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"I don't know how to save the world. I don't have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all Earth's inhabitants, none of us will survive - nor will we deserve to." Leonard Peltier
Friday, October 31, 2014
ISIS: the Useful Enemy
ISIS: the Useful Enemy
Kobani Kurds Expose the Hypocrisy of the Coalition Against ISIS
The dark force of ISIS is apparently an invincible and unstoppable war juggernaut that is mercilessly killing and conquering in pursuit of establishing an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In reality, however, it is not as out of control as it appears. It is, indeed, carefully controlled and managed by its creators and supporters, that is, by the United States and its allies in the regions—those who now pretend to have established a coalition to fight it! The U.S., Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other allies in the region do not really need to fight ISIS to (allegedly) destroy it; all they need to do to extinguish its hellish flames is stop supplying fuel for its fire, that is, stop supplying it with funds, mercenaries, military training and armaments.
There are many ways to show the fact that, in subtle ways, ISIS benefactors control its operations and direct its activities in accordance with their own geopolitical interests. One way is to pay attention to its purported mission: to dismantle the corrupt and illegitimate regimes in Iraq and Syria and replace them with a “pure” Islamic state under the rule of a “pious caliphate.” Despite this professed mission to fight the dictatorial regimes that have tarnished Islam, however, ISIS does not question the most corrupt, dictatorial and illegitimate regimes in the region—such as the Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti and Jordanian regimes that fund and arm its operations.
Another way is to compare ISIS’s attack (in early August) on the Iraqi Kurds in Irbil with its current attack on the Syrian Kurds in Kobani. When Irbil came under attack by ISIS, the U.S. unleashed the full force of its air power in concert with the Kurdish peshmerga fighters to repel the attack.
By contrast, while the Kurdish city of Kobani in Northern Syria is being attacked by the disproportionately better armed forces of ISIS, and thousands of its besieged residents face certain mass killings if it falls, the forces of the “coalition to fight ISIS” are watching—in effect, playing a game of hide-and-seek, or perhaps trick-or-treat, with ISIS—as the outgunned and outmanned Kurdish forces are valiantly fighting to death against the attackers. Only occasionally the coalition forces carry out bombing missions that seem to be essentially theatrical, or just for the record.
So, why are the Kurds in Kobani treated differently than those in Irbil? I find Ajamu Baraka’s answer to this question quite insightful:
“The reason why the Kurds of Kobani are to be sacrificed stems from the fact that they are the wrong kind of Kurds. Masoud Barzani and the bourgeois Kurds of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) are the “good Kurds” and the predominant force among the Kurds of Iraq. Their control of almost 45% of Iraqi oil reserves and the booming business that they have been involved in with U.S. oil companies and Israel since their ‘liberation’ with the U.S. invasion makes them a valued asset for the U.S. The same goes for Turkey where despite the historic oppression of Kurds in Turkey, the government does a robust business with the Kurds of Iraq” (Source).
http://www.globalresearch.ca/while-isis-moves-to-slaughter-kurds-in-kobani-the-u-s-bombs-syrian-grain-silos/5407586
While the U.S., Turkey and their allies in the region do not view KDP as a threat to their geopolitical plans (at least for now), they do so when it comes to the “bad” Kurds in the self-governing area in Northern Syria, led by the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG). Contrary to KDP that tends to shun the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey in order not to antagonize the Turks, the United States and their allies in the region, YPG welcomes support from PKK in its fight against ISIS.
Turkey’s overriding interest in Syria is not so much against ISIS as it is against the Syrian Kurds, as well as the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad; because the rabidly anti-Kurd regime in Ankara fears that the weakened regime of Assad may not be able to do away with the self-governing Kurds in Kobani and the surrounding Kurdish areas. The Turkish regime is concerned that if the Kobani Kurds succeed in fending off the ISIS forces, their success and their experience of self-government in the Kobani region, may serve as a tempting model of self-rule for the 15-million Kurds in Turkey. The Turks are also concerned that the success of the Syrian Kurds against ISIS would thwart their long-harbored ambitions to occupy and/or annex the oil-rich Kurdish region in Northern Syria—hence their insistence on a buffer or no-fly zone in that region.
This helps explain why the Turkish regime insists that the overthrow of the Assad regime must take precedence over the fight against ISIS. It also explains why it is feverishly trying to prevent the Kurdish volunteers to cross its border with Syria to help the besieged Kobani defenders against the brutal ISIS attack—in effect, helping ISIS against the Kurds. The inaction or half-hearted action of the United States in the face of the preventable slaughter of the Syrian Kurds, which makes it complicit in the carnage, can be explained by its political horse-trading with Turkey in exchange for the Turks’ collaboration with the pursuit of its imperialistic interests in the region.
The U.S. approach to ISIS would be better understood when it is viewed in the context of its overall objectives in the region—and beyond. That overriding objective, shared and reinforced by its client states, is to undermine or eliminate “the axis of resistance,” consisting of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and, to a lesser extent, Shia forces in Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Achievement of this goal would also be achievement of another, even broader, goal: undermining Russia’s influence and alliances in the region and, by extension, in other parts of the world—for example, its critically important role within both the Shanghai Cooperation Council (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) and the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).
To intervene in order to achieve these goals, the U.S. and its allies need pretexts and/or enemies—even if it means inventing or manufacturing such enemies. Without ISIS, resumption of U.S. military operations in Iraq and extension of those operations into Syria would have been difficult to justify to the American people. A year or so ago, the Obama administration’s drive to attack Syria was thwarted by the opposition from the American people and, therefore, the U.S. congress. The rise of ISIS quickly turned that opposition to support.
Viewed in this light, ISIS can be seen as essentially another (newly manufactured) instrument in the tool-box of U.S. foreign policy, which includes “global terrorism,” the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, weapons of mass destruction, Iran’s nuclear technology, Al-Qaeda, and many other radical Islamic groupings—all by-products of, or blowbacks to, imperialistic U.S. foreign policies.
Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University).
Kobani Kurds Expose the Hypocrisy of the Coalition Against ISIS
The dark force of ISIS is apparently an invincible and unstoppable war juggernaut that is mercilessly killing and conquering in pursuit of establishing an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In reality, however, it is not as out of control as it appears. It is, indeed, carefully controlled and managed by its creators and supporters, that is, by the United States and its allies in the regions—those who now pretend to have established a coalition to fight it! The U.S., Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other allies in the region do not really need to fight ISIS to (allegedly) destroy it; all they need to do to extinguish its hellish flames is stop supplying fuel for its fire, that is, stop supplying it with funds, mercenaries, military training and armaments.
There are many ways to show the fact that, in subtle ways, ISIS benefactors control its operations and direct its activities in accordance with their own geopolitical interests. One way is to pay attention to its purported mission: to dismantle the corrupt and illegitimate regimes in Iraq and Syria and replace them with a “pure” Islamic state under the rule of a “pious caliphate.” Despite this professed mission to fight the dictatorial regimes that have tarnished Islam, however, ISIS does not question the most corrupt, dictatorial and illegitimate regimes in the region—such as the Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti and Jordanian regimes that fund and arm its operations.
Another way is to compare ISIS’s attack (in early August) on the Iraqi Kurds in Irbil with its current attack on the Syrian Kurds in Kobani. When Irbil came under attack by ISIS, the U.S. unleashed the full force of its air power in concert with the Kurdish peshmerga fighters to repel the attack.
By contrast, while the Kurdish city of Kobani in Northern Syria is being attacked by the disproportionately better armed forces of ISIS, and thousands of its besieged residents face certain mass killings if it falls, the forces of the “coalition to fight ISIS” are watching—in effect, playing a game of hide-and-seek, or perhaps trick-or-treat, with ISIS—as the outgunned and outmanned Kurdish forces are valiantly fighting to death against the attackers. Only occasionally the coalition forces carry out bombing missions that seem to be essentially theatrical, or just for the record.
So, why are the Kurds in Kobani treated differently than those in Irbil? I find Ajamu Baraka’s answer to this question quite insightful:
“The reason why the Kurds of Kobani are to be sacrificed stems from the fact that they are the wrong kind of Kurds. Masoud Barzani and the bourgeois Kurds of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) are the “good Kurds” and the predominant force among the Kurds of Iraq. Their control of almost 45% of Iraqi oil reserves and the booming business that they have been involved in with U.S. oil companies and Israel since their ‘liberation’ with the U.S. invasion makes them a valued asset for the U.S. The same goes for Turkey where despite the historic oppression of Kurds in Turkey, the government does a robust business with the Kurds of Iraq” (Source).
http://www.globalresearch.ca/while-isis-moves-to-slaughter-kurds-in-kobani-the-u-s-bombs-syrian-grain-silos/5407586
While the U.S., Turkey and their allies in the region do not view KDP as a threat to their geopolitical plans (at least for now), they do so when it comes to the “bad” Kurds in the self-governing area in Northern Syria, led by the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG). Contrary to KDP that tends to shun the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey in order not to antagonize the Turks, the United States and their allies in the region, YPG welcomes support from PKK in its fight against ISIS.
Turkey’s overriding interest in Syria is not so much against ISIS as it is against the Syrian Kurds, as well as the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad; because the rabidly anti-Kurd regime in Ankara fears that the weakened regime of Assad may not be able to do away with the self-governing Kurds in Kobani and the surrounding Kurdish areas. The Turkish regime is concerned that if the Kobani Kurds succeed in fending off the ISIS forces, their success and their experience of self-government in the Kobani region, may serve as a tempting model of self-rule for the 15-million Kurds in Turkey. The Turks are also concerned that the success of the Syrian Kurds against ISIS would thwart their long-harbored ambitions to occupy and/or annex the oil-rich Kurdish region in Northern Syria—hence their insistence on a buffer or no-fly zone in that region.
This helps explain why the Turkish regime insists that the overthrow of the Assad regime must take precedence over the fight against ISIS. It also explains why it is feverishly trying to prevent the Kurdish volunteers to cross its border with Syria to help the besieged Kobani defenders against the brutal ISIS attack—in effect, helping ISIS against the Kurds. The inaction or half-hearted action of the United States in the face of the preventable slaughter of the Syrian Kurds, which makes it complicit in the carnage, can be explained by its political horse-trading with Turkey in exchange for the Turks’ collaboration with the pursuit of its imperialistic interests in the region.
The U.S. approach to ISIS would be better understood when it is viewed in the context of its overall objectives in the region—and beyond. That overriding objective, shared and reinforced by its client states, is to undermine or eliminate “the axis of resistance,” consisting of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and, to a lesser extent, Shia forces in Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Achievement of this goal would also be achievement of another, even broader, goal: undermining Russia’s influence and alliances in the region and, by extension, in other parts of the world—for example, its critically important role within both the Shanghai Cooperation Council (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) and the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).
To intervene in order to achieve these goals, the U.S. and its allies need pretexts and/or enemies—even if it means inventing or manufacturing such enemies. Without ISIS, resumption of U.S. military operations in Iraq and extension of those operations into Syria would have been difficult to justify to the American people. A year or so ago, the Obama administration’s drive to attack Syria was thwarted by the opposition from the American people and, therefore, the U.S. congress. The rise of ISIS quickly turned that opposition to support.
Viewed in this light, ISIS can be seen as essentially another (newly manufactured) instrument in the tool-box of U.S. foreign policy, which includes “global terrorism,” the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, weapons of mass destruction, Iran’s nuclear technology, Al-Qaeda, and many other radical Islamic groupings—all by-products of, or blowbacks to, imperialistic U.S. foreign policies.
Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University).
Blowback And The Incompetence Theory
Blowback And The Incompetence Theory
Amidst a rash of terror attacks in Canada, the general public is once again witnessing a discussion playing out in the mainstream media as to the solutions and appropriate responses to international Islamic terror. As usual, these solutions and responses involve the bombing, invasion, or general destruction of a country in Africa or the Middle East, always one which was conveniently placed on the hit list of the United States, NATO, or Israel.
During the course of this discussion, as with terror attacks of the past, the public is also being subjected to a discussion of the nature and causes of such terrorism in the first place. In the pro-war camp, the answer is simple – “They hate us for our freedom.” In the anti-war camp, the answer is also simple – “blowback.”
Obviously, the pro-war argument can be dismissed out of hand due to its imbecilic nature and the fact that it is nothing more than a pathetic propaganda narrative aimed at Americans with far too much bravado or fear and not nearly enough intelligence. Indeed, if terrorists hated America for its freedoms it is unfortunately the case that they could have stopped hating America a long time ago.
The anti-war camp, however, while its aims may be well-meaning (or not) will argue that such fundamentalist terrorism is the result of the United States and its allies having relentlessly bombed a number of countries in the past, engendering hatred, and thus perpetuating a cycle – simply put, more bombing begets more terror.
These are now the responses being introduced into the discussion yet again after a number of terroristic killings of Canadian military soldiers by Islamic fundamentalists.
Canada, according to the “blowback” camp, is simply reaping the seeds it has sewn for taking part in the NATO destruction of Iraq and Syria.
Predictably, the alternative media has soon followed behind the blowback proponents who are usually mainstream individuals – commentators, theorists, “journalists,” hosts, politicians, “activists,” etc. – as an attempt to use the alleged credibility of the speaker so as to bolster its own anti-war case. Unfortunately, the blowback position is not only fraught with problems and inconsistencies, it is entirely a cop out.
To argue that terrorist attacks like 9/11, the London 7/7 bombings, Boston Bombings, and now the Canadian shootings among others are the result of bad American policy is to find oneself arguing a timeline of “who started it” that does not exactly match up with the theory or a cause-and-effect scenario that does not always match up the cause with the effect or the regions in which the cause and effect have taken place.
Blowback proponents must subsequently find themselves arguing against any comprehensive response to terrorism beyond simply ending all current foreign engagements and hoping that extremist sentiment finally settles down and dissipates over time. For those who have died in terrorist attacks in the past and those set to die by them in the future, such logic is bound to ring hollow. The argument to simply pull back, hope for the best, and expect a “cooling down” period to take its course is weak indeed.
Most importantly, however, proponents of the blowback theory, regardless of their good intentions, essentially act as cover-up artists for the world oligarchy. Like 9/11, “incompetence theories,” blowbackers are forced to admit that such terrorist organizations are organically organized in response to some perceived injustice. Even blowbackers who are able to admit that groups like al-Qaeda were actually created by the United States intelligence community are subsequently forced to acquiesce to the idea that it is an organization that was abandoned by the U.S., mishandled, or otherwise no longer under the control of the West.
This argument, of course, fundamentally misses the facts surrounding situations like 9/11, 7/7, the 1993 WTC bombing, Libya, Iraq, and Syria.
Indeed, attempting to understand any of the crises mentioned above without understanding that NATO, the United States, Britain, France, Israel, GCC, and other allies not only created but funded, directed, trained, armed, and continue to control these terrorist organizations, is an exercise in futility. That is, such an approach is an exercise in futility if one’s goal is to determine the truth surrounding the situation.
For this reason, blowback theory is generally pushed by “gatekeepers” for the establishment. The purpose and method of the gatekeeper is to act as one of the last buffers against an individual’s potential to discover the true nature of the conflict. The gatekeeper must present criticism seen as hard-hitting, unpopular, and cutting edge while, at the same time, not going so far as to reveal the actual nature of the situation. The gatekeeper cannot allow the ardent follower to get too close to reality. Thus, when the ardent follower begins to introduce relevant facts into the discussion that question even the gatekeeper’s narrative, the gatekeeper typically responds with catcalls of “conspiracy theory.”
