Will the French Indict Cheney?
by Doug Ireland
October 22, 2005

Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.

At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton--the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President--in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh.

One of France's best-known investigating magistrates, Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke--who came to fame by unearthing major French campaign finance scandals in the 1990s that led to a raft of indictments--has been conducting a probe of the Nigeria deal since October. And, three days before Christmas, the Paris daily Le Figaro front-paged the news that Judge van Ruymbeke had notified the Justice Ministry that Cheney might be among those eventually indicted as a result of his investigation.

According to accounts in the French press, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret "retrocommissions" paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery's construction. These reports say van Ruymbeke has fingered as the bagman in the operation a 55-year-old London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler, who has worked for Halliburton for some thirty years. It was Tesler who was paid the $180 million as a "commercial consultant" through a Gibraltar-based front company he set up called TriStar. TriStar, in turn, got the money from a consortium set up for the Nigeria deal by Halliburton and Technip and registered in Madeira, the Portuguese offshore island where taxes don't apply. According to Agence France-Presse, a former top Technip official, Georges Krammer, has testified that the Madeira-based consortium was a "slush fund" controlled by Halliburton--through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root--and Technip. Krammer, who is cooperating with the investigation, also swore that Tesler was imposed as the intermediary by Halliburton over the objections of Technip.

Tesler is a curious fellow: A veteran operator in Nigeria, he was the financial adviser to the late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha and controlled his personal fortune, while at the same time working for Halliburton. Abacha's former Oil Minister, Dan Etete--who is suspected of having used some of the alleged bribe money to buy himself fancy apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy--was deposed by Judge van Ruymbeke in December. According to the Journal du Dimanche (a large Sunday paper), Etete's testimony seemed to confirm the judge's suspicions that Tesler laundered the $180 million through offshore and other accounts, and that part of the money wound up in dictator Abacha's coffers. Tesler's bank accounts in Monaco, Switzerland and elsewhere have been subpoenaed in an effort to find out where the money went.

Judge van Ruymbeke's authority for his transnational investigation comes from a law France passed in 2000 against "bribing foreign officials," following its ratification of a convention adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development prohibiting bribe-giving in the course of commercial transactions. The notion that the judge's targeting of Cheney might be in part retaliatory for the Bush Administration's exclusion of France from Iraq reconstruction contracts is unlikely: Van Ruymbeke is notoriously independent, and his previous investigations have been aimed at politicians and parties of both right and left. He's also no stranger to the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics, having previously investigated bribe-giving by the French petrogiant Elf--indeed, it was in the course of his Elf investigation that van Ruymbeke stumbled upon the Nigerian deal.

The suspected bribe money was mostly ladled out between 1995 and 2000, when Cheney was Halliburton's CEO. The Journal du Dimanche reported on December 21 that "it is probable that some of the 'retrocommissions' found their way back to the United States" and asked, did this money go "to Halliburton's officials? To officials of the Republican Party?" These questions have so far gone unasked by America's media, which have completely ignored the explosive Le Figaro headline revealing the targeting of Cheney. It will be interesting to see if the US press looks seriously into this ticking time-bomb of a scandal before the November elections.
************************************************************
Doug Ireland, a longtime Nation contributor, has been a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Observer and the Paris daily Libération. He is also a contributing editor of POZ, the monthly for the HIV-positive community.

The original article was posted on December 29,2003:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040112/ireland
Reposted on October 22, 2005
http://www.uruknet.com/?p=17058&hd=0&size=1&l=e

Do No Harm:
A Doctor's Hypocritical Oath
by Ray Boyd
18 Oct, 2005

Take your medicine, as long as it's not marijuana?

Take your medicine, as long as it's not marijuana?

Compassionate conservatism in the world of modern medicine:

If your gut wrenches, vomit.

If you can't absorb nutrients through your defective digestive system, get your nutrients intravenously.

If you have chronic pain so severe you want to die, suffer.

