because they found him insufficiently tough on Iran.

Assessing just how far the Iranians have gone from plan to product is difficult. 'It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that beautiful pictures represent reality,' a senior intelligence official said. 'But that may not be the case.'

Although ElBaradei has been vindicated on Iraq, he was still ousted from the IAEA, in what appears to be be a complete repeat of the Iraq deception with Iran.

“The idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far,” said ElBaradei before his departure in 2009 [14].

The laptop was not something discovered independently by inspectors. German officials identified the source in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK) [15], an Iranian terrorist opposition group with a clear motive to play a role in fabricating the evidence. It has since been established that the MEK work hand-in-hand with Israel’s Mossad. Quoting US officials, NBC says the group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.”[16]

How can this laptop have any credibility without something more tangible to back it up?

Iranian Nuclear Timeline:[17]

1957 - The United States and Iran signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement as part of the United States Atoms for Peace program. The agreement provided for U.S. technical assistance and the lease of enriched uranium to Iran. It also called for research cooperation on peaceful nuclear energy uses.

1967 - November – The Tehran Nuclear Research Center, supplied by the United States, opened. It was equipped with a 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor called the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), fueled by highly enriched uranium.

1968 July 1 – Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Parliament ratified it in February 1970. Uranium enrichment was allowed under the treaty.

1974 May 15 – Iran signed the NPT’s Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The safeguards allowed inspections for the purpose of verifying that nuclear enrichment for peaceful nuclear energy is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

November – West German company Kraftwerk Union, a subsidiary of Siemens, agreed to construct two 1,200-megawatt light water reactors to produce nuclear energy at Bushehr. Construction began in August 1975, but the formal contract was not signed until mid-1976.

1975 The Ford administration expressed support in principle for the shah’s plan to develop a full-fledged nuclear power program to diversify Iran’s energy sources. The shah wanted the capacity to generate 23,000 megawatts of electricity with the ability to reprocess U.S.-supplied fuel.

1976 April 20 – President Gerald Ford issued National Security Decision Memorandum 324 supporting the shah’s ambitions and helping Iran formulate a plan to build 23 nuclear power reactors. But the administration refused to allow Iran to have the independent reprocessing capabilities sought by the shah. Ford’s memorandum instead approved a multinational reprocessing plant in Iran that would also enable the United States to participate in the project. Iran rejected the multinational option and pushed for a comprehensive national nuclear program.

1977 August – President Carter reopened negotiations on the shah’s quest for a nuclear energy program.

1978 January – Iran and the United States initialed a nuclear agreement in which Iran agreed to safeguards beyond NPT requirements. In return, the United States granted Iran “most favored nation” status for reprocessing so that Iran would not be discriminated against when seeking permission to reprocess U.S.-supplied fuel.

1979 After the 1979 revolution, the United States stopped supplying highly enriched uranium for the Tehran Research Reactor.

July 31 – Kraftwerk Union terminated work on the Bushehr reactor when Iran failed to make payments.

1984 February – German engineers returned to Iran to do a feasibility study to complete the Bushehr reactor.

March 24 – Iraq’s attack on the Bushehr nuclear power plant did serious damage.
December – Iran opened a nuclear research center at Isfahan with China’s assistance. In 1985, China supplied the center with a “training reactor.”

1987 May 5 – After 18 months of negotiations, Argentina concluded a $5.5 million deal with Tehran to supply a new core for the Tehran Research Reactor so it would operate with only 20 percent enriched uranium, instead of the previous 90 percent. In 1989, Argentina replaced the core. In 1993, Argentina delivered around 50 pounds of 20 percent enriched uranium to fuel the reactor.

1990 Oct. 9 – Iran decided to rebuild the damaged Bushehr nuclear power plant.

1992 Aug. 25 – Russia and Iran signed a cooperation agreement on the civil use of nuclear energy, including construction of a nuclear power plant.