The blowback superstars include a small number of politicians but especially include individuals like Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald, two individuals who have repeatedly assailed the 9/11 truth movement despite their inability to adequately address the inconsistencies in the official story or provide adequate solutions to any problem they are forced to address.
Blowback theory presents the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, 7/7, 9/11, and other terrorist attacks as a response to Western aggression and thus completely covers up the fact that these attacks were entirely orchestrated by the very governments who claimed victimhood by them after the fact. Blowback theory presents the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria as an organic creation that appeared due to American interference in Iraq. Blowback theory attempts to portray al-Qaeda as a group that was created (if the theory proponent is even moderately honest) by the U.S. which has come back to bite us.
The truth is that “blowback” has very little, if any, historical precedent.
It is also the truth that “blowback” is nothing more than intellectual gatekeeping, regardless of who espouses it. If one wishes to discover the hidden hand behind international terror, he need look no further than Washington, D.C., London, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv. He may begin looking at the myriad of inconsistencies surrounding virtually every terrorist attack that has occurred in the Western world within recent memory, a search that will lead to precisely the same locations.
Amidst a rash of terror attacks in Canada, the general public is once again witnessing a discussion playing out in the mainstream media as to the solutions and appropriate responses to international Islamic terror. As usual, these solutions and responses involve the bombing, invasion, or general destruction of a country in Africa or the Middle East, always one which was conveniently placed on the hit list of the United States, NATO, or Israel.
During the course of this discussion, as with terror attacks of the past, the public is also being subjected to a discussion of the nature and causes of such terrorism in the first place. In the pro-war camp, the answer is simple – “They hate us for our freedom.” In the anti-war camp, the answer is also simple – “blowback.”
Obviously, the pro-war argument can be dismissed out of hand due to its imbecilic nature and the fact that it is nothing more than a pathetic propaganda narrative aimed at Americans with far too much bravado or fear and not nearly enough intelligence. Indeed, if terrorists hated America for its freedoms it is unfortunately the case that they could have stopped hating America a long time ago.
The anti-war camp, however, while its aims may be well-meaning (or not) will argue that such fundamentalist terrorism is the result of the United States and its allies having relentlessly bombed a number of countries in the past, engendering hatred, and thus perpetuating a cycle – simply put, more bombing begets more terror.
These are now the responses being introduced into the discussion yet again after a number of terroristic killings of Canadian military soldiers by Islamic fundamentalists.
Canada, according to the “blowback” camp, is simply reaping the seeds it has sewn for taking part in the NATO destruction of Iraq and Syria.
Predictably, the alternative media has soon followed behind the blowback proponents who are usually mainstream individuals – commentators, theorists, “journalists,” hosts, politicians, “activists,” etc. – as an attempt to use the alleged credibility of the speaker so as to bolster its own anti-war case. Unfortunately, the blowback position is not only fraught with problems and inconsistencies, it is entirely a cop out.
To argue that terrorist attacks like 9/11, the London 7/7 bombings, Boston Bombings, and now the Canadian shootings among others are the result of bad American policy is to find oneself arguing a timeline of “who started it” that does not exactly match up with the theory or a cause-and-effect scenario that does not always match up the cause with the effect or the regions in which the cause and effect have taken place.
Blowback proponents must subsequently find themselves arguing against any comprehensive response to terrorism beyond simply ending all current foreign engagements and hoping that extremist sentiment finally settles down and dissipates over time. For those who have died in terrorist attacks in the past and those set to die by them in the future, such logic is bound to ring hollow. The argument to simply pull back, hope for the best, and expect a “cooling down” period to take its course is weak indeed.
Most importantly, however, proponents of the blowback theory, regardless of their good intentions, essentially act as cover-up artists for the world oligarchy. Like 9/11, “incompetence theories,” blowbackers are forced to admit that such terrorist organizations are organically organized in response to some perceived injustice. Even blowbackers who are able to admit that groups like al-Qaeda were actually created by the United States intelligence community are subsequently forced to acquiesce to the idea that it is an organization that was abandoned by the U.S., mishandled, or otherwise no longer under the control of the West.
This argument, of course, fundamentally misses the facts surrounding situations like 9/11, 7/7, the 1993 WTC bombing, Libya, Iraq, and Syria.
Indeed, attempting to understand any of the crises mentioned above without understanding that NATO, the United States, Britain, France, Israel, GCC, and other allies not only created but funded, directed, trained, armed, and continue to control these terrorist organizations, is an exercise in futility. That is, such an approach is an exercise in futility if one’s goal is to determine the truth surrounding the situation.
For this reason, blowback theory is generally pushed by “gatekeepers” for the establishment. The purpose and method of the gatekeeper is to act as one of the last buffers against an individual’s potential to discover the true nature of the conflict. The gatekeeper must present criticism seen as hard-hitting, unpopular, and cutting edge while, at the same time, not going so far as to reveal the actual nature of the situation. The gatekeeper cannot allow the ardent follower to get too close to reality. Thus, when the ardent follower begins to introduce relevant facts into the discussion that question even the gatekeeper’s narrative, the gatekeeper typically responds with catcalls of “conspiracy theory.”
The blowback superstars include a small number of politicians but especially include individuals like Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald, two individuals who have repeatedly assailed the 9/11 truth movement despite their inability to adequately address the inconsistencies in the official story or provide adequate solutions to any problem they are forced to address.
Blowback theory presents the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, 7/7, 9/11, and other terrorist attacks as a response to Western aggression and thus completely covers up the fact that these attacks were entirely orchestrated by the very governments who claimed victimhood by them after the fact. Blowback theory presents the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria as an organic creation that appeared due to American interference in Iraq. Blowback theory attempts to portray al-Qaeda as a group that was created (if the theory proponent is even moderately honest) by the U.S. which has come back to bite us.
The truth is that “blowback” has very little, if any, historical precedent.
It is also the truth that “blowback” is nothing more than intellectual gatekeeping, regardless of who espouses it. If one wishes to discover the hidden hand behind international terror, he need look no further than Washington, D.C., London, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv. He may begin looking at the myriad of inconsistencies surrounding virtually every terrorist attack that has occurred in the Western world within recent memory, a search that will lead to precisely the same locations.
Privacy Groups to Present Oral Argument in NSA Spying Case on Nov. 4
Privacy Groups to Present Oral Argument in NSA Spying Case on Nov. 4
Court Should Rule That Mass Telephone Records Collection Is Unconstitutional in Klayman v. Obama
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will appear before a federal appeals court next week to argue the National Security Agency (NSA) should be barred from its mass collection of telephone records of million of Americans. The hearing in Klayman v. Obama is set for 9:30 am on Tuesday, Nov. 4 in Washington, D.C.
Appearing as an amicus, EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn will present oral argument at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on behalf of EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which submitted a joint brief in the case.
https://www.eff.org/document/eff-and-aclu-amicus-brief-klayman
Conservative activist and lawyer Larry Klayman filed the suit in the aftermath of the first Edward Snowden disclosure, in which The Guardian revealed how the NSA was collecting telephone records on a massive scale from the telecommunications company Verizon. In December, District Court Judge Richard Leon issued a preliminary injunction in the case, declaring that the mass surveillance program was likely unconstitutional.
EFF argues that the call-records collection, which the NSA conducts with claimed authority under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, violates the Fourth Amendment rights of millions of Americans. Separately, EFF is counsel in two other lawsuits against the program—Jewel v. NSA and First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA—and is co-counsel with the ACLU in a third, Smith v. Obama.https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel
https://www.eff.org/cases/first-unitarian-church-los-angeles-v-nsa
https://www.eff.org/cases/smith-v-obama
What: Oral Argument in Klayman v. Obama
Who: EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn
When: 9:30 am (ET), Nov. 4, 2014
Where: E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse and William B. Bryant Annex
Courtroom 20
333 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20001
For background and legal documents:
https://www.eff.org/cases/klayman-v-obama
The audio of the oral arguments is expected to be available on the court's website sometime after the hearing: http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/recordings/recordings.nsf/
Contact:
Dave Maass
Media Relations Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
press@eff.org
Related Cases
Klayman v. Obama
Court Should Rule That Mass Telephone Records Collection Is Unconstitutional in Klayman v. Obama
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will appear before a federal appeals court next week to argue the National Security Agency (NSA) should be barred from its mass collection of telephone records of million of Americans. The hearing in Klayman v. Obama is set for 9:30 am on Tuesday, Nov. 4 in Washington, D.C.
Appearing as an amicus, EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn will present oral argument at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on behalf of EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which submitted a joint brief in the case.
https://www.eff.org/document/eff-and-aclu-amicus-brief-klayman
Conservative activist and lawyer Larry Klayman filed the suit in the aftermath of the first Edward Snowden disclosure, in which The Guardian revealed how the NSA was collecting telephone records on a massive scale from the telecommunications company Verizon. In December, District Court Judge Richard Leon issued a preliminary injunction in the case, declaring that the mass surveillance program was likely unconstitutional.
EFF argues that the call-records collection, which the NSA conducts with claimed authority under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, violates the Fourth Amendment rights of millions of Americans. Separately, EFF is counsel in two other lawsuits against the program—Jewel v. NSA and First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA—and is co-counsel with the ACLU in a third, Smith v. Obama.https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel
https://www.eff.org/cases/first-unitarian-church-los-angeles-v-nsa
https://www.eff.org/cases/smith-v-obama
What: Oral Argument in Klayman v. Obama
Who: EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn
When: 9:30 am (ET), Nov. 4, 2014
Where: E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse and William B. Bryant Annex
Courtroom 20
333 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20001
For background and legal documents:
https://www.eff.org/cases/klayman-v-obama
The audio of the oral arguments is expected to be available on the court's website sometime after the hearing: http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/recordings/recordings.nsf/
Contact:
Dave Maass
Media Relations Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
press@eff.org
Related Cases
Klayman v. Obama
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES SCRAMBLE TO PURCHASE HAZMAT SUITS
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES SCRAMBLE TO PURCHASE HAZMAT SUITS
Orders from one company surpass 1 million as concerns about Ebola linger
Government agencies across the world are rushing to snap up protective gear as concerns about the spread of the Ebola virus continue to dominate, with Lakeland Industries announcing that it has received 1 million orders for Hazmat suits alone.
Lakeland hit the headlines last month when it was revealed that the U.S. State Department had ordered 160,000 Hazmat suits from the Ronkonkoma, NY company.
The manufacturer saw its stock soar by 30% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after a press release on business activity related to Ebola revealed that the company was still being inundated with orders for Hazmat suits and other PPE items.
“Through its direct sales force and numerous distribution partners throughout the world, Lakeland has secured new orders relating to the fight against the spread of Ebola. Orders have been received from government agencies around the world as well as other public and private sector customers. Certain of these contracts require weekly delivery guarantees or shipments through the first calendar quarter of 2015. The aggregate of orders won by Lakeland that are believed to have resulted from the Ebola crisis amount to approximately 1 million suits with additional orders for other products, such as hoods, foot coverings and gloves,” states the press release.
The company adds that orders for ChemMAX and MicroMAX protective suit lines have increased 50% since August and are on course for a 100% increase by January 2015.
As Infowars reported last week, the federal government is quickly exhausting supplies for Hazmat suits in the United States, with numerous distributors being forced to place stock on hold for “government needs” only as concerns about Ebola linger after a third case was confirmed in New York.
Other federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health are also stockpiling PPE gear in anticipation of an “emergency event” disrupting the supply chain.
Lakeland, which already enjoyed a 40% stock surge in the aftermath of the first Ebola case being confirmed in the United States, is currently selling class A Hazmat suits for $1300 dollars. Business Insider’s Sam Ro accuses the company of cashing in on the spread of the Ebola virus and the fear that has come with it,” noting that the word “Ebola” is mentioned twelve times in their press release.
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*********************
by Dave Hodges: http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/author/admindave/
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
Orders from one company surpass 1 million as concerns about Ebola linger
Government agencies across the world are rushing to snap up protective gear as concerns about the spread of the Ebola virus continue to dominate, with Lakeland Industries announcing that it has received 1 million orders for Hazmat suits alone.
Lakeland hit the headlines last month when it was revealed that the U.S. State Department had ordered 160,000 Hazmat suits from the Ronkonkoma, NY company.
The manufacturer saw its stock soar by 30% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after a press release on business activity related to Ebola revealed that the company was still being inundated with orders for Hazmat suits and other PPE items.
“Through its direct sales force and numerous distribution partners throughout the world, Lakeland has secured new orders relating to the fight against the spread of Ebola. Orders have been received from government agencies around the world as well as other public and private sector customers. Certain of these contracts require weekly delivery guarantees or shipments through the first calendar quarter of 2015. The aggregate of orders won by Lakeland that are believed to have resulted from the Ebola crisis amount to approximately 1 million suits with additional orders for other products, such as hoods, foot coverings and gloves,” states the press release.
The company adds that orders for ChemMAX and MicroMAX protective suit lines have increased 50% since August and are on course for a 100% increase by January 2015.
As Infowars reported last week, the federal government is quickly exhausting supplies for Hazmat suits in the United States, with numerous distributors being forced to place stock on hold for “government needs” only as concerns about Ebola linger after a third case was confirmed in New York.
Other federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health are also stockpiling PPE gear in anticipation of an “emergency event” disrupting the supply chain.
Lakeland, which already enjoyed a 40% stock surge in the aftermath of the first Ebola case being confirmed in the United States, is currently selling class A Hazmat suits for $1300 dollars. Business Insider’s Sam Ro accuses the company of cashing in on the spread of the Ebola virus and the fear that has come with it,” noting that the word “Ebola” is mentioned twelve times in their press release.
Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71
FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet
*********************
by Dave Hodges: http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/author/admindave/
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
Software Expert: “Incredibly Suspicious”… Democrats are Cheating
Software Expert: “Incredibly Suspicious”… Democrats are Cheating
Red Statements
Voting machines in Chicago and Maryland are experiencing the same problem. They are switching votes from Republican to democrat. This they are blaming on bad calibration. This has been a problem for at least three election cycles now and it’s always republicanvoters getting switched to democratic candidates. If that’s not suspicious enough for you,try this on for size. Tony Heller a software developer and an expert on touchscreen technology says that’s not possible:
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/29/2014-vote-fraud-illinois-maryland-republican-votes-counted-democrat-candidates/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/04/27/election-fraud-44000-registered-vote-virginia-maryland/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/29/2014-vote-fraud-illinois-maryland-republican-votes-counted-democrat-candidates/
“It’s a software issue, and it’s incredibly suspicious that a bug like that could slip through accidentally. It defies belief.”
Heller said that any technician could determine whether the machines were tampered with, but of course since the machines were in democratic districts, no independent technicians were allowed to examine them. Heller added:
“This is being used by the public for voting. Public trust is essential. It’s completely unacceptable that an official waved it off as a calibration issue. It’s something that can be easily verified and should be.”
But it won’t be. That you can count on. Joe Torre, an election official in Maryland made the false claim that it was a calibration problem affecting one machine. The truth is that the same problem was found in three machines in different locations. The same problem was found in Illinois when Republican Jim Moynihan tried to vote for himself:
“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast a vote for my opponent. You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”
Illinois election officials blamed it on a calibration problem also.