If you have arthritis so bad that your arms and legs are turning into mummified pretzel shapes, take a warm bath with Epsom Salts.

If you are starving to death because your cancer chemotherapy or AIDS drugs have stolen your appetite, force yourself to eat.

Or take prescription drugs that make the conditions worse. Or have surgery. Or die.

That's the Bush administration's message to the sick and dying people of the United States: suffer, endure pain, and perhaps even die, but whatever you do, don't use medical marijuana, not even in a state where the majority of your fellow citizens approve of you using it.

If you want to use medical marijuana, you break federal law, and you know what happens if you break federal law – you live in fear, you risk losing your family, assets, and freedom.

If you break an American federal marijuana law, you risk prosecution, even if you break the law while you live in Canada.

Just ask Canadian marijuana seed seller Marc Emery. He broke Canadian marijuana laws for years, but the worst that ever happened to him was 90 days in jail for passing a joint. He broke Canadian laws on television. He broke them in front of Parliament and police stations. He advertised illegal seed sales on the Internet. He gave illegal seed sale money to prominent politicians. The Canadian government investigated him a couple of years ago and decided not to bust him for selling seeds. But the US government decided to bust him for selling seeds, and the DEA wants to kidnap him from Canada (they call it "extradition").

If you are an American in America, should you use and/or grow medical marijuana? It's a hard choice. If the government catches you using, growing or advocating medical marijuana, you could lose your life. Like Steve McWilliams, the San Diego medpot activist who killed himself earlier this year after the feds took away his right to use medical marijuana and created an unbearable situation of pain and illness for him by doing so.

In most countries, if you want to use pot, you have two clear choices: help yourself with the relatively harmless healing herb and thus make yourself a federally-designated cannabis criminal, or take prescription drugs.

There are of course other choices, such as surgery, suicide, death, alternative therapies. But let's just stay focused on the drug choice dilemma: the federal drug warriors say marijuana is not medicine; you have no right to choose medical marijuana even if you know it will help you. The federal drug warriors say a substance is not "a medicine" until the government says it's a medicine, but the government won't say something is a medicine unless the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it's a medicine first. The FDA won’t say a substance is a medicine unless a pharmaceutical corporation pays off researchers, who then write a study or two saying that the substance is a medicine. The researchers and physicians who tell the FDA and federal government that a substance is or is not a medicine are as believable as the researchers and physicians who used to testify under oath to Congress, claiming that cigarettes were actually good for people's health.

The process involved in creating "legal prescription drugs" causes more harm than illegal marijuana, and verges on criminal negligence. Consider a report titled "Uneasy Alliance: Clinical Investigators and the Pharmaceutical Industry" written by Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer. The report says many medical researchers, physicians and academic institutions are funded by the prescription drug industry.

Bodenheimer interviewed researchers who told how pharmaceutical companies halted publication or altered the contents of prescription drug studies, so they could cover up negative information that would interfere with FDA product approval.

One researcher who found problems with a company's drug was told by the sponsoring pharmaceutical company that funded the research that he would not get hired as a contract researcher again, unless he falsified his findings to present the product in a more favorable light.

The FDA, supposedly a watchdog protecting the public from bad prescription drugs, is implicated in numerous scandals involving bad research and deadly drugs.

Recently, FDA safety officer David Graham stated that the FDA is "the single greatest obstacle to doing anything effective" regarding Vioxx, a drug reported to cause severe side effects and death.

Graham said the FDA could have prevented the deaths resulting from Vioxx.

"Nearly 60,000 people probably died from Vioxx," Graham lamented. "The FDA had the opportunity, the responsibility, to stop that, and didn't."

Graham said the FDA was in "a collaborative relationship" with the pharmaceutical industry, and that FDA had financial incentive to "to approve new drugs and approve them more quickly."

"The pharma-FDA complex has to be dismantled," Graham warned, "and the American people have to insist on that, otherwise we're going to have more disasters like Vioxx happen in the future."