1995 January –Iran signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy to build a light water reactor at Bushehr under IAEA safeguards. Russia was under a contractual obligation to complete the plant within 55 months. The project’s completion was delayed until August 2010.

1997 May – The IAEA expanded the Safeguards Agreement by adopting the Additional Protocol. Under the latter, inspectors would be allowed to conduct short notice inspections and be provided with multiple entry/exit visas. Iran signed the Additional Protocol in 2003, but had not ratified it as of 2010.

1998 Feb. 23 – The Clinton administration opposed Iran’s nuclear energy program on grounds that Iran had sufficient oil and gas reserves for power and that work on the nuclear power reactor could indirectly contribute to a weapons program.

March 6 – Under U.S. pressure, Ukraine announced that it would not sell two turbines for use at the Bushehr reactor.

1999 May 7 – Russia said Iran wanted to expand nuclear cooperation, potentially including the building of a second nuclear power plant.

May 19 – President Mohammad Khatami paid a five-day state visit to Saudi Arabia, where Iran and Saudi Arabia issued a joint statement expressing support for turning the Middle East into a zone free of weapons of mass destruction. They said Israel’s production and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, along with its non-compliance with international laws and treaties, posed a serious threat to peace and security in the region.

2000 March 14 – President Clinton signed the Iran Nonproliferation Act, which allowed the United States to sanction individuals and organizations providing material aid to Iran’s nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile weapons programs.

2001 March 12-15 – Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Khatami signed nuclear and military cooperation accords. Khatami said Iran wanted a second nuclear power plant after the completion of Bushehr.

2002 Jan. 8 – Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said, “Iran is not seeking to arm itself with non-conventional weapons.”

Aug. 15 – The National Council of Resistance of Iran, an exiled opposition group, revealed that Iran was building two secret nuclear sites – a uranium enrichment plant and research lab at Natanz and a heavy water production plant in Arak. President Khatami acknowledged the existence of Natanz and other facilities on Iran’s state-run television and invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit them.

Sept. 1 – Russian technicians began to assemble heavy equipment in the Bushehr reactor, despite U.S. attempts to convince the Russians not to participate. But the plant faced frequent delays in construction.

2003 Feb. 9 – President Khatami said Iran had discovered and extracted uranium in the Savand area. He cited Iran’s “legitimate right to obtain nuclear energy for peaceful aims” and expressed readiness to accept international inspections of its nuclear activities.

May 6 – Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization presented the United Nations with a sketch of Iran’s nuclear program, insisting that the program was peaceful.

May 17 – Tehran backed a proposal by Syria to rid the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction.

June 19 – An IAEA report did not find Iran in violation of the NPT but said Iran should have been more forthcoming about the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the Arak heavy water production plant. The U.N. watchdog agency later urged Iran to sign and ratify the Additional Protocol to the Safeguards Agreement of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would allow inspectors more access to nuclear sites and the right to sudden inspections.

Aug. 26 – IAEA inspectors found traces of highly enriched uranium at Iran’s Natanz nuclear plant. Iran claimed the traces came from equipment imported from another country.

Sept. 19 – President Khatami said, “We don’t need atomic bombs, and based on our religious teaching, we will not pursue them…but at the same time, we want to be strong, and being strong means having knowledge and technology.”

Sept. 25 – U.N. weapons inspectors found traces of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium at a second site near the capital city of Tehran. The IAEA set a deadline of Oct. 31 for Iran to prove it was not making nuclear weapons.

Oct. 21 – In talks with Britain, France and Germany (EU-3), Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and processing activities and to open nuclear sites to unannounced inspections by the U.N. watchdog agency. It also agreed to sign the Additional Protocols of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

Oct. 24 – 1,500 Iranian protestors gathered in Tehran to denounce the recently concluded agreement between Tehran and the EU-3.

Nov. 12 – The IAEA concluded there was no evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program in Iran but showed concern about its production of plutonium. President Khatami said that the plutonium was used for manufacturing pharmaceuticals and the small amount produced by Iran could not make a nuclear bomb.