When you vote this year, especially if you vote in a Democratic precinct, pay close attention to how the machine is recording your vote.
by Dave Hodges
by Steven Ahle
Red Statements
Voting machines in Chicago and Maryland are experiencing the same problem. They are switching votes from Republican to democrat. This they are blaming on bad calibration. This has been a problem for at least three election cycles now and it’s always republicanvoters getting switched to democratic candidates. If that’s not suspicious enough for you,try this on for size. Tony Heller a software developer and an expert on touchscreen technology says that’s not possible:
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/29/2014-vote-fraud-illinois-maryland-republican-votes-counted-democrat-candidates/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/04/27/election-fraud-44000-registered-vote-virginia-maryland/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/29/2014-vote-fraud-illinois-maryland-republican-votes-counted-democrat-candidates/
“It’s a software issue, and it’s incredibly suspicious that a bug like that could slip through accidentally. It defies belief.”
Heller said that any technician could determine whether the machines were tampered with, but of course since the machines were in democratic districts, no independent technicians were allowed to examine them. Heller added:
“This is being used by the public for voting. Public trust is essential. It’s completely unacceptable that an official waved it off as a calibration issue. It’s something that can be easily verified and should be.”
But it won’t be. That you can count on. Joe Torre, an election official in Maryland made the false claim that it was a calibration problem affecting one machine. The truth is that the same problem was found in three machines in different locations. The same problem was found in Illinois when Republican Jim Moynihan tried to vote for himself:
“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast a vote for my opponent. You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”
Illinois election officials blamed it on a calibration problem also.
When you vote this year, especially if you vote in a Democratic precinct, pay close attention to how the machine is recording your vote.
by Dave Hodges
by Steven Ahle
Former FDA Official: Larger Ebola Outbreaks Coming to American Cities
Former FDA Official: Larger Ebola Outbreaks Coming to American Cities
Authorities could be forced to quarantine hundreds of citizens
Former FDA Official: Larger Ebola Outbreaks Coming to American Cities
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
Former FDA official Scott Gottlieb M.D. warns that larger and more frequent Ebola outbreaks will inevitably hit American cities in the near future and that hundreds of people could be forcibly quarantined by health authorities.
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/21/new-ebola-study-supports-findings-21-day-quarantine-long-enough/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/29/quarantined-nurse-kaci-hickox-misled-public-works-cdc-attorney-white-house-visitor-tied-al-sharpton/
In an op-ed for Forbes, Gottlieb, who previously served as Director of Medical Policy Development for the Food and Drug Administration, writes that the imminent onset of theflu season will make it harder to keep tabs on potential Ebola victims in the United States.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2014/10/30/why-ebola-quarantines-will-grow-larger-and-more-troubling/print/
Sometime in January or February – as the Ebola epidemic explodes out of West Africa – we’ll start experiencing larger, more frequent outbreaks in American cities. With the flu as a background to confound suspected cases of Ebola, public health departments will be hard pressed to “track and trace” all of the potential “contacts” when perhaps dozens of Ebola cases pop up in their cities.
Unable to pinpoint who might have come in close contact with Ebola, and be at risk of contracting the virus, they will reach for their most absolute tool – forced quarantine – as a way to mitigate threat amidst uncertainty. The number of people who will be placed into forced quarantines could easily number in the hundreds.
Gottlieb goes on to predict that once Ebola hits Latin America, the U.S. is far likelier to begin importing cases on a more than sporadic basis, but that current measures concerning the quarantine of individuals remain convoluted, a factor that could lead to hundreds of unsuspecting healthy individuals being caught up in a medical dragnet.
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/30/ebola-cdc-significantly-tightens-guidelines-forced-quarantines/
“The prospect of larger and more frequent outbreaks seems highly likely,” writes Gottlieb, who is also a Clinical Assistant Professor at the NYU School of Medicine. “As we have seen with the anxiety engendered by just a few isolated cases, if we were to have a dozen or more cases in a major U.S. city, it could have a substantial impact on our economic and social life.”
As we highlighted back in August, Gottlieb warned that if Ebola were to arrive in America, the CDC would likely invoke powers to “hold a healthy person against his will,” and enact “sweeping authority to hold and isolate Americans in a public health emergency.”
http://www.infowars.com/former-fda-official-warns-of-spooky-scenarios-if-ebola-hits-u-s/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/28/er-doctor-reveals-truth-hospitals-cant-save-ebola-patients/
With Ebola cases continuing to rise in West Africa, the CDC this week expanded the list of risk factors for Ebola which allow for the forcible quarantine of individuals suspected of being exposed to the virus, including if someone has briefly been in the vicinity of an Ebola victim, despite the fact that health officials continue to claim the disease can only be transmitted via direct exchange of bodily fluids.http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/24/cdc-admits-fault-newest-ebola-patient/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/30/ebola-cdc-significantly-tightens-guidelines-forced-quarantines/
http://www.prisonplanet.com/cdc-expands-ebola-risk-factors-for-forcible-quarantine.html
As we reported earlier, the U.S. government today ordered 250,000 Hazmat suits to be delivered to Dallas, Texas, the location of the first Ebola outbreak in the United States.
Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71
FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
by Dave Hodges
by Paul Joseph Watson
Authorities could be forced to quarantine hundreds of citizens
Former FDA Official: Larger Ebola Outbreaks Coming to American Cities
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
Former FDA official Scott Gottlieb M.D. warns that larger and more frequent Ebola outbreaks will inevitably hit American cities in the near future and that hundreds of people could be forcibly quarantined by health authorities.
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/21/new-ebola-study-supports-findings-21-day-quarantine-long-enough/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/29/quarantined-nurse-kaci-hickox-misled-public-works-cdc-attorney-white-house-visitor-tied-al-sharpton/
In an op-ed for Forbes, Gottlieb, who previously served as Director of Medical Policy Development for the Food and Drug Administration, writes that the imminent onset of theflu season will make it harder to keep tabs on potential Ebola victims in the United States.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2014/10/30/why-ebola-quarantines-will-grow-larger-and-more-troubling/print/
Sometime in January or February – as the Ebola epidemic explodes out of West Africa – we’ll start experiencing larger, more frequent outbreaks in American cities. With the flu as a background to confound suspected cases of Ebola, public health departments will be hard pressed to “track and trace” all of the potential “contacts” when perhaps dozens of Ebola cases pop up in their cities.
Unable to pinpoint who might have come in close contact with Ebola, and be at risk of contracting the virus, they will reach for their most absolute tool – forced quarantine – as a way to mitigate threat amidst uncertainty. The number of people who will be placed into forced quarantines could easily number in the hundreds.
Gottlieb goes on to predict that once Ebola hits Latin America, the U.S. is far likelier to begin importing cases on a more than sporadic basis, but that current measures concerning the quarantine of individuals remain convoluted, a factor that could lead to hundreds of unsuspecting healthy individuals being caught up in a medical dragnet.
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/30/ebola-cdc-significantly-tightens-guidelines-forced-quarantines/
“The prospect of larger and more frequent outbreaks seems highly likely,” writes Gottlieb, who is also a Clinical Assistant Professor at the NYU School of Medicine. “As we have seen with the anxiety engendered by just a few isolated cases, if we were to have a dozen or more cases in a major U.S. city, it could have a substantial impact on our economic and social life.”
As we highlighted back in August, Gottlieb warned that if Ebola were to arrive in America, the CDC would likely invoke powers to “hold a healthy person against his will,” and enact “sweeping authority to hold and isolate Americans in a public health emergency.”
http://www.infowars.com/former-fda-official-warns-of-spooky-scenarios-if-ebola-hits-u-s/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/28/er-doctor-reveals-truth-hospitals-cant-save-ebola-patients/
With Ebola cases continuing to rise in West Africa, the CDC this week expanded the list of risk factors for Ebola which allow for the forcible quarantine of individuals suspected of being exposed to the virus, including if someone has briefly been in the vicinity of an Ebola victim, despite the fact that health officials continue to claim the disease can only be transmitted via direct exchange of bodily fluids.http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/24/cdc-admits-fault-newest-ebola-patient/
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/10/30/ebola-cdc-significantly-tightens-guidelines-forced-quarantines/
http://www.prisonplanet.com/cdc-expands-ebola-risk-factors-for-forcible-quarantine.html
As we reported earlier, the U.S. government today ordered 250,000 Hazmat suits to be delivered to Dallas, Texas, the location of the first Ebola outbreak in the United States.
Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71
FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
by Dave Hodges
by Paul Joseph Watson
Nobel Prize winner: Ebola can be spread by people who show no symptoms
Nobel Prize winner: Ebola can be spread by people who show no symptoms
Nearly 15 years ago, European and African scientists knew that the Ebola virus could infect a person without them knowing about it, meaning they can walk around with the virus in their system and never show any symptoms.
In 2000, The New York Times (archived here), cited the findings of a study published in a prestigious medical journal, reporting:http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/062700hth-ebola.html
The possibility of asymptomatic infection was only suggested in earlier studies, they said in last week’s issue of The Lancet, a medical journal published in London. Now they said they had documented such infections for the first time. They found that the Ebola virus could persist in the blood of asymptomatic infected individuals for two weeks after they were first exposed to an infected individual. How much longer the virus can persist is unknown.
The Times went on to report that the virus “usually spreads” from someone who is infected via contamination “in clinics or hospitals,” generally through contact with materials contaminated with infected bodily fluids. At that time, however, based on the “new finding” at the time, “some” Ebola “cases may result from healthy carriers,” though “[h]ow often is unknown.”
The 13 percent
Fast-forward to the present. In the largest study of the current outbreak, scientists have further discovered that more than 1-in-10, 13 percent, of Ebola patients don’t exhibit a fever or other symptoms. As reported by the Los Angeles Times:http://www.naturalnews.com/Ebola.html
The study, sponsored by the World Health Organization and published online late last month by the New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed data on 3,343 confirmed and 667 probable cases of Ebola.
The finding that 87.1% of those infected exhibited fever – but 12.9% did not – illustrates the challenges confronting health authorities as they struggle to contain the epidemic.
That finding has been echoed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, as he voiced support for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s recent (now vacated) order to quarantine anyone returning from West Africa for 21 days. As reported by NJ.com:
Dr. [Bruce] Beutler, an American medical doctor and researcher, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 2011 for his work researching the cellular subsystem of the body’s overall immune system – the part of it that defends the body from infection by other organisms, like Ebola.
In voicing support for Christie’s quarantine, Dr. Beutler — current director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas — told the website, “I favor it,” adding, “I favor it, because it’s not entirely clear that they can’t transmit the disease.” He was referring to currently asymptomatic healthcare worker Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse who recently returned to New Jersey after treating patients in Sierra Leone and was quarantined in the state for 65 hours. She was eventually taken to her home state of Maine.
‘There’s a lot of variation with viruses’
“It may not be absolutely true that those without symptoms can’t transmit the disease, because we don’t have the numbers to back that up,” Dr. Beutler continued in his NJ.com interview. “It could be people develop significant viremia [where viruses enter the bloodstream and gain access to the rest of the body], and become able to transmit the disease before they have a fever, even.
http://www.naturalnews.com/people.html
“People may have said that without symptoms you can’t transmit Ebola. I’m not sure about that being 100 percent true. There’s a lot of variation with viruses,” he added.
Despite the massive WHO study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to insist that the virus is not communicable in people without symptoms.
http://www.naturalnews.com/WHO.html
“There’s some imperative to prevent panic among the public,” Dr. Beutler said. “But to be honest, people have not examined that with transmissibility in mind. I don’t completely trust people who’d say that as dogma.”
Since Ebola came to the U.S., the CDC’s chief, Dr. Thomas Frieden, has put out so much conflicting information that any reasonable person would conclude that’s all it is: dogma.
Learn all these details and more at the FREE online Pandemic Preparedness course at
www.BioDefense.com
by: J. D. Heyes
Sources:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.latimes.com
http://www.nj.com
http://science.naturalnews.com
Nearly 15 years ago, European and African scientists knew that the Ebola virus could infect a person without them knowing about it, meaning they can walk around with the virus in their system and never show any symptoms.
In 2000, The New York Times (archived here), cited the findings of a study published in a prestigious medical journal, reporting:http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/062700hth-ebola.html
The possibility of asymptomatic infection was only suggested in earlier studies, they said in last week’s issue of The Lancet, a medical journal published in London. Now they said they had documented such infections for the first time. They found that the Ebola virus could persist in the blood of asymptomatic infected individuals for two weeks after they were first exposed to an infected individual. How much longer the virus can persist is unknown.
The Times went on to report that the virus “usually spreads” from someone who is infected via contamination “in clinics or hospitals,” generally through contact with materials contaminated with infected bodily fluids. At that time, however, based on the “new finding” at the time, “some” Ebola “cases may result from healthy carriers,” though “[h]ow often is unknown.”
The 13 percent
Fast-forward to the present. In the largest study of the current outbreak, scientists have further discovered that more than 1-in-10, 13 percent, of Ebola patients don’t exhibit a fever or other symptoms. As reported by the Los Angeles Times:http://www.naturalnews.com/Ebola.html
The study, sponsored by the World Health Organization and published online late last month by the New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed data on 3,343 confirmed and 667 probable cases of Ebola.
The finding that 87.1% of those infected exhibited fever – but 12.9% did not – illustrates the challenges confronting health authorities as they struggle to contain the epidemic.
That finding has been echoed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, as he voiced support for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s recent (now vacated) order to quarantine anyone returning from West Africa for 21 days. As reported by NJ.com:
Dr. [Bruce] Beutler, an American medical doctor and researcher, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 2011 for his work researching the cellular subsystem of the body’s overall immune system – the part of it that defends the body from infection by other organisms, like Ebola.
In voicing support for Christie’s quarantine, Dr. Beutler — current director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas — told the website, “I favor it,” adding, “I favor it, because it’s not entirely clear that they can’t transmit the disease.” He was referring to currently asymptomatic healthcare worker Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse who recently returned to New Jersey after treating patients in Sierra Leone and was quarantined in the state for 65 hours. She was eventually taken to her home state of Maine.
‘There’s a lot of variation with viruses’
“It may not be absolutely true that those without symptoms can’t transmit the disease, because we don’t have the numbers to back that up,” Dr. Beutler continued in his NJ.com interview. “It could be people develop significant viremia [where viruses enter the bloodstream and gain access to the rest of the body], and become able to transmit the disease before they have a fever, even.
http://www.naturalnews.com/people.html
“People may have said that without symptoms you can’t transmit Ebola. I’m not sure about that being 100 percent true. There’s a lot of variation with viruses,” he added.
Despite the massive WHO study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to insist that the virus is not communicable in people without symptoms.
http://www.naturalnews.com/WHO.html
“There’s some imperative to prevent panic among the public,” Dr. Beutler said. “But to be honest, people have not examined that with transmissibility in mind. I don’t completely trust people who’d say that as dogma.”
Since Ebola came to the U.S., the CDC’s chief, Dr. Thomas Frieden, has put out so much conflicting information that any reasonable person would conclude that’s all it is: dogma.
Learn all these details and more at the FREE online Pandemic Preparedness course at
www.BioDefense.com
by: J. D. Heyes
Sources:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.latimes.com
http://www.nj.com
http://science.naturalnews.com
Afghan Retreat Echoes of Vietnam Defeat
Afghan Retreat Echoes of Vietnam Defeat
It didn’t quite garner the same media highlight, but nevertheless there was the unmistakable comparison this week between the evacuation of American troops from southern Afghanistan and the Fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1975.
Both events mark embarrassing retreats by a failing American empire whose hubris always manages to deny reality until the illusion of power finally comes crashing down.