Guess what happened to Graham after he admitted that the FDA had wrongly handled the Vioxx situation? Graham was subject to a smear campaign by FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford. But there is some justice in the world: Crawford, who was only following Karl Rove's example regarding how you handle a critic (attack the critic, endanger the critic's family, etc.), was forced to resign recently.

He joins FEMA boss Michael Brown, who resigned after it was discovered that his qualifications for doing hurricane relief consisted of being a lawyer for owners of Arabian race horses.

Crawford was a political hack who opposed women's reproductive rights. He ran an agency that was all about government regulation, but he opposed government regulation.

Crawford believes, as does Bush's new female Supreme Court nominee, that as soon as a sperm and egg get together, a baby exists.

That's why, despite two FDA advisory committee votes approving the "morning-after contraceptive pill," Crawford overruled his own experts and prohibited the drug from being provided. He said he was very concerned about womens' health.

But Crawford wasn't concerned about the health of people who used the painkiller Vioxx. According to Graham, "a study of patient insurance records showed that Vioxx users had a 50 percent greater chance of heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths." Crawford knew about the study Graham had cited.

What did Crawford do to protect the American people from Vioxx? He helped Vioxx manufacturer Merck hide the negative Vioxx study.

He tried to force Graham to stop criticizing Vioxx. Graham resisted, so Crawford started slagging him. In December 2004, the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower support group, described Crawford's actions against Graham as "rabid bureaucratic backlash." Several Congressmembers wrote a report telling Crawford that his attacks on Graham were "out of line and may very well be illegal."

"Your treatment of Dr. Graham," the Congressional report said, "undoubtedly has had a chilling effect on the willingness of FDA employees to speak up and disagree when they believe the public's health is at risk."

Why would Crawford "whore" for Merck? Could it be because Merck is one of the largest pharmaceutical company donors to the Republican Party? It gives hundreds of thousands of dollars directly and indirectly to Repubs every year.

Crawford isn't just loyal to Merck. He also allegedly sold himself to the Bush 2004 campaign team. Before the election, Bush opposed allowing Canada to export prescription drugs to the USA, and the policy was costing Bush votes because elderly voters wanted Canadian drugs because they're cheaper and better than US versions of the same drugs. Just before the election, then-FDA head Crawford falsely stated that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by putting poison in Canadian drugs, giving Bush political cover for opposing importation of Canadian drugs.

The importation of Canadian marijuana, and the approval of marijuana as a medicine by the FDA, has been similarly handled. The FDA and DEA say marijuana has no medical value and is deadly. The DEA and the White House describe Canadian marijuana as a deadly drug killing America's youth.

Perhaps we will soon be told that Osama bin Laden is going to poison US-bound BC bud? Or that he is poisoning Afghani hashish sold in Dutch potshops?

The prescription and over the counter drugs that medical marijuana competes with are often certifiably deadly, but there has never been a certifiably recorded incident wherein somebody died from a marijuana overdose or marijuana side effects.

It is important to prove the relative harmlessness of marijuana when compared to prescription drugs, so forgive me the following list of pharmaceutical drug side effects. These drugs are prescribed for people who would rather use medical marijuana. Pharmaceutical drugs commonly prescribed for conditions that medical marijuana has been found to safely alleviate include the following drugs. We are also including a list of some side effects said to be associated with the drug:

Megestrol acetate (Megace). Can cause high blood pressure, diabetes, inflammation of the blood vessels, congestive heart failure, seizures, pneumonia, nausea, vomiting, impotence, urinary frequency, urinary incontinence, urinary tract infection, vaginal bleeding and discharge, heart disease, chest pain, lung disorders, rapid breathing, insomnia, headache, weakness, numbness, seizures, depression, and abnormal thinking.