Dec. 18 – Tehran signed the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Safeguards Agreement. The Additional Protocol granted IAEA inspectors greater authority in their nuclear verification programs. Since then, Iran has at times voluntarily allowed more intrusive inspections, but the Iranian parliament has not yet ratified the Additional Protocol.

2004 Feb. 22 – Iran acknowledged having secretly bought nuclear parts from international sources, although Tehran continued to insist that its goal was electricity production and not nuclear weapons.

Apr. 7 – Iran declared its plans to construct a heavy water reactor to produce radioisotopes for medical research. Western envoys warned that the facility could reprocess the spent fuel rods to produce plutonium.

Aug. 28 – President Khatami said Iran had a right to enrich uranium and was willing to provide guarantees to the IAEA that it was not developing nuclear weapons.

Oct. 6 – Tehran announced that it had produced tons of the hexafluoride gas needed to enrich uranium by converting a few tons of yellowcake uranium.

Nov. 14 – In negotiations with Britain, France and Germany, Iran accepted the Paris accord, which recognized Tehran’s rights to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and reaffirmed Iran’s commitment not to acquire nuclear weapons. In exchange, Iran voluntarily agreed to temporarily suspend uranium enrichment activities and allow the IAEA to monitor the suspension.

Nov. 15 – The IAEA reported that it had not found any evidence that Iran had tried to develop nuclear weapons, although it could not rule out the existence of nuclear materials that had not been declared.

Nov. 22 – Iran invited the IAEA to monitor the suspension of all enrichment-related activities.

Nov. 30 – Iran said that it had not abandoned its right to enrich uranium and that the suspension was only temporary. European officials hoped to make the suspension permanent in return for trade deals and other incentives.

Dec. 22 – Iran’s intelligence minister announced the arrest of more than 10 people on spying charges. Tehran charged the spies were passing sensitive information on Iran’s nuclear program to the Israeli Mossad and the CIA.

2005 Jan. 13 – IAEA inspectors were only allowed partial access to the Parchin military base near Tehran. Under the NPT, Iran was not required to allow inspectors into its military bases. But the Bush administration consistently expressed concern that Iran’s failure to allow full access to its suspected military bases and facilities was linked to a secret nuclear weapons program.

Jan. 17 – President Bush said military action against Iran remained an option, “if it continues to stonewall the international community about the existence of its nuclear weapons program.”

Feb. 7 – Iran’s Minister of Defense Ali Shamkhani said in an interview that it was not in Iran’s national interest to acquire nuclear weapons.

Feb. 28 – Tehran and Moscow signed an agreement that stipulated that Russia would supply nuclear fuel for the Bushehr facility and that Iran would return all spent fuel rods to Russia to ensure the fuel was not diverted for other use.

May 15 – Iran’s parliament approved a non-binding resolution urging the government to resume uranium enrichment for peaceful use.

Aug. 1 – Iran informed the IAEA that it had decided to resume activities at the Isfahan uranium conversion center. The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency urged Iran not to take any action that would prejudice negotiations with Britain, France and Germany (the EU-3) or undermine the IAEA inspection process.

Aug. 5 – Britain, France and Germany (the EU-3) proposed the “Framework for a Long-term Agreement” to Iran. The deal offered assistance in developing peaceful nuclear energy in exchange for a binding commitment that Iran would not to pursue fuel cycle activities other than for light water power and research reactors. It also called for a halt on construction of a heavy water research reactor at Arak. Iran rejected the proposal, as it required Tehran to abandon all nuclear fuel work.

Aug. 8 – Iran resumed uranium conversion at the Isfahan facility under surveillance of the IAEA.

Aug. 9 – Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the “production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.”

Aug. 11 –The IAEA urged Iran to suspend all enrichment activities and re-instate IAEA seals.