This week thousands of US and British troops were hurriedly airlifted from the giant military base known as Camp Bastion in southern Helmand Province.
It was a huge logistical operation involving a fleet of transport planes and helicopters landing and taking off over a 24-hour period.
The scene of hasty imperial removal from Helmand reminded one of the classic photograph taken in 1975 by UPI photographer Hubert Van Es, which captured American Huey choppers lifting hundreds of desperate personnel from off the rooftop of the CIA headquarters in Saigon ahead of imminent defeat by Vietnamese insurgents.
This week in Helmand the evacuating troops were the last of the US-led NATO force that has occupied Afghanistan for the past 13 years. At its peak, there were 140,000 American troops in the country with the second biggest contingency being the British, along with soldiers from nearly 50 other nations.
Now Camp Bastion has been handed over to Afghan troops and police, who will take over the daunting task of maintaining security across the country against a deadly resurgence of Taliban militants.
Officially, the US-led international force is to wind down its operation in Afghanistan at the end of this year, but some 10,000 American military and CIA will remain in the country in a “support role” to national security forces under a deal signed between Washington and the new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
Just like the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, in which thousands of American personnel were scrambled out the country ahead of the Vietnamese victory, the retreat from Afghanistan this week signals another humiliating defeat for the warmongers in Washington.
Not only a humiliating defeat, but the end of a long and bloody chronicle of futile war. Thirteen years ago, the Americans invaded Afghanistan allegedly to topple a fundamentalist Taliban regime and eradicate an international source of terrorism led by Saudi al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
Tens of thousands of deaths later, plus trillions of dollars billed to the American taxpayers, the US troops are clearing out from a country that is left in worst shape. The American-installed government can barely maintain security in the capital, Kabul, never mind the surrounding regions. What’s more terrorism of the Al-Qaeda brand has spread internationally eliciting the deployment of even more American militarism abroad, and the ramping up of state security powers within the US and its NATO allies.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are resurgent not only in their southern heartlands, but have taken over large parts of the east, west and north of the country, where they previously had little presence. Schools and other civic administration in these areas are now reportedly run, not by the US-backed government in Kabul, but by the militants.
Cultivation of poppy for heroin production - a main source of finance for the Taliban warlords – has reached an all-time high with over 200,000 hectares under cultivation. Nearly half of all Afghan poppy is harvested in Helmand Province, where US President Obama launched his much-vaunted surge of 30,000 extra marines in 2009-2010. Despite Washington spending $7.6 billion to curb poppy production, Afghanistan has emerged as the world's biggest source of heroin, while drug addiction in the US is reportedly soaring.
On security matters, between March and August this year, nearly 1,000 Afghan troops and 2,200 police officers were killed in militant attacks. That represents the worst casualty rate for local forces over the past 13 years.
With the last of the US-led foreign forces pulling out this week, there is an ominous sense of the security levee bursting across Afghanistan.
If anything, the prognosis for Afghanistan is a lot worse than it was for Iraq where US troops beat a similar hasty retreat three years ago.
By comparison, Afghanistan has a much more active insurgency raging even as the Americans are pulling out. Iraq has gone on to descend into chaos, so the portent for Afghanistan would seem a lot worse.
Reuters news agency reported the view of US Marine Staff Sergeant Kenneth Oswood, who participated in both the Iraq withdrawal and this week's evacuation from Afghanistan. He said: “It’s a lot different this time. Closing out Iraq, when we got there, we were told there hadn’t been a shot fired in anger at us in years. And then you come here and they are still shooting at us.”
The US marine added: “It’s almost like it’s not over here, and we’re just kind of handing it over to someone else to fight.”
More like handing it over to someone else to do the dying.
The “exceptional” Americans in Washington like to refer to their foreign interventions as “nation building.” Like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, among dozens of other unfortunate countries to have hosted American “nation builders” over the past century, the people of these wretched lands have experienced Washington’s reverse Midas Touch. Far from turning to gold, everything Washington touches brings death and destruction.
And in the end when the American destroyers finally pack up and run, it is the people that remain who must pick up the pieces and actually begin the real process of national development. How easier it would be if Washington just kept its imperialist, predatory hands off others.
It didn’t quite garner the same media highlight, but nevertheless there was the unmistakable comparison this week between the evacuation of American troops from southern Afghanistan and the Fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1975.
Both events mark embarrassing retreats by a failing American empire whose hubris always manages to deny reality until the illusion of power finally comes crashing down.
This week thousands of US and British troops were hurriedly airlifted from the giant military base known as Camp Bastion in southern Helmand Province.
It was a huge logistical operation involving a fleet of transport planes and helicopters landing and taking off over a 24-hour period.
The scene of hasty imperial removal from Helmand reminded one of the classic photograph taken in 1975 by UPI photographer Hubert Van Es, which captured American Huey choppers lifting hundreds of desperate personnel from off the rooftop of the CIA headquarters in Saigon ahead of imminent defeat by Vietnamese insurgents.This week in Helmand the evacuating troops were the last of the US-led NATO force that has occupied Afghanistan for the past 13 years. At its peak, there were 140,000 American troops in the country with the second biggest contingency being the British, along with soldiers from nearly 50 other nations.
Now Camp Bastion has been handed over to Afghan troops and police, who will take over the daunting task of maintaining security across the country against a deadly resurgence of Taliban militants.
Officially, the US-led international force is to wind down its operation in Afghanistan at the end of this year, but some 10,000 American military and CIA will remain in the country in a “support role” to national security forces under a deal signed between Washington and the new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
Just like the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, in which thousands of American personnel were scrambled out the country ahead of the Vietnamese victory, the retreat from Afghanistan this week signals another humiliating defeat for the warmongers in Washington.
Not only a humiliating defeat, but the end of a long and bloody chronicle of futile war. Thirteen years ago, the Americans invaded Afghanistan allegedly to topple a fundamentalist Taliban regime and eradicate an international source of terrorism led by Saudi al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
Tens of thousands of deaths later, plus trillions of dollars billed to the American taxpayers, the US troops are clearing out from a country that is left in worst shape. The American-installed government can barely maintain security in the capital, Kabul, never mind the surrounding regions. What’s more terrorism of the Al-Qaeda brand has spread internationally eliciting the deployment of even more American militarism abroad, and the ramping up of state security powers within the US and its NATO allies.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are resurgent not only in their southern heartlands, but have taken over large parts of the east, west and north of the country, where they previously had little presence. Schools and other civic administration in these areas are now reportedly run, not by the US-backed government in Kabul, but by the militants.
Cultivation of poppy for heroin production - a main source of finance for the Taliban warlords – has reached an all-time high with over 200,000 hectares under cultivation. Nearly half of all Afghan poppy is harvested in Helmand Province, where US President Obama launched his much-vaunted surge of 30,000 extra marines in 2009-2010. Despite Washington spending $7.6 billion to curb poppy production, Afghanistan has emerged as the world's biggest source of heroin, while drug addiction in the US is reportedly soaring.
On security matters, between March and August this year, nearly 1,000 Afghan troops and 2,200 police officers were killed in militant attacks. That represents the worst casualty rate for local forces over the past 13 years.
With the last of the US-led foreign forces pulling out this week, there is an ominous sense of the security levee bursting across Afghanistan.
If anything, the prognosis for Afghanistan is a lot worse than it was for Iraq where US troops beat a similar hasty retreat three years ago.
By comparison, Afghanistan has a much more active insurgency raging even as the Americans are pulling out. Iraq has gone on to descend into chaos, so the portent for Afghanistan would seem a lot worse.
Reuters news agency reported the view of US Marine Staff Sergeant Kenneth Oswood, who participated in both the Iraq withdrawal and this week's evacuation from Afghanistan. He said: “It’s a lot different this time. Closing out Iraq, when we got there, we were told there hadn’t been a shot fired in anger at us in years. And then you come here and they are still shooting at us.”
The US marine added: “It’s almost like it’s not over here, and we’re just kind of handing it over to someone else to fight.”
More like handing it over to someone else to do the dying.
The “exceptional” Americans in Washington like to refer to their foreign interventions as “nation building.” Like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, among dozens of other unfortunate countries to have hosted American “nation builders” over the past century, the people of these wretched lands have experienced Washington’s reverse Midas Touch. Far from turning to gold, everything Washington touches brings death and destruction.
And in the end when the American destroyers finally pack up and run, it is the people that remain who must pick up the pieces and actually begin the real process of national development. How easier it would be if Washington just kept its imperialist, predatory hands off others.
Modern Day America: One Step Away from the Third Reich
Modern Day America:
One Step Away from the Third Reich
Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures which confer powers on the President, such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires the Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done only once in the nearly forty year history of the Act.
— Patrick Thronson, Michigan Journal of Law (2013, Vol 46).
"Dissident Voice" - A bit of irony, perhaps, that on November 4, 2014—as Americans go to the polls to cast their ballots for a slate of politicians at the local, state and federal levels—the august citizens of the United States will also celebrate the birth of the National Security Agency (NSA).
On November 4, 1952 the NSA was created by a Presidential Executive Order signed by then president Harry Truman. Earlier that year, in January 1952, Truman’s state of the union address focused on the Korean War, the global Soviet-Communist threat, the “Iran oil situation”, and the need to increase the production of US military equipment for use by American forces, and for transfer to Western European Allies. Truman called on Americans to seek guidance in the God of Peace even as a brutal shadow war was being waged by the United States to eliminate popularly elected “leftist” governments.
In 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to the American presidency and with him came John Foster and Allan Dulles, two political appointees who would, it turns out, seek the counsel and expertise of “former” Nazi executioners, scientists and intelligence operatives. J Edgar Hoover, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was already on the case using whatever resources were at his disposal—including Nazis–to hunt down unionists, communists, dissenters and radicals wherever they might be. According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Truman had this to say about Hoover and his FBI, “We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail… Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/01/j-edgar-hoover-secret-fbi
From 1953-1961, Eisenhower, as Commander in Chief, constructed a nascent military-intelligence-law enforcement-industrial complex influenced directly by Nazi ideology and technological know-how. No wonder he warned the world about his creation, the military-industrial complex. At one time in the early 21st Century it was uncomfortable to call out America’s ties to the Nazis. But that has changed particularly with the release of Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door (2014) and “The Collaboration” by Ben Urwand. It has also been confirmed by the overthrow of a nationally elected leader in Ukraine—Victor Yanukovych–and the open support of neo-Nazi groups largely responsible for that event. Is it a coincidence that the head of the CIA, John Brennan, visited with the neo-Nazi usurpers not long after the coup given the CIA’s history?
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-hollywood-helped-hitler-595684
http://rt.com/usa/white-house-confirms-cia-ukraine-448/
Do You Want to Know a Secret, do, da, do?
According to Lichtblau, writing in the New York Times: “The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher’, said Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian…but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible. U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes, he said. Information was readily available that these were compromised men. The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War mentality shared by two titans of intelligence in the 1950s: Mr. Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. director.”http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html?_r=0
Over at Antiwar.com, in “Federal Agencies Just Doing Whatever They Want Now”, Lucy Steigerwald comments wryly on Lichtblau’s findings:
http://original.antiwar.com/lucy/2014/10/29/federal-agencies-just-doing-whatever-they-want-now/
…the CIA hid their precious assets from Nazi hunters and prosecutors trying to deport then-old men in the 1980s and even into the ‘90s. Most disturbing, one of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann’s little buddies, Otto von Bolschwing, was protected until 1982, when he conveniently died of a brain disorder before he could be deported or prosecuted. Famously, Nazi rocket scientists were picked up by America to prevent their expertise from falling into Soviet hands. Maybe an exception to the prickly feeling that letting heinous war criminals off the hook is not what America was supposed to be doing when it won the good war in a heroically-sepia montage could be made for geniuses like Wernher Von Braun. Von Braun was a rocket scientist and “honorary” SS member under the Nazis, and he helped America get to the moon (which is neat, so that apparently makes his debated level of involvement/enthusiasm for the party acceptable.) What exactly did von Bolschwing contribute to America after happily joining the SS in 1933 to make ignoring his crimes worthwhile? What’s the purpose of this kind of grim revelation? There are several.
One, they diminish the moral high ground about the Second World War that the US clings to desperately to this day. Yes, everyone who isn’t literally Adolph Hitler gets to feel pretty good about themselves, so anyone not allied with Hitler must be doing the right thing. Yet, helping to plan the Final Solution is forgivable if the CIA really wants you around. Another more contemporary reason to be horrified by this revelation is that it is just one outrage of many. Sharing the CIA’s dark corner is most of the other big-name, secretive agencies. For the past 18 months, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive campaign of spying has been big news. Less prominent were stories that suggest the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are also playing the part of secretive, unaccountable rulers.
Welcome to the Reich, American Style
William Binney, former NSA employee and whistleblower, stated that the NSA had gone “totalitarian”. In an interview with DW he likened the NSA and the US government to the Third Reich.http://www.dw.de/binney-the-nsas-main-motives-power-and-money/a-17862571?maca=en-TWITTER-EN-2004-xml-mrss
Binney: “Sure, they haven’t gone that far yet [as the Nazis and East German Stassi], but they tried to shut down newspaper reporters like Jim Risen…Look at the NDAA Section 1021, that gave President Obama the ability to define someone as a terrorist threat and have the military incarcerate them indefinitely without due process. That’s the same as the special order 48 issued in 1933 by the Nazis, [the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree]. Read that – it says exactly the same thing. These were totalitarian processes that were instituted…Totalitarianism comes in the form first of knowledge of people and what they’re doing, and then it starts to transition into using that power against people. That’s what’s happening – in terms of newspaper reporters, in terms of crimes. That’s a direct violation of our constitution.
DW: But surely the difference is that there was an ideological regime behind the Stasi and the Nazis.
Binney: You mean like putting people like John Kiriakou in prison for exposing torture and giving the torturers immunity? That’s what our country’s coming to. That’s what we did. That’s disgraceful. The motives of totalitarian states are not exactly the same every time, but they’re very similar: power, control and money…We’re focusing now on everyone on the planet – that’s a change from focusing on organizations that were attempting to do nasty things. When you focus on everybody, you’re moving down that path towards population control.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou
Ingeniously Produced from Concentration Camps: Data “Comes to Light”
Many advances in warfare can be traced to Nazi innovations built on the backs of tortured souls. For example, air and ship crew survivability in frigid seas is just one of them:
https://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/marinesafety/tp-tp13822-section4-1640.htm
…the Germans noted the terrible loss of critical personnel in sudden cold water immersion accidents. The sinking of the Bismarck and loss of airmen who bailed out alive and well into the cold North Sea during the Battle of Britain caused their physiologists and aviation medicine physicians to examine the problem. They commenced a large Research and Development program, which in part was the cause for the infamous Dachau experiments. They were the first to observe the “after drop” or continuation in reduction of body core temperature after being withdrawn from the cold water. They also experimented with survival suits and the Deutsches Textilforschunginstitut in München-Gladbach, ingeniously produced one that provided the insulation using soap bubbles which appears to have gone into limited service.
Another example is the development of the military aircraft “ejection seat”. In Achtung! Schleuder-Sitzaparat by Chris Carry, German engineering was far afield of American efforts in pilot safety.
http://webs.lanset.com/aeolusaero/Articles/A_Brief_History_of_American_Egress_Systems--25_May_04.pdf
With the acquisition by the US of both German databases in egress research and actual examples of the German Heinkel explosive cartridge ejection seat immediately after the war had ended, the US began to vigorously attempt to gain greater knowledge in this overlooked area of aviation technology. The new American developmental research spurred on by acquisition of German wartime data branched off into two distinctly different approaches towards the same end, one taken by the US Air Force and one by the US Navy.