Metronidazole (Flagyl), is carcinogenic. Patients treated with Metronidazole have reported convulsive seizures and peripheral neuropathy. Ironically, this medicine is prescribed for digestive problems but it causes nausea that is sometimes accompanied by headache, anorexia, and occasionally vomiting; diarrhea; gastric distress and abdominal cramping.

Sulfasalazine (Azulfidine) -Common adverse reactions associated with sulfasalazine are anorexia, headache, nausea, vomiting, gastric distress.

Chlordiazepoxide/Clidinium (Librax) - Drowsiness, ataxia and confusion have been reported in some patients, particularly the elderly and debilitated. Adverse effects reported with use of Librax are those typical of anticholinergic agents, i.e., dryness of the mouth and blurred vision. Withdrawal symptoms, similar in character to those noted with barbiturates and alcohol (convulsions, tremor, abdominal and muscle cramps, vomiting and sweating), have occurred following abrupt discontinuance of chlordiazepoxide.

Hyoscyamine Sulfate (Levsin) - Adverse reactions may include dryness of the mouth; urinary hesitancy and retention; blurred vision; tachycardia; palpitations; increased ocular tension; loss of taste; headache; nervousness; drowsiness; weakness; dizziness; insomnia; nausea; vomiting; impotence; suppression of lactation; constipation; bloated feeling; allergic reactions or drug idiosyncrasies; speech disturbance; mental confusion (especially in elderly persons); and decreased sweating.

Mesalamine CR (Pentasa) - Common side effects are diarrhea, headache, nausea, abdominal pain, dyspepsia, vomiting, and rash.

Phosphorated carbohydrate (Emetrol) - Side effects include: fainting; swelling of face, arms, and legs; unusual bleeding; vomiting; weight loss; yellow eyes or skin, stomach or abdominal pain.

Dicyclomine (Bentyl) - Can cause blurred vision, dry mouth, heart problems, seizures, impotence, difficulty urinating.

Ciprofloxacin (Cipro) - The most frequent side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, rash, headache, and restlessness.

Methotrexate (Rheumatrex, Trexall) - Is very toxic, depending on dose. The most frequent reactions include mouth sores, stomach upset, and low white blood counts. Methotrexate can cause severe toxicity of the liver and bone marrow, which require regular monitoring with blood testing.

Diphenoxylate and atropine (Lotomil) - Bad effects include drowsiness, dizziness, and headache, nausea or vomiting, and dry mouth. Euphoria, depression, lethargy, restlessness, numbness of extremities, loss of appetite, and abdominal pain or discomfort has been reported less frequently. Side effects of atropine (including dryness of the skin and mucous membranes, increased heart rate, urinary retention, and increased body temperature) have been reported, particularly in children under two years of age.

Prednisone (Delatasone). This is a steroid drug that can have serious adverse musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, dermatologic, neurological, endocrine, and ophthalmic side effects. These include: congestive heart failure in susceptible patients, potassium loss, and hypertension. Muscle weakness, steroid myopathy, loss of muscle mass, osteoporosis, tendon rupture, vertebral compression fractures, and pathologic fracture of long bones; peptic ulcer with possible perforation and hemorrhage; pancreatitis; abdominal distention; ulcerative esophagitis. Impaired wound healing, thin fragile skin. Increased intracranial pressure, usually after treatment, convulsions, vertigo, and headache. Menstrual irregularities; decreased carbohydrate tolerance; diabetes mellitus, cataracts and glaucoma.

Doses of these medicines are often huge. Some patients take thousands of milligrams of aspirin per day in continuous doses, which can cause stomach pain and damage; aspirin causes at least 1,500 deaths annually in the United States.