Sept. 24 –The IAEA found Iran in noncompliance with the NPT Safeguards Agreement and decided to refer Tehran to the U.N. Security Council for further action. The decision followed Iran’s repeated failure to fully report its nuclear activities.

However with the assistance of Pakistan a group of US government experts and international scientists concluded that traces of bomb-grade uranium found in Iran came from contaminated Pakistani equipment and were not evidence of a clandestine nuclear weapons program in Iran.[18]

IAEA Director General Mohammad ElBaradei reported that “most” highly enriched uranium traces found in Iran by agency inspectors came from imported centrifuge components, validating Iran’s claim that the traces were due to contamination. Sources in Vienna and the State Department reportedly stated that, for all practical purposes, the HEU issue has been resolved.

Nov. 20 –Iran’s parliament approved a bill requiring the government to stop voluntary implementation of the Safeguards Agreement’s separate Additional Protocol, which allowed more intrusive and surprise inspections, if Iran were referred to the Security Council. The parliament did not move to block normal inspections required under the Safeguards Agreement, which had been ratified by parliament in 1974.

2006 January – Iran broke open internationally monitored seals on the Natanz enrichment facility and at two related storage and testing locations, which cleared the way to resume nuclear fuel research under IAEA supervision.

Feb. 4 – The IAEA voted to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for its non-compliance with its NPT Safeguards Agreement obligations.

July 31 – The U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1696 demanding that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment activities within one month. No sanctions were imposed but the resolution warned that “appropriate measures” would be taken in the case of Iranian non-compliance. Tehran called the resolution illegal.

Aug. 26 – Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated a heavy water production plant at Arak. The United States expressed concern that the heavy water would be used in the heavy water reactor at Arak to produce plutonium, an ingredient in making nuclear weapons.

Oct. 2 – President Bush signed into law the Iran Freedom Support Act, which imposed economic sanctions on nations and companies that aided Iran’s nuclear program.
…From that point on sanctions and media spin took over.

After decades of cooperation with the IAEA, at times going above and beyond what was even required, on a nuclear energy program initially created with the help of the US, the mainstream media still paint a picture like Iran is the bad guy and playing hardball. Are they to keep letting inspectors in until they find another tin can somewhere that the media can spin? There’s something called national sovereignty, the West ought to learn to respect it.

Something also worth considering is the likelihood of any nation ever using a nuke again. In the current geopolitical situation Iran nuking Israel or the West is just going to get them obliterated one way or another. What’s the point? In fact if they were credibly pursuing nuclear weapons, it would be all over the media and they’d find themselves invaded in a heartbeat. Instead the West and Israel have to slowly build up a web of lies before action can be taken.

And if the West and Israel ever considered using a nuclear weapon against the Middle-East and they truly believed Iran had a secret nuke, it would cause a stalemate, because they know Iran would fire back. Nobody is ever going to use one.

In reality the whole nuclear debate itself is just a facade to placate the public. The Israeli linked Neo-Conservative agenda of Full Spectrum Dominance, as outlined by General Wesley Clark, was always about taking over the Middle-East for the benefit of the West and Israel. Everything else is just propaganda to suit this end.

The Bush administration had signed off on a war with Afghanistan even prior to 9/11 [19]. We were then told Bin Laden orchestrated the attacks and was hiding in the region. Rumsfeld showed detailed diagrams of comic-book style bunker complexes, carved in to the mountains.

None of these were ever found and no evidence was ever presented of Bin Laden’s involvement, beyond an alleged “confession tape” that was exposed as a gross and no doubt deliberate mistranslation on German television [20], that wasn’t enough for the FBI to list 9/11 as one of Bin Laden’s crimes [21].

We were told Iraq had WMDs, and were presented with similar aerial photos as proof [22]. Documents and “intelligence” claimed warheads that could destroy the West and Israel could be ready within 45 minutes [23], yet Saddam didn’t think to use them when US planes were approaching his airspace for the invasion. It was soon revealed that it was all lies. There were no WMDs, and the intelligence was “sexed-up” [24], which itself was a massive understatement.