Exceptionalism and Innovative Torture Techniques Led to Technological Advances
How could human beings engage in such hideous experiments on other human beings? Well, that is a time tested formula: Indoctrinate the masses into thinking that all others besides, say, Americans, are inferior, unexceptional, demons and insects. The world is witnessing just that as the US government, its allies and its media and academic proxies seek to reduce the Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Iranians, and the immigrants, unemployed and impoverished in the United States, down to the level of parasitic microbes.
Just how does that mentality work?
For that answer we turn to the UK’s Telegraph for an article written in 2008 by Richard Evans:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3540339/How-Hitler-perverted-the-course-of-science.html
The answer springs from the fact that medicine was both dominant in the world of science under the Third Reich, and closely allied to the Nazi project… After all, German medical science had uncovered the causes of several major diseases and contributed massively to improving the health of the population over the previous decades. Surely, therefore, it was justified in eliminating negative influences as well? What underpinned this behavior was a widespread belief that some people were less than human, relegated to a lower plane of existence by their inherited degeneracy – or their race. For German doctors, a camp inmate was either a racially inferior subhuman, a vicious criminal, a traitor to the German cause, or more than one of the above. Such beings had no right to life or wellbeing – indeed, it was logical that they should be sacrificed in the interests of the survival and triumph of the German race, just as that race had to be strengthened by the elimination of the inferior, degenerate elements within it.
Evans continues on describing the torture:
SS doctors used inmates to test treatments for injuries sustained in battle, cutting open their calves and sewing bits of glass or wood or gauze impregnated with bacteria into the wounds, sometimes even smashing the prisoners’ bones with hammers to create a more realistic effect; again, the results were presented to scientific conferences without anyone offering any criticism of the methods employed. Perhaps the most enthusiastic user of human guinea pigs was the ambitious young SS doctor Sigmund Rascher, who employed camp inmates at Dachau to test the human body’s reactions to rapid decompression and lack of oxygen, in an attempt to help pilots forced to parachute out of their planes at high altitudes. He called some of his research sessions “terminal experiments”. He measured the time it took his subjects to die as their air supply was gradually thinned out. He showed his work, which led to the deaths of between 70 and 80 prisoners, to a conference of Luftwaffe medical experts in September 1942. The following month, Rascher presented the results of another experiment to a conference of 95 medical scientists in Nuremberg. This time, he showed how long inmates dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms and life jackets could survive in cold water, simulating conditions in the North Sea. The average time that elapsed before death, he reported, was 70 minutes. None of those listening to him raised any ethical objections.
Albert Camus offers a sort of prayer for these dark times:
http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/camus/sp001174.txt
All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked. Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.
John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in political and national security affairs.
One Step Away from the Third Reich
Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures which confer powers on the President, such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires the Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done only once in the nearly forty year history of the Act.
— Patrick Thronson, Michigan Journal of Law (2013, Vol 46).
"Dissident Voice" - A bit of irony, perhaps, that on November 4, 2014—as Americans go to the polls to cast their ballots for a slate of politicians at the local, state and federal levels—the august citizens of the United States will also celebrate the birth of the National Security Agency (NSA).
On November 4, 1952 the NSA was created by a Presidential Executive Order signed by then president Harry Truman. Earlier that year, in January 1952, Truman’s state of the union address focused on the Korean War, the global Soviet-Communist threat, the “Iran oil situation”, and the need to increase the production of US military equipment for use by American forces, and for transfer to Western European Allies. Truman called on Americans to seek guidance in the God of Peace even as a brutal shadow war was being waged by the United States to eliminate popularly elected “leftist” governments.
In 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to the American presidency and with him came John Foster and Allan Dulles, two political appointees who would, it turns out, seek the counsel and expertise of “former” Nazi executioners, scientists and intelligence operatives. J Edgar Hoover, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was already on the case using whatever resources were at his disposal—including Nazis–to hunt down unionists, communists, dissenters and radicals wherever they might be. According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Truman had this to say about Hoover and his FBI, “We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail… Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/01/j-edgar-hoover-secret-fbi
From 1953-1961, Eisenhower, as Commander in Chief, constructed a nascent military-intelligence-law enforcement-industrial complex influenced directly by Nazi ideology and technological know-how. No wonder he warned the world about his creation, the military-industrial complex. At one time in the early 21st Century it was uncomfortable to call out America’s ties to the Nazis. But that has changed particularly with the release of Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door (2014) and “The Collaboration” by Ben Urwand. It has also been confirmed by the overthrow of a nationally elected leader in Ukraine—Victor Yanukovych–and the open support of neo-Nazi groups largely responsible for that event. Is it a coincidence that the head of the CIA, John Brennan, visited with the neo-Nazi usurpers not long after the coup given the CIA’s history?
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-hollywood-helped-hitler-595684
http://rt.com/usa/white-house-confirms-cia-ukraine-448/
Do You Want to Know a Secret, do, da, do?
According to Lichtblau, writing in the New York Times: “The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher’, said Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian…but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible. U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes, he said. Information was readily available that these were compromised men. The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War mentality shared by two titans of intelligence in the 1950s: Mr. Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. director.”http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html?_r=0
Over at Antiwar.com, in “Federal Agencies Just Doing Whatever They Want Now”, Lucy Steigerwald comments wryly on Lichtblau’s findings:
http://original.antiwar.com/lucy/2014/10/29/federal-agencies-just-doing-whatever-they-want-now/
…the CIA hid their precious assets from Nazi hunters and prosecutors trying to deport then-old men in the 1980s and even into the ‘90s. Most disturbing, one of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann’s little buddies, Otto von Bolschwing, was protected until 1982, when he conveniently died of a brain disorder before he could be deported or prosecuted. Famously, Nazi rocket scientists were picked up by America to prevent their expertise from falling into Soviet hands. Maybe an exception to the prickly feeling that letting heinous war criminals off the hook is not what America was supposed to be doing when it won the good war in a heroically-sepia montage could be made for geniuses like Wernher Von Braun. Von Braun was a rocket scientist and “honorary” SS member under the Nazis, and he helped America get to the moon (which is neat, so that apparently makes his debated level of involvement/enthusiasm for the party acceptable.) What exactly did von Bolschwing contribute to America after happily joining the SS in 1933 to make ignoring his crimes worthwhile? What’s the purpose of this kind of grim revelation? There are several.
One, they diminish the moral high ground about the Second World War that the US clings to desperately to this day. Yes, everyone who isn’t literally Adolph Hitler gets to feel pretty good about themselves, so anyone not allied with Hitler must be doing the right thing. Yet, helping to plan the Final Solution is forgivable if the CIA really wants you around. Another more contemporary reason to be horrified by this revelation is that it is just one outrage of many. Sharing the CIA’s dark corner is most of the other big-name, secretive agencies. For the past 18 months, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive campaign of spying has been big news. Less prominent were stories that suggest the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are also playing the part of secretive, unaccountable rulers.
Welcome to the Reich, American Style
William Binney, former NSA employee and whistleblower, stated that the NSA had gone “totalitarian”. In an interview with DW he likened the NSA and the US government to the Third Reich.http://www.dw.de/binney-the-nsas-main-motives-power-and-money/a-17862571?maca=en-TWITTER-EN-2004-xml-mrss
Binney: “Sure, they haven’t gone that far yet [as the Nazis and East German Stassi], but they tried to shut down newspaper reporters like Jim Risen…Look at the NDAA Section 1021, that gave President Obama the ability to define someone as a terrorist threat and have the military incarcerate them indefinitely without due process. That’s the same as the special order 48 issued in 1933 by the Nazis, [the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree]. Read that – it says exactly the same thing. These were totalitarian processes that were instituted…Totalitarianism comes in the form first of knowledge of people and what they’re doing, and then it starts to transition into using that power against people. That’s what’s happening – in terms of newspaper reporters, in terms of crimes. That’s a direct violation of our constitution.
DW: But surely the difference is that there was an ideological regime behind the Stasi and the Nazis.
Binney: You mean like putting people like John Kiriakou in prison for exposing torture and giving the torturers immunity? That’s what our country’s coming to. That’s what we did. That’s disgraceful. The motives of totalitarian states are not exactly the same every time, but they’re very similar: power, control and money…We’re focusing now on everyone on the planet – that’s a change from focusing on organizations that were attempting to do nasty things. When you focus on everybody, you’re moving down that path towards population control.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou
Ingeniously Produced from Concentration Camps: Data “Comes to Light”
Many advances in warfare can be traced to Nazi innovations built on the backs of tortured souls. For example, air and ship crew survivability in frigid seas is just one of them:
https://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/marinesafety/tp-tp13822-section4-1640.htm
…the Germans noted the terrible loss of critical personnel in sudden cold water immersion accidents. The sinking of the Bismarck and loss of airmen who bailed out alive and well into the cold North Sea during the Battle of Britain caused their physiologists and aviation medicine physicians to examine the problem. They commenced a large Research and Development program, which in part was the cause for the infamous Dachau experiments. They were the first to observe the “after drop” or continuation in reduction of body core temperature after being withdrawn from the cold water. They also experimented with survival suits and the Deutsches Textilforschunginstitut in München-Gladbach, ingeniously produced one that provided the insulation using soap bubbles which appears to have gone into limited service.
Another example is the development of the military aircraft “ejection seat”. In Achtung! Schleuder-Sitzaparat by Chris Carry, German engineering was far afield of American efforts in pilot safety.
http://webs.lanset.com/aeolusaero/Articles/A_Brief_History_of_American_Egress_Systems--25_May_04.pdf
With the acquisition by the US of both German databases in egress research and actual examples of the German Heinkel explosive cartridge ejection seat immediately after the war had ended, the US began to vigorously attempt to gain greater knowledge in this overlooked area of aviation technology. The new American developmental research spurred on by acquisition of German wartime data branched off into two distinctly different approaches towards the same end, one taken by the US Air Force and one by the US Navy.
Exceptionalism and Innovative Torture Techniques Led to Technological Advances
How could human beings engage in such hideous experiments on other human beings? Well, that is a time tested formula: Indoctrinate the masses into thinking that all others besides, say, Americans, are inferior, unexceptional, demons and insects. The world is witnessing just that as the US government, its allies and its media and academic proxies seek to reduce the Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Iranians, and the immigrants, unemployed and impoverished in the United States, down to the level of parasitic microbes.
Just how does that mentality work?
For that answer we turn to the UK’s Telegraph for an article written in 2008 by Richard Evans:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3540339/How-Hitler-perverted-the-course-of-science.html
The answer springs from the fact that medicine was both dominant in the world of science under the Third Reich, and closely allied to the Nazi project… After all, German medical science had uncovered the causes of several major diseases and contributed massively to improving the health of the population over the previous decades. Surely, therefore, it was justified in eliminating negative influences as well? What underpinned this behavior was a widespread belief that some people were less than human, relegated to a lower plane of existence by their inherited degeneracy – or their race. For German doctors, a camp inmate was either a racially inferior subhuman, a vicious criminal, a traitor to the German cause, or more than one of the above. Such beings had no right to life or wellbeing – indeed, it was logical that they should be sacrificed in the interests of the survival and triumph of the German race, just as that race had to be strengthened by the elimination of the inferior, degenerate elements within it.
Evans continues on describing the torture:
SS doctors used inmates to test treatments for injuries sustained in battle, cutting open their calves and sewing bits of glass or wood or gauze impregnated with bacteria into the wounds, sometimes even smashing the prisoners’ bones with hammers to create a more realistic effect; again, the results were presented to scientific conferences without anyone offering any criticism of the methods employed. Perhaps the most enthusiastic user of human guinea pigs was the ambitious young SS doctor Sigmund Rascher, who employed camp inmates at Dachau to test the human body’s reactions to rapid decompression and lack of oxygen, in an attempt to help pilots forced to parachute out of their planes at high altitudes. He called some of his research sessions “terminal experiments”. He measured the time it took his subjects to die as their air supply was gradually thinned out. He showed his work, which led to the deaths of between 70 and 80 prisoners, to a conference of Luftwaffe medical experts in September 1942. The following month, Rascher presented the results of another experiment to a conference of 95 medical scientists in Nuremberg. This time, he showed how long inmates dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms and life jackets could survive in cold water, simulating conditions in the North Sea. The average time that elapsed before death, he reported, was 70 minutes. None of those listening to him raised any ethical objections.
Albert Camus offers a sort of prayer for these dark times:
http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/camus/sp001174.txt
All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked. Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.
John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in political and national security affairs.
Report to U.N. Calls Bullshit on Obama’s ‘Look Forward, Not Backwards’ Approach to Torture
Report to U.N. Calls Bullshit on Obama’s ‘Look Forward, Not Backwards’ Approach to Torture
Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had “tortured some folks” as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/obama-cia-torture-some-folks-brennan-spying
http://hrp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CAT-Shadow-Report-Advocates-for-US-Torture-Prosecutions.pdf
The report describes the post-9/11 torture program as “breathtaking in scope”, and indicts both the Bush and Obama administrations for complicity in it – the former through design and implementation, and the latter through its ongoing attempts to obstruct justice. Noting that the program caused grievous harm to countless individuals and in many cases went as far as murder, the report calls for the United States to “promptly and impartially prosecute senior military and civilian officials responsible for authorizing, acquiescing, or consenting in any way to acts of torture.”
In specifically naming former President George W. Bush, Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo and former CIA contractor James Mitchell, among many others, as individuals who sanctioned torture at the highest levels, the report highlights a gaping hole in President Obama’s promise to reassert America’s moral standing during his administration. Not only have the cited individuals not been charged with any crime for their role in the torture program, Obama has repeatedly reiterated his mantra of “looking forward, not backwards” to protect them from accountability.
Needless to say, you shouldn’t try that defense in court if you’re an ordinary American on trial for, say, a drug crime.
It’s also worth remembering that, horrific as it was, the torture regime described in the report was only a tiny part of the wide-ranging human rights abuses the United States committed after 9/11. It doesn’t even account for the network of prisons where hundreds of thousands of people were detained in Iraq and Afghanistan – many of whom suffered beatings, rape and murder at the hands of U.S. soldiers.http://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/taguba.pdf
The environment that allowed such treatment was again authorized at the highest levels, but just as with the CIA program the only people to receive any legal sanction for these actions have been low-level soldiers who’ve essentially been used as scapegoats for the crimes of their superiors.
By refusing to prosecute Bush-era officials for their culpability in major human rights abuses such as the CIA program and Abu Ghraib, President Obama is not just failing to enforce justice but is essentially guaranteeing that such abuses will happen again in the future. His administration has demonstrated that even if government officials perpetrate the most heinous crimes imaginable, they will still be able to rely on their peers to conceal their wrongdoing and protect them from prosecution. This not only erodes the rule of law, it also helps create a culture of impunity that will inevitably give rise to such actions once again.
The UN report cites former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as describing the Bush administration’s legal definition of torture as, “so narrow that it would have exculpated Saddam Hussein.” To his credit Barack Obama has finally called a spade a spade and identified Bush officials actions for what they were: torture. Having done so, it’s now incumbent on him to stop protecting the officials who authorized this crime from legal scrutiny.
Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had “tortured some folks” as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/obama-cia-torture-some-folks-brennan-spying
http://hrp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CAT-Shadow-Report-Advocates-for-US-Torture-Prosecutions.pdf
The report describes the post-9/11 torture program as “breathtaking in scope”, and indicts both the Bush and Obama administrations for complicity in it – the former through design and implementation, and the latter through its ongoing attempts to obstruct justice. Noting that the program caused grievous harm to countless individuals and in many cases went as far as murder, the report calls for the United States to “promptly and impartially prosecute senior military and civilian officials responsible for authorizing, acquiescing, or consenting in any way to acts of torture.”
In specifically naming former President George W. Bush, Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo and former CIA contractor James Mitchell, among many others, as individuals who sanctioned torture at the highest levels, the report highlights a gaping hole in President Obama’s promise to reassert America’s moral standing during his administration. Not only have the cited individuals not been charged with any crime for their role in the torture program, Obama has repeatedly reiterated his mantra of “looking forward, not backwards” to protect them from accountability.
Needless to say, you shouldn’t try that defense in court if you’re an ordinary American on trial for, say, a drug crime.
It’s also worth remembering that, horrific as it was, the torture regime described in the report was only a tiny part of the wide-ranging human rights abuses the United States committed after 9/11. It doesn’t even account for the network of prisons where hundreds of thousands of people were detained in Iraq and Afghanistan – many of whom suffered beatings, rape and murder at the hands of U.S. soldiers.http://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/taguba.pdf
The environment that allowed such treatment was again authorized at the highest levels, but just as with the CIA program the only people to receive any legal sanction for these actions have been low-level soldiers who’ve essentially been used as scapegoats for the crimes of their superiors.
By refusing to prosecute Bush-era officials for their culpability in major human rights abuses such as the CIA program and Abu Ghraib, President Obama is not just failing to enforce justice but is essentially guaranteeing that such abuses will happen again in the future. His administration has demonstrated that even if government officials perpetrate the most heinous crimes imaginable, they will still be able to rely on their peers to conceal their wrongdoing and protect them from prosecution. This not only erodes the rule of law, it also helps create a culture of impunity that will inevitably give rise to such actions once again.
The UN report cites former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as describing the Bush administration’s legal definition of torture as, “so narrow that it would have exculpated Saddam Hussein.” To his credit Barack Obama has finally called a spade a spade and identified Bush officials actions for what they were: torture. Having done so, it’s now incumbent on him to stop protecting the officials who authorized this crime from legal scrutiny.
The World Must Judge America’s Human Rights Abuses
The World Must Judge America’s Human Rights Abuses
Black people in this country are brutalized by police on a daily basis. That has always been true but thanks to modern technology there is a steady stream of proof caught on video. Accessing the internet means inevitably being confronted with awful imagery such as Marlene Pinnock being beaten by a highway patrolman in California. We see Eric Garner murdered by the NYPD, pleading that he couldn’t breathe.
These videos may or may not assist with prosecutions. Footage showed the late Rodney King being beaten by California police in 1991. The officers were indicted, a rarity, but a jury acquitted them anyway, making a mockery of the old saying “seeing is believing.” Common sense wisdom doesn’t count for much if it threatens to upend white supremacy. No matter how seemingly iron clad the case, police rarely face criminal charges.
Such was the case of Milton Hall, a mentally ill black man shot to death by Saginaw, Michigan, police on July 1, 2012. A camera inside one of the patrol cars shows Hall, surrounded by police, armed only with a small pen knife. He is unable to harm anyone, given that he was surrounded by seven cops and a police dog, yet they fired forty-six shots with fourteen of them striking and killing Hall.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Iigvm5iPkU
Local prosecutors did not charge the officers and the Obama/Holder Department of Justice did not see fit to do anything either. After investigating they concluded that prosecution was not warranted. “Even if the officers were mistaken in their assessment of the threat posed by Hall, this would not establish that the officers acted willfully, or with an unlawful intent, when using deadly force against Hall. Accordingly, this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to give rise to a federal criminal prosecution of the police officers involved.”
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-results-investigation-death-milton-hall
The ACLU of Michigan not only pushed for local and federal action, but has taken its protest to a new and very important level. On October 27, 2014, Mark Fancher, Racial Justice Project Attorney for the ACLU of Michigan, testified before an international body regarding the federal government’s refusal to prosecute Hall’s “death by firing squad.” The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is an arm of the Organization of American States. It is mandated to “promote the observance and protection of human rights in the hemisphere.”
http://www.aclumich.org/issues/racial-justice/2014-10/2029
http://www.blackagendareport.com/blog/179
http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/mandate/what.asp
The IAHCR does not have the power to punish any individual or government for Hall’s killing, but the hearing had a very important purpose. ACLU of Michigan Legal Director Michael Steinberg put it simply. He called the testimony “a wake-up call for the desperate need to address police misconduct against the black citizens of this country.” He added, “The power behind these international tribunals is to draw attention to the problem and to put pressure on the United States to abide by human rights principles.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/milton-hall-shooting-video_n_6057402.html
The United States must be condemned before the nations of the world. Americans should not be allowed to behave as if human rights abuses only occur in far away nations while police in this country commit murder in broad daylight without fear of punishment.
The refusal of the federal government to charge Milton Hall’s killers is a bad omen for anyone wanting to see justice done for Michael Brown. Black Agenda Report has already revealed how the Justice Department uses media leaks to claim that the “bar is too high” to prosecute the officer who shot and killed the fleeing teenager.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14481
Obama and attorney general Eric Holder have no intention of prosecuting police murder, no matter what videos or other evidence show. Barack Obama is just not that into black people. Instead he sends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to pacify an angry public and fool them into thinking that black people will have reasons to hope. Sharpton and Jackson made appearances in Saginaw as they did in Ferguson, Missouri, but the presence of the two “leaders” accomplished nothing, as the Obama administration intended all along.
Rodney King finally had another day in court after the acquittal sparked an uprising in Los Angeles. Fifty three people died, millions of dollars in property was damaged and the political system was frightened. Federal prosecutors in the Bush administration charged the officers with civil rights violations. They won convictions against two of them and they later served time in prison.
Riots should not be a means of guaranteeing justice but the deck is stacked against black people who are victimized by police. If Eric Holder doesn’t prosecute Michael Brown’s killer any resulting violence ought to be called the Barack Obama Riots. President Kill List is able to make the case for punishment when it suits him. The man who claims the right to designate and kill terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to claim that there isn’t enough evidence to prosecute real criminals at home.
The ACLU of Michigan is to be commended for taking this action of exposing American injustice to the world. Just as the United States government calls for sanctions and boycotts of countries it doesn’t like, the rest of the world ought to penalize this country for the continuation of unpunished violence directed at black people. Legal cases must be made against the United States at the IAHCR and with any other entity which can bring our plight to the world. Expecting Obama and Holder to act on our behalf is just a foolish dream.
By Margaret Kimberley
Black people in this country are brutalized by police on a daily basis. That has always been true but thanks to modern technology there is a steady stream of proof caught on video. Accessing the internet means inevitably being confronted with awful imagery such as Marlene Pinnock being beaten by a highway patrolman in California. We see Eric Garner murdered by the NYPD, pleading that he couldn’t breathe.
These videos may or may not assist with prosecutions. Footage showed the late Rodney King being beaten by California police in 1991. The officers were indicted, a rarity, but a jury acquitted them anyway, making a mockery of the old saying “seeing is believing.” Common sense wisdom doesn’t count for much if it threatens to upend white supremacy. No matter how seemingly iron clad the case, police rarely face criminal charges.
Such was the case of Milton Hall, a mentally ill black man shot to death by Saginaw, Michigan, police on July 1, 2012. A camera inside one of the patrol cars shows Hall, surrounded by police, armed only with a small pen knife. He is unable to harm anyone, given that he was surrounded by seven cops and a police dog, yet they fired forty-six shots with fourteen of them striking and killing Hall.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Iigvm5iPkU
Local prosecutors did not charge the officers and the Obama/Holder Department of Justice did not see fit to do anything either. After investigating they concluded that prosecution was not warranted. “Even if the officers were mistaken in their assessment of the threat posed by Hall, this would not establish that the officers acted willfully, or with an unlawful intent, when using deadly force against Hall. Accordingly, this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to give rise to a federal criminal prosecution of the police officers involved.”
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-results-investigation-death-milton-hall
The ACLU of Michigan not only pushed for local and federal action, but has taken its protest to a new and very important level. On October 27, 2014, Mark Fancher, Racial Justice Project Attorney for the ACLU of Michigan, testified before an international body regarding the federal government’s refusal to prosecute Hall’s “death by firing squad.” The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is an arm of the Organization of American States. It is mandated to “promote the observance and protection of human rights in the hemisphere.”
http://www.aclumich.org/issues/racial-justice/2014-10/2029
http://www.blackagendareport.com/blog/179
http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/mandate/what.asp
The IAHCR does not have the power to punish any individual or government for Hall’s killing, but the hearing had a very important purpose. ACLU of Michigan Legal Director Michael Steinberg put it simply. He called the testimony “a wake-up call for the desperate need to address police misconduct against the black citizens of this country.” He added, “The power behind these international tribunals is to draw attention to the problem and to put pressure on the United States to abide by human rights principles.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/milton-hall-shooting-video_n_6057402.html
The United States must be condemned before the nations of the world. Americans should not be allowed to behave as if human rights abuses only occur in far away nations while police in this country commit murder in broad daylight without fear of punishment.
The refusal of the federal government to charge Milton Hall’s killers is a bad omen for anyone wanting to see justice done for Michael Brown. Black Agenda Report has already revealed how the Justice Department uses media leaks to claim that the “bar is too high” to prosecute the officer who shot and killed the fleeing teenager.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14481
Obama and attorney general Eric Holder have no intention of prosecuting police murder, no matter what videos or other evidence show. Barack Obama is just not that into black people. Instead he sends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to pacify an angry public and fool them into thinking that black people will have reasons to hope. Sharpton and Jackson made appearances in Saginaw as they did in Ferguson, Missouri, but the presence of the two “leaders” accomplished nothing, as the Obama administration intended all along.
Rodney King finally had another day in court after the acquittal sparked an uprising in Los Angeles. Fifty three people died, millions of dollars in property was damaged and the political system was frightened. Federal prosecutors in the Bush administration charged the officers with civil rights violations. They won convictions against two of them and they later served time in prison.
Riots should not be a means of guaranteeing justice but the deck is stacked against black people who are victimized by police. If Eric Holder doesn’t prosecute Michael Brown’s killer any resulting violence ought to be called the Barack Obama Riots. President Kill List is able to make the case for punishment when it suits him. The man who claims the right to designate and kill terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to claim that there isn’t enough evidence to prosecute real criminals at home.
The ACLU of Michigan is to be commended for taking this action of exposing American injustice to the world. Just as the United States government calls for sanctions and boycotts of countries it doesn’t like, the rest of the world ought to penalize this country for the continuation of unpunished violence directed at black people. Legal cases must be made against the United States at the IAHCR and with any other entity which can bring our plight to the world. Expecting Obama and Holder to act on our behalf is just a foolish dream.
By Margaret Kimberley
This Nation of Cowards
This Nation of Cowards
"Truthout " - It is likely that most of us, myself included, will live out our entire lives and die without ever meeting someone who willingly and purposefully volunteers to spend their vacation thousands of miles away, tending to people with diseases that make the talking heads on CNN and Fox want to hide under the bed. Kaci Hickox, a nurse from Maine who graduated from Johns Hopkins, is one such person.
In 2010, Hickox traveled overseas with the organization Doctors Without Borders to treat people suffering from yellow fever, one of several trips she made with that organization. Until last Friday, she was in Sierra Leone for a month, spending her vacation time helping to treat people infected with Ebola, the virus that has been burning through western Africa at an unprecedented rate. Kaci Hickox went to one of the most unstable countries in the world to help fight a deadly disease because someone had to, and so she raised her hand.
On Friday, she came home to a timorous nation of cowards.
That same day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo teamed up with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to establish a mandatory 21-day quarantine for any health workers returning from West Africa. When she landed at the ironically-named Liberty International Airport in Newark, she informed an immigration official that she had just returned from Sierra Leone, and was immediately hustled into a room. For the next several hours, she was questioned harshly by several people wearing bio-suits without being told exactly what was going on. According to her, nobody seemed to be in charge.
One man whose gun was visible under his bio-suit, in Hickox own words, "barked questions at me as if I was a criminal." After several hours passed, she was brought to University Hospital in Newark in a speeding sirens-blaring lights-flashing caravan of eight police cars. Upon arrival, she was stuffed into a quarantine tent with scant furniture, a port-o-potty and no shower, and was informed that this would be her home for the next twenty-one days.
Kaci Hickox, in her own words:http://www.dallasnews.com/ebola/headlines/20141025-uta-grad-isolated-at-new-jersey-hospital-as-part-of-ebola-quarantine.ece
I had spent a month watching children die, alone. I had witnessed human tragedy unfold before my eyes. I had tried to help when much of the world has looked on and done nothing.
At the hospital, I was escorted to a tent that sat outside of the building. The infectious disease and emergency department doctors took my temperature and other vitals and looked puzzled. "Your temperature is 98.6," they said. "You don't have a fever but we were told you had a fever."
After my temperature was recorded as 98.6 on the oral thermometer, the doctor decided to see what the forehead scanner records. It read 101. The doctor felts my neck and looked at the temperature again. "There's no way you have a fever," he said. "Your face is just flushed."
My blood was taken and tested for Ebola. It came back negative.
I sat alone in the isolation tent and thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal. Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?
Hickox began raising Hell about her treatment and the violation of her basic rights. The right-wing blogosphere launched itself into action, denouncing her for being a Democrat and dismissing her complaints because she voted for President Obama. Gov. Christie, one of the duo who ordered her mandatory quarantine, stood by his decision because, as he said, it was his job to protect the citizens of New Jersey. His concern for his constituents was evident, given that he was more than a thousand miles away when he defended his quarantine policy, campaigning for Rick Scott in Florida.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/christe-cuomo-ebola-quarantine-disaster
http://www.mediaite.com/online/let-the-smearing-of-left-wing-quarantined-nurse-kaci-hickox-begin/
On Monday, Christie was forced to retreat, announcing that Kaci Hickox would be "allowed" to serve out the remainder of her mandatory quarantine at home.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/kaci-hickox-to-be-released-ebola-scare
"Allowed."
"I didn't reverse my decision," said Gov. Christie later on Monday while still being so deeply concerned for his constituents that he was still campaigning for Gov. Scott in Florida, when pressed on his sudden change of heart. "She hadn't had any symptoms for 24 hours. And she tested negative for Ebola. So there was no reason to keep her. The reason she was put into the hospital in the first place was because she was running a high fever and was symptomatic."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/nyregion/nurse-in-newark-to-be-allowed-to-finish-ebola-quarantine-at-home-christie-says.html?_r=0
Lies. Hickox had no fever. She was not symptomatic. She remains so. Yet she has been "allowed" to go home from involuntary detention by a politician who clearly doesn't have the facts, but made sure she would be detained, as he campaigns for another politician in the Sunshine State.