Pain killers prescribed against chronic pain (for which cannabis is known to offer especially effective relief) include codeine (Dolacet, Hydrocet, Lorcet, Lortab); morphine (Avinza, Oramorph); oxycodone (Vicodin, Oxycontin, Roxicodone); propoxyphene (Percocet, Darvon, Darvocet) and tramadol (Ultram, Ultracet). These medicines are serious drugs with severe side-effects that cannot be avoided. Problems include psychological and physical dependence, addiction, constipation, dizziness, lightheadedness, mood changes, nausea, sedation, shortness of breath, vomiting, depression, and death.
Doctors also prescribe NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) and COX-2 inhibitors. All these substances can cause serious side-effects. Corticosteroids (Cortisone), prednisone and similar medications cause bruising, cataracts, elevated blood sugar, hypertension, increased appetite, indigestion, insomnia, mood swings, muscle weakness, nervousness or restlessness, osteoporosis, infection and thin skin.

People who take overdoses of these drugs, or who use them while also using alcohol, can suffer fatal consequences.
These prescription drugs are often prescribed in groups, and that creates a synergistic effect that potentiates the harmful effects.

These are just some of the prescription drugs that are given to people to alleviate conditions that marijuana can alleviate. The side effects of these and other prescription drugs can objectively be said to be far worse than the side effects of marijuana.

But let's give the devil his due. Just to let the drug warriors know we aren't liars, let’s list the "worst" side effects that could legitimately be proposed for marijuana: respiratory problems; being high; memory lapses; dependency; loss of energy; fatigue; impaired coordination; inability to concentrate; possible risk of triggering instability in people who already have a mental illness.

Even drug warriors admit that these are the only real side effects of pot, and that these side effects disappear if a person stops using marijuana.

Compare these marijuana side effects with those of pharmaceutical drugs that marijuana competes with. It’s undeniable that marijuana is safer, more effective, and less dangerous than any corporate drug it competes with.

And that’s why it’s illegal.
************************************************************
From: http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/4560.html

by David Melmer / Indian Country Today
October 10, 2005

CODY, Wyo. - The Creator brought everything together - earth, water, fire and air; ''this is Crow country.''

These were the words of Crow Chief Arapooish to fur trader Robert Campbell in 1843, as spoken by Crow elder Joe Medicine Crow at a recent seminar in Cody.

''You can take fur, but don't overdo it. You can eat buffalo, but don't overdo it. While you are here, don't hurt our land. Go now and catch the beaver, but don't overdo it; eat buffalo, but only what you need. So long as you do this, you are welcome in Crow country,'' were the words of Arapooish.

Medicine Crow spoke during the Plains Indian Museum Seminar at the Buffalo Bill Historic Center. The subtitle of the seminar was ''Native Land and the People of the Great Plains.'' Seminar participants, scholars, lecturers, historians and others heard story after story about how today's American Indian makes contact with the past so that they can maintain the culture today.

A fusion of history and contemporary life on the Plains brought to light why the Plains Indians so strongly protect their ancestral homeland and sustain the culture. From the Black Hills of South Dakota to Yellowstone and north to the Missouri River in Montana, then south into the Powder River country of Wyoming. American Indian participants at the seminar related stories and personal opinions about why the people are still there and why they intent to stay and grow even stronger.

''We are the earth people,'' Medicine Crow said. ''It is very challenging trying to preserve our land and keep it sacred. A lot of times you abuse our land,'' he said.

Medicine Crow said that non-Indians may acquire land and claim they can do anything they want on it.

''We don't own the land; we belong to it. Father Sky is getting mad at us. There are tornadoes and hurricanes, and it goes on and on,'' Medicine Crow said.

''While we are here we can enjoy; here we can sustain the Indian beliefs,'' he said.

The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, like other tribes along the Missouri River, lost much of their homeland - including villages and allotments - to the creation of lakes behind a series of Missouri River dams that were part of the Flood Control Act of 1944.

''Native lands of the Great Plains seemed to be speaking to Fort Berthold. We are irrevocably tied to the land; physically, it is the land which nourished us,'' said Marilyn Cross Hudson, of Fort Berthold.