The crux of the Iranian nuclear argument comes down to “Iran could develop a nuclear weapon at some point in the distant future. We don’t really have any solid evidence but lets bomb them anyway”. Well pigs could fly tomorrow, and the West could invade another sovereign nation based on lies to pillage resources for the corporations and to continue the New World Order. I know what the most likely scenario is, and it has nothing to do with Iran getting nukes!

This article first appeared at Wide Shut.

Keelan Balderson is an independent journalist, documentary filmmaker and Internet radio host from the UK. You can listen to his WideShut Webcast every Monday at 8pm GMT on Resistance Radio. Please support his work by visiting his website: WideShut.co.uk.

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One Too Many In The Cuckoo's Nest -- Shock Therapy Still Used to Control Behavior

2012-02-22T11:55:00.000-08:00

Heather Callaghan
Activist Post

Did you know that electroshock therapy is still a common practice? It's true that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) nearly died out after Jack Nicholson's performance in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and the major influx of psychotropic drugs beginning around the '60s.

But just as ECT was going extinct its use picked up in the '90s and continued to grow exponentially. As of 1998, the ECT treatments numbered 100,000, approximately twice the number of tonsillectomies that year, and continues at that rate.

The Judge Rotenburg Institute is under fire once again for its improper use of aversive shock therapy; the use of shock to dissuade certain behaviors.

Young disabled Andre was called into a room after hitting one of the staff members. He was shocked once for punishment, then tied down to a restraint board and left in the room for seven hours with no food, water, or bathroom breaks. The shocks were set to zap whenever he yelled out or tensed up -- he was shocked 31 times. He was responsive enough to beg his mother for help when she arrived, but went into a comatose state for three days until requiring immediate hospitalization. Rotenburg holds that this is therapy.

Andre's mother is imploring that the video be allowed for public view so that people can see that this particular incident, and other electroshock treatments, are an act of torture. Rotenburg sought a court order to keep the video hidden during investigation. Last year, they were caught erasing crucial video evidence during another investigation. They are also responsible for the deaths of five children and numerous lawsuits.

More details from this disturbing story can be found in the video below.

Proponents of ECT call it a safe therapy and life-saving measure -- there are ECT patients who have reported good results. Memory loss, however, in varying degrees, is the most commonly reported side effect whether the jolts work or not.

Little-known fact: Ernest Hemingway did not shoot himself due to alcoholism, although it may have been a contributing factor. His suicide followed ECT after it erased a major portion of his memory. He said the memory loss was “ruining his head” and “putting himself out of business."

Other information:

Rotenburg procedures mimic the Skinner Behavior Modification model.
Created by psychologist Ugo Cerletti in 1938 when he noted effects of electroshock used to make pigs docile for slaughter.
Upwards of 220 volts administered -- the average amount of electricity used to run a home.
Heavy use in the US began in the '40s with no sedatives, painkillers, or relaxants, which led to broken bones and vertebrae.
Today a GED is strapped to the legs, arms, and torso, and drugs are often administered.
Used today on toddlers & pregnant women.
FDA reports miscarriages and lifelong developmental damages to the unborn.
Consent not required in many cases.
No one knows why it might work; brain damage is cited by opponents.

Most opponents (and many survivors) of the practice simply call it torture -- even the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment agrees!

Sources:
http://www.electroboy.com/electroshocktherapy.htm
http://www.cchrint.org/2010/01/24/think-they-dont-electroshock-people-anymore-think-again...
http://www.globalization101.org/torture-in-the-u-s-shocking-disabled-children-at-the-judge...
http://hyphenbird.hubpages.com/hub/Electric-Shock-Treatment-For-Mental-Illness-Therapy...
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/controversy-hasnt-killed-off-electric-shock...

Read other articles by Heather Callaghan here.