New York Gov. Cuomo, the other side of this mandatory quarantine coin, took the time to invite any health worker detained after returning from their heroic work to "read my book" as a way to pass the time. One can understand why he would choose a civil liberties crisis to pitch his deep thoughts: at the time of this publication, Cuomo's book has sold less than a thousand copies. That's not a very impressive sales number for a salesman selling himself as Vice-Presidential material in the run-up to the 2016 election...and then he, like Christie, backpedaled on his mandatory quarantine plan.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cuomo-quarantine-read-my-book
The American Bar Association has weighed in on the legality of the Christie/Cuomo mandatory quarantine program. "States are required to protect civil liberties during public health emergencies," they wrote. "Quarantine and isolation orders must be conducted in accordance with substantive and procedural due process, and any restrictions of civil liberties should be legal and as minimally restrictive as reasonably possible." Kaci Hickox would seem to agree. According to Reuters, Hickox intends to file a federal lawsuit on the grounds that her involuntary confinement was a violation of her civil rights.
http://www.americanbar.org/publications/law_practice_today_home/law_practice_today_archive/april11/protecting_civil_liberties_during_quarantine_and_isolation_in_public_health_emergencies.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/26/kaci-hickox-lawsuit_n_6050848.html
When she wins that suit, I will raise a toast to her: a woman who volunteered to send herself into peril to assuage the suffering of others, who returned home with no fever and no symptoms, but was quarantined like a bug in a bottle because two craven politicians decided to catch the frantic media-driven wave and show how they were being Tough On Ebola in the War On Ebola, to the detriment of Kaci Hickox and other health workers who have more courage in the moon of their pinkie fingernail than those two governors have in their whole pander-prone bodies.
"Allowed."
"The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny," Aesop tells us. These days, the tyrant will justify that tyranny by playing to the fears of the people. Kaci Hickox is but one example of a nation that has entirely surrendered to those fears, both real and imagined, because those fears are a facile way for TV networks to get ratings, and for politicians to get coverage by stoking those fears, which creates more fear, which generates ratings, which makes political careers. Lather rinse repeat.
This is what happens in a nation trained to be fearful by a media and political establishment which profits from that fear. We have seen it with terrorism, and with WMD in Iraq, and Bird Flu, and "They're coming for your guns," and immigration, and now ISIS, and in so many other moments as well. Now, it is Ebola, which is dangerous to be sure, but not to the point that we explode the Bill of Rights, again. For the record, it seems the CDC would seem to agree.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/10/28/cdc-no-quarantine-for-returning-medics.html?via=newsletter&source=CSMorning
This is what happens to an ill-informed populace which is not taught to be strong, and fair, and true to the ideals of their founding, but is instead convinced by the very entities tasked to protect and inform them that they are, actually, about to die at the hands of this week's bloviated threat.
This is how a nation of cowards is made.
Mission accomplished.
William Rivers Pitt is Truthout's senior editor and lead columnist.
"Truthout " - It is likely that most of us, myself included, will live out our entire lives and die without ever meeting someone who willingly and purposefully volunteers to spend their vacation thousands of miles away, tending to people with diseases that make the talking heads on CNN and Fox want to hide under the bed. Kaci Hickox, a nurse from Maine who graduated from Johns Hopkins, is one such person.
In 2010, Hickox traveled overseas with the organization Doctors Without Borders to treat people suffering from yellow fever, one of several trips she made with that organization. Until last Friday, she was in Sierra Leone for a month, spending her vacation time helping to treat people infected with Ebola, the virus that has been burning through western Africa at an unprecedented rate. Kaci Hickox went to one of the most unstable countries in the world to help fight a deadly disease because someone had to, and so she raised her hand.
On Friday, she came home to a timorous nation of cowards.
That same day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo teamed up with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to establish a mandatory 21-day quarantine for any health workers returning from West Africa. When she landed at the ironically-named Liberty International Airport in Newark, she informed an immigration official that she had just returned from Sierra Leone, and was immediately hustled into a room. For the next several hours, she was questioned harshly by several people wearing bio-suits without being told exactly what was going on. According to her, nobody seemed to be in charge.
One man whose gun was visible under his bio-suit, in Hickox own words, "barked questions at me as if I was a criminal." After several hours passed, she was brought to University Hospital in Newark in a speeding sirens-blaring lights-flashing caravan of eight police cars. Upon arrival, she was stuffed into a quarantine tent with scant furniture, a port-o-potty and no shower, and was informed that this would be her home for the next twenty-one days.
Kaci Hickox, in her own words:http://www.dallasnews.com/ebola/headlines/20141025-uta-grad-isolated-at-new-jersey-hospital-as-part-of-ebola-quarantine.ece
I had spent a month watching children die, alone. I had witnessed human tragedy unfold before my eyes. I had tried to help when much of the world has looked on and done nothing.
At the hospital, I was escorted to a tent that sat outside of the building. The infectious disease and emergency department doctors took my temperature and other vitals and looked puzzled. "Your temperature is 98.6," they said. "You don't have a fever but we were told you had a fever."
After my temperature was recorded as 98.6 on the oral thermometer, the doctor decided to see what the forehead scanner records. It read 101. The doctor felts my neck and looked at the temperature again. "There's no way you have a fever," he said. "Your face is just flushed."
My blood was taken and tested for Ebola. It came back negative.
I sat alone in the isolation tent and thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal. Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?
Hickox began raising Hell about her treatment and the violation of her basic rights. The right-wing blogosphere launched itself into action, denouncing her for being a Democrat and dismissing her complaints because she voted for President Obama. Gov. Christie, one of the duo who ordered her mandatory quarantine, stood by his decision because, as he said, it was his job to protect the citizens of New Jersey. His concern for his constituents was evident, given that he was more than a thousand miles away when he defended his quarantine policy, campaigning for Rick Scott in Florida.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/christe-cuomo-ebola-quarantine-disaster
http://www.mediaite.com/online/let-the-smearing-of-left-wing-quarantined-nurse-kaci-hickox-begin/
On Monday, Christie was forced to retreat, announcing that Kaci Hickox would be "allowed" to serve out the remainder of her mandatory quarantine at home.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/kaci-hickox-to-be-released-ebola-scare
"Allowed."
"I didn't reverse my decision," said Gov. Christie later on Monday while still being so deeply concerned for his constituents that he was still campaigning for Gov. Scott in Florida, when pressed on his sudden change of heart. "She hadn't had any symptoms for 24 hours. And she tested negative for Ebola. So there was no reason to keep her. The reason she was put into the hospital in the first place was because she was running a high fever and was symptomatic."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/nyregion/nurse-in-newark-to-be-allowed-to-finish-ebola-quarantine-at-home-christie-says.html?_r=0
Lies. Hickox had no fever. She was not symptomatic. She remains so. Yet she has been "allowed" to go home from involuntary detention by a politician who clearly doesn't have the facts, but made sure she would be detained, as he campaigns for another politician in the Sunshine State.
New York Gov. Cuomo, the other side of this mandatory quarantine coin, took the time to invite any health worker detained after returning from their heroic work to "read my book" as a way to pass the time. One can understand why he would choose a civil liberties crisis to pitch his deep thoughts: at the time of this publication, Cuomo's book has sold less than a thousand copies. That's not a very impressive sales number for a salesman selling himself as Vice-Presidential material in the run-up to the 2016 election...and then he, like Christie, backpedaled on his mandatory quarantine plan.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cuomo-quarantine-read-my-book
The American Bar Association has weighed in on the legality of the Christie/Cuomo mandatory quarantine program. "States are required to protect civil liberties during public health emergencies," they wrote. "Quarantine and isolation orders must be conducted in accordance with substantive and procedural due process, and any restrictions of civil liberties should be legal and as minimally restrictive as reasonably possible." Kaci Hickox would seem to agree. According to Reuters, Hickox intends to file a federal lawsuit on the grounds that her involuntary confinement was a violation of her civil rights.
http://www.americanbar.org/publications/law_practice_today_home/law_practice_today_archive/april11/protecting_civil_liberties_during_quarantine_and_isolation_in_public_health_emergencies.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/26/kaci-hickox-lawsuit_n_6050848.html
When she wins that suit, I will raise a toast to her: a woman who volunteered to send herself into peril to assuage the suffering of others, who returned home with no fever and no symptoms, but was quarantined like a bug in a bottle because two craven politicians decided to catch the frantic media-driven wave and show how they were being Tough On Ebola in the War On Ebola, to the detriment of Kaci Hickox and other health workers who have more courage in the moon of their pinkie fingernail than those two governors have in their whole pander-prone bodies.
"Allowed."
"The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny," Aesop tells us. These days, the tyrant will justify that tyranny by playing to the fears of the people. Kaci Hickox is but one example of a nation that has entirely surrendered to those fears, both real and imagined, because those fears are a facile way for TV networks to get ratings, and for politicians to get coverage by stoking those fears, which creates more fear, which generates ratings, which makes political careers. Lather rinse repeat.
This is what happens in a nation trained to be fearful by a media and political establishment which profits from that fear. We have seen it with terrorism, and with WMD in Iraq, and Bird Flu, and "They're coming for your guns," and immigration, and now ISIS, and in so many other moments as well. Now, it is Ebola, which is dangerous to be sure, but not to the point that we explode the Bill of Rights, again. For the record, it seems the CDC would seem to agree.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/10/28/cdc-no-quarantine-for-returning-medics.html?via=newsletter&source=CSMorning
This is what happens to an ill-informed populace which is not taught to be strong, and fair, and true to the ideals of their founding, but is instead convinced by the very entities tasked to protect and inform them that they are, actually, about to die at the hands of this week's bloviated threat.
This is how a nation of cowards is made.
Mission accomplished.
William Rivers Pitt is Truthout's senior editor and lead columnist.
Corporations Act To Make Congress A Wholly Owned Subsidiary
Corporations Act To Make Congress A Wholly Owned Subsidiary
As Election Day approaches, two reports show us exactly how corrupted our political system has become. Unless voters come out in force, it looks like corporate money is about to buy itself another house of Congress.
The Wall Street Journal analyzed filings from the Federal Election Commission and concluded that
http://online.wsj.com/articles/business-pac-dollars-move-to-gop-candidates-in-seven-key-senate-races-1414543038?cb=logged0.22870760201476514
In a significant shift, business groups gave more money to Republican candidates than to Democrats in seven of the most competitive Senate races in recent months, in some cases taking the unusual step of betting against sitting senators.
The Journal found that corporate PACs gave most of their donations to Democrats in the early part of the campaign. That fits with a longstanding pattern: big-business interests shower incumbents with money to encourage special treatment, both during the election year and in the upcoming term.
But giving has shifted dramatically since June. The Journal discovered that Republican candidates received the lion’s share of corporate campaign contributions in the July-to-September time period. The cash-generating power of incumbency had faded – for Democrats.
One reason for the shift, according to sources, is a sense that Democrats are the underdogs. “Wall Street expects return on investment,” a brokerage executive told the Journal. “It makes no sense to contribute to a losing campaign.”
The other reason, of course, is ideologically based. Corporations feel more comfortable abandoning incumbent Democrats than they do turning their backs on more reliably loyal Republicans. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has been awash in corporate cash this year, for example – thanks to his far-right stance, his chances of reelection, and the position of influence he would hold as Majority Leader if the GOP captures the Senate.
In a related report, Public Citizen analyzed the flow of “dark money” (from groups which don’t have to disclose their donors) and found that the United States Chamber of Commerce, the largest dark-money spender, “is leaving a huge footprint in almost every race it enters.”
http://www.citizen.org/documents/us-chamber-of-commerce-dark-money-spending-report.pdf
As of October 25, the Chamber had spent $31.8 million on House and Senate races. The second-largest dark-money spender, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, had spent $23.5 million. Other big-spending dark-money groups include “Patriot Majority USA,” the extremist “Americans for Prosperity,” and the National Rifle Association.
Public Citizen found that the Chamber was “the biggest spender among non-disclosing outside groups in 28 of 35 races in which it has gotten involved. It is the second-biggest non-disclosing spender in three races, and the third-biggest dark money spender in four races.”
This dark money is being spent in as lopsided a manner as that of the business PACs analyzed by the Wall Street Journal, with Public Citizen concluding that “almost all of the money the Chamber has spent has gone to aid Republicans or hinder Democrats … The Chamber has not spent any money supporting Democrats.”
The Nation’s George Zornick (who we interviewed about the election last week on The Zero Hour) notes that “the Chamber is a 501(c)(6) tax-exempt organization, meaning it doesn’t have to disclose its donors.” Zornick adds that publicly available data reveals that “much of the Chamber’s money has generally come from titans in the oil, banking and agriculture industries, among others.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I06nNZ60YFY
http://www.thisisthezerohour.com/
In the past, many Congressional Democrats were able to count on the power of incumbency to trump party affiliation or the “liberal” label when it came time to collect corporate cash. But as Republicans have become increasingly shameless in their subservience to business interests – remember “Washington is here to serve the banks”? – corporations may sense that the time is coming when no longer need to compromise with government at all. From the Wall Street Journal:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/12/13/134703/bachus-serves-bank/
“It’s increasingly likely we’re going to reestablish a pro-business majority in the Senate,” said Rob Engstrom, national political director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which mostly backs conservative candidates. He said President Barack Obama and other party leaders had made Democratic candidates “vulnerable, so companies aren’t going to write PAC checks to candidates who fundamentally don’t represent their interests.”
If the incumbents in Washington haven’t been representing corporate interests effectively, it’s hard to imagine who could. Both corporate profits and the personal wealth of the 1 percent soared in the aftermath of a financial crisis which left most Americans worse off than ever before.
Perhaps Engstrom meant to say “companies aren’t going to write PAC checks to candidates who don’t solely represent their interests.” From the looks of things, Corporate America is no longer content with buying political influence. Now it wants to turn Congress into a wholly owned subsidiary. And it may well succeed, unless the voters thwart them on Tuesday.
For Democrats in Congress, perhaps the moral of the story is this: Don’t chase their money, because they’ll still betray you in the end – just as they did on Social Security. Instead of kowtowing to them, fight them. You may not be able to outspend your opponents, but that option seems to be disappearing anyway. At least that way you’ll have the voters on your side.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/gop-betrays-social-securi_b_6061196.html
For the American people, the moral of this story couldn’t be clearer: If we don’t get money out of politics, we’ll lose our democracy altogether.
As Election Day approaches, two reports show us exactly how corrupted our political system has become. Unless voters come out in force, it looks like corporate money is about to buy itself another house of Congress.
The Wall Street Journal analyzed filings from the Federal Election Commission and concluded that
http://online.wsj.com/articles/business-pac-dollars-move-to-gop-candidates-in-seven-key-senate-races-1414543038?cb=logged0.22870760201476514
In a significant shift, business groups gave more money to Republican candidates than to Democrats in seven of the most competitive Senate races in recent months, in some cases taking the unusual step of betting against sitting senators.
The Journal found that corporate PACs gave most of their donations to Democrats in the early part of the campaign. That fits with a longstanding pattern: big-business interests shower incumbents with money to encourage special treatment, both during the election year and in the upcoming term.
But giving has shifted dramatically since June. The Journal discovered that Republican candidates received the lion’s share of corporate campaign contributions in the July-to-September time period. The cash-generating power of incumbency had faded – for Democrats.
One reason for the shift, according to sources, is a sense that Democrats are the underdogs. “Wall Street expects return on investment,” a brokerage executive told the Journal. “It makes no sense to contribute to a losing campaign.”
The other reason, of course, is ideologically based. Corporations feel more comfortable abandoning incumbent Democrats than they do turning their backs on more reliably loyal Republicans. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has been awash in corporate cash this year, for example – thanks to his far-right stance, his chances of reelection, and the position of influence he would hold as Majority Leader if the GOP captures the Senate.
In a related report, Public Citizen analyzed the flow of “dark money” (from groups which don’t have to disclose their donors) and found that the United States Chamber of Commerce, the largest dark-money spender, “is leaving a huge footprint in almost every race it enters.”
http://www.citizen.org/documents/us-chamber-of-commerce-dark-money-spending-report.pdf
As of October 25, the Chamber had spent $31.8 million on House and Senate races. The second-largest dark-money spender, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, had spent $23.5 million. Other big-spending dark-money groups include “Patriot Majority USA,” the extremist “Americans for Prosperity,” and the National Rifle Association.
Public Citizen found that the Chamber was “the biggest spender among non-disclosing outside groups in 28 of 35 races in which it has gotten involved. It is the second-biggest non-disclosing spender in three races, and the third-biggest dark money spender in four races.”
This dark money is being spent in as lopsided a manner as that of the business PACs analyzed by the Wall Street Journal, with Public Citizen concluding that “almost all of the money the Chamber has spent has gone to aid Republicans or hinder Democrats … The Chamber has not spent any money supporting Democrats.”
The Nation’s George Zornick (who we interviewed about the election last week on The Zero Hour) notes that “the Chamber is a 501(c)(6) tax-exempt organization, meaning it doesn’t have to disclose its donors.” Zornick adds that publicly available data reveals that “much of the Chamber’s money has generally come from titans in the oil, banking and agriculture industries, among others.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I06nNZ60YFY
http://www.thisisthezerohour.com/
In the past, many Congressional Democrats were able to count on the power of incumbency to trump party affiliation or the “liberal” label when it came time to collect corporate cash. But as Republicans have become increasingly shameless in their subservience to business interests – remember “Washington is here to serve the banks”? – corporations may sense that the time is coming when no longer need to compromise with government at all. From the Wall Street Journal:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/12/13/134703/bachus-serves-bank/
“It’s increasingly likely we’re going to reestablish a pro-business majority in the Senate,” said Rob Engstrom, national political director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which mostly backs conservative candidates. He said President Barack Obama and other party leaders had made Democratic candidates “vulnerable, so companies aren’t going to write PAC checks to candidates who fundamentally don’t represent their interests.”
If the incumbents in Washington haven’t been representing corporate interests effectively, it’s hard to imagine who could. Both corporate profits and the personal wealth of the 1 percent soared in the aftermath of a financial crisis which left most Americans worse off than ever before.
Perhaps Engstrom meant to say “companies aren’t going to write PAC checks to candidates who don’t solely represent their interests.” From the looks of things, Corporate America is no longer content with buying political influence. Now it wants to turn Congress into a wholly owned subsidiary. And it may well succeed, unless the voters thwart them on Tuesday.
For Democrats in Congress, perhaps the moral of the story is this: Don’t chase their money, because they’ll still betray you in the end – just as they did on Social Security. Instead of kowtowing to them, fight them. You may not be able to outspend your opponents, but that option seems to be disappearing anyway. At least that way you’ll have the voters on your side.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/gop-betrays-social-securi_b_6061196.html
For the American people, the moral of this story couldn’t be clearer: If we don’t get money out of politics, we’ll lose our democracy altogether.
It Is a Mistake to Consider the Ebola Epidemic a Hoax
It Is a Mistake to Consider the Ebola Epidemic a Hoax
I was almost ready to dismiss the present “Ebola crisis” as a hoax as so many others have. Just based upon the fact that the virus is not spreading within the United Stated as would be expected, there is a natural tendency to reasonably suspect that we are not looking at a strain of Ebola that has been weaponized. It would also be reasonable to assume that this bioweapon is not nearly as contagious as “traditional Ebola” and this would explain the extremely low transmission rate. The obvious purpose of this bioweapon, under these conditions, would be to scare people into taking the Bill Gates funded vaccines. However, as this article will demonstrate, it might be a mistake to jump to the false flag conclusion at this point in time.
This article is the first of a two part series which explores the differing possibilities connected to so-called presence of Ebola inside of the United States
The Numbers Do Not Lie
As the subtitle suggests, Ebola should be exploding exponentially through the United States, for a variety of reasons, and it is not. I have spent the past week considering the possibility that Ebola really is a false flag designed to “trick” us into submitting to a national protocol relating to forcing every man, woman and child in the country into taking vaccines. On the surface, the case is strong that we are not dealing with traditional Ebola. The reasons for this line of reasoning are listed below.
Last weekend, I used my SPSS statistics program to run the projected reproduction rate (Ro) of the Ebola virus in the United States. Based upon the late Thomas Duncan’s unrestricted movements, as USA’s “patient zero”, prior to succumbing to Ebola, my statistics program tells me that we should be seeing hundreds of cases in the U.S. by this point in time. Before Christmas, we should be seeing thousands, if not tens of thousands of cases. Yet, we are not. As far as we know, there is only one active case inside of the United States and that would be Dr. Spencer. This defies all logic if we are looking at Ebola as we understand the virus to be.
If the United States had over 250 cases of Ebola, social media would make it virtually impossible for this administration to cover up every single case.
The fact is, that Ebola is not spreading as expected.
The Spread of Ebola Is Related to GDP and Type of Economy
In my study, related to the spread of the pathogen, thourgh of the use of a multiple regression analysis, I found a positive correlation between GDP, the type of economy and the Ro rate. What jumped out in my analysis of West African countries was that the more affluent economies had a 60% greater Ro rate than the poorer countries
When one ponders the fact that a higher GDP is related to more people congregating together (e.g. shopping malls, public transit, movie theaters, sporting events, etc.) in close proximity, thus the greater Ro rate would be expected to be higher in wealthier countries. For example, Dr. Christian L. Althaus from the Swiss National Science Foundation found that Sierra Leone has an Ro rate of 2.53, with a GDP of $9 billion dollars. Liberia has a GDP of only $3 billion dollars and a Ro rate of 1.59, or almost 60% less that Sierra Leone. Liberia is an extremely primitive economy in which almost 80% of the people work in agriculture and would have less person to person contact on a daily basis than in Sierra Leone in which less than half of Sierra Leone population is employed in agriculture.
http://www.naturalnews.com/asymptomatic_carriers.html
If we apply the Sierra Leone Ro numbers to the United States, as a factor of GDP, coupled with our service based economy combined with high concentrations of people in close proximity, our Ro Rate should be 9-10 times greater than Sierra Leone. This would place the expected Ro rate of approximately 20 times greater for the Ebola virus based upon our service economy structure and the mobility of our society.
In short, the virus is inexplicably failing to replicate in the expected manner. The fear of Ebola is spreading faster than the virus itself.
More Mitigating Factors Suggesting the Ebola Crisis Is a False Flag
Infected Ebola victims, not in quarantine, should be infected many others prior to encountering medical personnel. In a distinct and stunning statistical anomaly, we need to consider why are such a disproportionate number of medical personnel are contracting the virus in comparison to the general population? This suggests implantation of the virus, not the normal spreading of a virus. This is particularly true when an Ebola victim would have contact with the public far in advance of diagnostics and treatment, and in greater numbers than they would with medical personnel.
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/2/5960449/why-are-many-ebola-outbreak-health-workers-doctors-dying-virus
The evidence seems strong that we are looking at an artificially mutated virus designed not to be highly transmissible. Within this line of thinking, Bill “Vaccine” Gates must be licking his chops and sharpening his syringes in anticipation of a huge payday connected to the needless mass vaccination of the American public.
Not So Fast…
There are some very serious questions connected as to why we should not be so quick to dismiss the Ebola crisis as a monumental health risk and national security concern.
Why is Human Health Services and the DOD pressing forward with the preparation of FEMA camps for occupation of Ebola victims and those exposed to them for a virus that is not spreading?
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/10/30/fema-camp-mass-incarceration-is-a-goal-of-the-ebola-crisis/
As I have previously pointed out, the CDC owns the patent on Ebola, and all strains within 70% of the variance of the virus. As a result, the CDC stands to make money on the spread of the virus due to the royalties associated with treating a patented virus. But wait a minute, a patent is never issued for owning something in nature. Therefore, we must conclude that this present strain of Ebola has been artificially altered. Why?
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/09/17/the-cdc-nih-bill-gates-own-the-patents-on-existing-ebola-related-vaccines-mandatory-vaccinations-are-near/
If the hoax of the spread of Ebola is true then why are the following actions being taken by the government?
The government has ordered over 250,000 hazmat suits to be sent to Dallas. Why? In what appears to be an effort to ensure the spread of Ebola in the United States, Obama has announced that Ebola patients will be brought from West Africa for treatment in the United States at a cost of $500, 000 for each case. Further, Ebola symptoms can be spread by people with no symptoms. Various government agencies are scrambling to order one million hazmat suits and we should all be asking why?http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/10/30/exclusive-u-s-government-orders-250000-hazmat-suits-to-be-sent-to-dallas/
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/10/30/u-s-state-dept-to-transport-foreign-ebola-victims-to-u-s-hospitals-for-treatment/
http://www.naturalnews.com/047455_Ebola_transmission_asymptomatic_carriers_no_symptoms.html
http://www.infowars.com/government-agencies-scramble-to-purchase-hazmat-suits/
No, it is too early and there is far too much contradictory evidence to suggest that the virus is not going to be a threat to the American public in the near future. There is also another factor that could prove very telling and that is the real reason why U.S. soldiers are being sent to West Africa. This will be the topic of Part Two of this series.
by Dave Hodges
I was almost ready to dismiss the present “Ebola crisis” as a hoax as so many others have. Just based upon the fact that the virus is not spreading within the United Stated as would be expected, there is a natural tendency to reasonably suspect that we are not looking at a strain of Ebola that has been weaponized. It would also be reasonable to assume that this bioweapon is not nearly as contagious as “traditional Ebola” and this would explain the extremely low transmission rate. The obvious purpose of this bioweapon, under these conditions, would be to scare people into taking the Bill Gates funded vaccines. However, as this article will demonstrate, it might be a mistake to jump to the false flag conclusion at this point in time.
This article is the first of a two part series which explores the differing possibilities connected to so-called presence of Ebola inside of the United States
The Numbers Do Not Lie
As the subtitle suggests, Ebola should be exploding exponentially through the United States, for a variety of reasons, and it is not. I have spent the past week considering the possibility that Ebola really is a false flag designed to “trick” us into submitting to a national protocol relating to forcing every man, woman and child in the country into taking vaccines. On the surface, the case is strong that we are not dealing with traditional Ebola. The reasons for this line of reasoning are listed below.
Last weekend, I used my SPSS statistics program to run the projected reproduction rate (Ro) of the Ebola virus in the United States. Based upon the late Thomas Duncan’s unrestricted movements, as USA’s “patient zero”, prior to succumbing to Ebola, my statistics program tells me that we should be seeing hundreds of cases in the U.S. by this point in time. Before Christmas, we should be seeing thousands, if not tens of thousands of cases. Yet, we are not. As far as we know, there is only one active case inside of the United States and that would be Dr. Spencer. This defies all logic if we are looking at Ebola as we understand the virus to be.
If the United States had over 250 cases of Ebola, social media would make it virtually impossible for this administration to cover up every single case.
The fact is, that Ebola is not spreading as expected.
The Spread of Ebola Is Related to GDP and Type of Economy
In my study, related to the spread of the pathogen, thourgh of the use of a multiple regression analysis, I found a positive correlation between GDP, the type of economy and the Ro rate. What jumped out in my analysis of West African countries was that the more affluent economies had a 60% greater Ro rate than the poorer countries
When one ponders the fact that a higher GDP is related to more people congregating together (e.g. shopping malls, public transit, movie theaters, sporting events, etc.) in close proximity, thus the greater Ro rate would be expected to be higher in wealthier countries. For example, Dr. Christian L. Althaus from the Swiss National Science Foundation found that Sierra Leone has an Ro rate of 2.53, with a GDP of $9 billion dollars. Liberia has a GDP of only $3 billion dollars and a Ro rate of 1.59, or almost 60% less that Sierra Leone. Liberia is an extremely primitive economy in which almost 80% of the people work in agriculture and would have less person to person contact on a daily basis than in Sierra Leone in which less than half of Sierra Leone population is employed in agriculture.
http://www.naturalnews.com/asymptomatic_carriers.html
If we apply the Sierra Leone Ro numbers to the United States, as a factor of GDP, coupled with our service based economy combined with high concentrations of people in close proximity, our Ro Rate should be 9-10 times greater than Sierra Leone. This would place the expected Ro rate of approximately 20 times greater for the Ebola virus based upon our service economy structure and the mobility of our society.
In short, the virus is inexplicably failing to replicate in the expected manner. The fear of Ebola is spreading faster than the virus itself.
More Mitigating Factors Suggesting the Ebola Crisis Is a False Flag
Infected Ebola victims, not in quarantine, should be infected many others prior to encountering medical personnel. In a distinct and stunning statistical anomaly, we need to consider why are such a disproportionate number of medical personnel are contracting the virus in comparison to the general population? This suggests implantation of the virus, not the normal spreading of a virus. This is particularly true when an Ebola victim would have contact with the public far in advance of diagnostics and treatment, and in greater numbers than they would with medical personnel.
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/2/5960449/why-are-many-ebola-outbreak-health-workers-doctors-dying-virus
The evidence seems strong that we are looking at an artificially mutated virus designed not to be highly transmissible. Within this line of thinking, Bill “Vaccine” Gates must be licking his chops and sharpening his syringes in anticipation of a huge payday connected to the needless mass vaccination of the American public.
Not So Fast…
There are some very serious questions connected as to why we should not be so quick to dismiss the Ebola crisis as a monumental health risk and national security concern.
Why is Human Health Services and the DOD pressing forward with the preparation of FEMA camps for occupation of Ebola victims and those exposed to them for a virus that is not spreading?
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/10/30/fema-camp-mass-incarceration-is-a-goal-of-the-ebola-crisis/
As I have previously pointed out, the CDC owns the patent on Ebola, and all strains within 70% of the variance of the virus. As a result, the CDC stands to make money on the spread of the virus due to the royalties associated with treating a patented virus. But wait a minute, a patent is never issued for owning something in nature. Therefore, we must conclude that this present strain of Ebola has been artificially altered. Why?
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/09/17/the-cdc-nih-bill-gates-own-the-patents-on-existing-ebola-related-vaccines-mandatory-vaccinations-are-near/
If the hoax of the spread of Ebola is true then why are the following actions being taken by the government?
The government has ordered over 250,000 hazmat suits to be sent to Dallas. Why? In what appears to be an effort to ensure the spread of Ebola in the United States, Obama has announced that Ebola patients will be brought from West Africa for treatment in the United States at a cost of $500, 000 for each case. Further, Ebola symptoms can be spread by people with no symptoms. Various government agencies are scrambling to order one million hazmat suits and we should all be asking why?http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/10/30/exclusive-u-s-government-orders-250000-hazmat-suits-to-be-sent-to-dallas/
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/10/30/u-s-state-dept-to-transport-foreign-ebola-victims-to-u-s-hospitals-for-treatment/
http://www.naturalnews.com/047455_Ebola_transmission_asymptomatic_carriers_no_symptoms.html
http://www.infowars.com/government-agencies-scramble-to-purchase-hazmat-suits/
No, it is too early and there is far too much contradictory evidence to suggest that the virus is not going to be a threat to the American public in the near future. There is also another factor that could prove very telling and that is the real reason why U.S. soldiers are being sent to West Africa. This will be the topic of Part Two of this series.
by Dave Hodges
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