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Somalia Next On The NWO Hitlist

2012-02-22T10:20:00.003-08:00

Brit Dee, Contributing Writer

Activist Post

Following last year's successful NATO mission in Libya, the Western corporate and political power structures forging a "new world order" have turned their sights on another strategically important African country -- Somalia.

As reported in yesterday's The Guardian, the use of air strikes is being considered against "pirates and Islamic insurgents" operating in the country.

An armed insurgent group called Al-Shabaab, which has allegedly pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda, is currently waging a war against the shaky Western-backed Somali transitional government. US unmanned drone strikes against suspected militants have been taking place for some time -- last month British national Bilal el-Berwaji was killed in a strike near Mogadishu -- but now the West is considering "over the beach" airstrikes, using heavily armed helicopter gunships to attack purported Al-Shabaab training camps.

Such strikes have so far been resisted, the article tells us, because:

planners have...flagged the likelihood that civilians could be caught up in any fighting. That has been one of the prime considerations militating against pre-emptive military action, though sources said that situation could change.

Claims of a concern for civilian deaths seem disingenuous, considering the thousands of innocents killed during NATO's relentless bombing of Libya last year -- and no doubt the situation will indeed "change", as Somalia is strategically important in the war for resources currently being fought on the global Grand Chessboard.

Somalia is rich in natural resources and believed to possess vast unexploited oil reserves, including in Puntland Province, said to hold between 5 and 10 billion barrels of oil, and in which Western oil companies began drilling earlier this year.

Somalia is also important in terms of the transit of oil and other goods, the British government estimating that annually 23,000 ships transit the adjoining Gulf of Aden, carrying $1 trillion of trade. Somalia's pirates have been a persistent annoyance to those using such vital oil shipping routes.

To justify yet more overseas military action, officials have been hyping the supposed terror threat posed to Britain by Al-Shabaab. It is claimed that Somalia is the new Afghanistan/Pakistan, attracting young British Muslims who seek training in Al-Shabaab's camps so that they can wage jihad against the West. States The Guardian states:

Some have been caught and are facing trial in the region, but intelligence agencies say it is only a matter of time before one of them attempts to bring terror back to their homeland

If British Muslims really are traveling to Somalia with the intention of carrying out terror attacks in the UK, rather than taking part in a localized insurgency against a Western puppet government, the idea that the threat can be eradicated through drone and air strikes is illogical. The inevitable killing of civilians during such strikes will provide added motivation to potential jihadists who already feel aggrieved at the West's violence against Muslim peoples around the world. Al-Shabaab are media savvy and adept at utilizing social media -- reports and images from the aftermath of Western aggression will make for great propaganda, and surely serve to inflame expatriate Somali Muslims and make them hostile to the British government.

As well as utilizing drone strikes, and the impending helicopter gunship strikes, the West has been using food as a weapon of control in Somalia. Susan Garth details how the US:

...has denied aid to all areas of Somalia that are not under the control of the US-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG), meaning that aid is restricted to a few square miles. 'We are committed to saving lives in Somalia and we are already working in any area not controlled by al-Shabaab,' Donald Steinberg, deputy administrator of USAid told a press conference in London. 'Unfortunately, about 60 percent of people affected are in al-Shabaab territories.' One could not have a clearer statement of Washington’s intention to use food and famine as weapons of war against a civilian population.

Thus we again see imperialists killing foreign civilians in order to secure access to natural resources, using the excuse of terrorism and "humanitarianism" to justify illegitimate warmongering, and appease the traditionally anti-imperial, but increasingly pro-interventionist, Western liberal left.

That Somalia is on the West's hitlist comes as no surprise. In 2007, General Wesley Clark revealed that the country was one of seven -- along with Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon and Iran -- that Neocons planned to take over in the years following 9/11.

Brit Dee runs an independent online radio station called Resistance Radio, which broadcasts daily news, views and analysis challenging the lies of our corrupt political and financial leaders, and the controlled corporate media, at http://www.resistradio.com.

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