The loss of homeland by Plains tribes meant the loss of lands rich in nutrients for sustenance and a loss of sacred sites used for ceremonial purposes, sites that include burial places as land was broken up to allow non-Indians to settle and the dams that created lakes put sites permanently underwater.

Cross Hudson spoke about the lost village of Elbowoods, where she grew up. The community was completely inundated by Lake Sakakewea in the 1950s. Many elders today speak of that community that was rich in life, ground where crops were grown and wildlife was abundant enough to ensure a sustained community.

Elbowoods was moved to where New Town, N.D. is now located. The houses were moved across the frozen Missouri River.

Fighting to protect sacred places

Sustaining the culture and spiritual connection to the land takes plenty of resilience and determination. Sacred places are harder to protect.

Bear Lodge (or Devils Tower) in Wyoming is a sacred site for the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho. Rock climbing on the tower is a major sport that conflicts with ceremonies conducted every year in June. The National Park Service asks for a voluntary prohibition on climbing in June, but many climbers, guides especially, do not respect the ceremonies - and have even taken the issue to court when the park service asked for a complete June prohibition.

A move is under way to change the name to Bear Lodge, or at least add it for place-name recognition. All tribes, in their own languages, refer to the monolith with similar stories as the lodge of the bear.

Bear Butte, on the north edge of the sacred Black Hills, is now a state park, controlled by South Dakota with help from an American Indian advisory board.

The Black Hills are sacred to many tribes who called the area home for centuries. The land was taken from the Lakota after it was retained by the Treaty of 1851.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in 1980, ruled the Black Hills were illegally taken from the Lakota. ''A more ripe case of dishonesty may never have been seen,'' the Supreme Court stated.

Congress offered $81 million for the Black Hills. The current value is now, accounting for compounded interest, approximately $500 million.

''Lakota people have refused the money, asserting the [Black Hills] are not for sale. Eighty percent of the Lakota are absolute in non-receipt of money. The government thinks the case is closed; the Indians know the case if open,'' said Linea Sundstrom, archaeologist.

Sundstrom said there is always the question about how a people with the nation's most extreme poverty refuse one-half billion dollars.

It's not about the money; the land isn't for sale, according to tribal elders. The land was taken because those who did the taking said the American Indian did not use the land properly. But the land provided sustenance and a spiritual value, Sundstrom said.

''It's not about the money. I think the prevalent thought on that is that the money will not fix what's wrong. It won't bring things back into balance,'' she said.

''Also I think the Oglalas [of the Pine Ridge Reservation] and Sicangu [of the Rosebud Reservation] in particular witnessed a lot of money poured in and gone up in smoke. It hasn't fixed the problem. I think they want to get back into relationship with the land.''

The archaeological sites referred to by Sundstrom range from stone drawings, medicine lodge sites and campsites to other sites such as springs and rock outcroppings that were used and are known by elders today as sacred or ceremonial sites; or sites where something significant had taken place.

An area called Cave Hills in South Dakota, a circle of caves that is sacred to the Lakota, is the site of former uranium mining. Today the tailings continue to drain into the Grand River and eventually into the Missouri. Work is under way to award more mining licenses for the area to explore for oil and other materials. The tribes want a reclamation process to take place.

Stone drawings that elders assert are communications from the ancestors that give instructions on how to live with the land are destroyed by chalk, tools and graffiti.

''Religions and spirituality reference both space and time. Christianity references place and American Indian spirituality references the past, present and future simultaneously,'' Sundstrom said.

''Lands of the Indians were inherent property from time immemorial and not given to them by human power,'' Cross Hudson said.

© Indian Country Today . All Rights Reserved

Marijuana may spur new brain cells
by Steve Mitchell

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Scientists said Thursday that marijuana appears
to promote the development of new brain cells in rats and have anti-anxiety
and anti-depressant effects, a finding that could have an impact on the
national debate over medical uses of the drug.

Other illegal ! and legal drugs, including opiates, alcohol, nicotine and
cocaine, have been shown to suppress the formation of new brain cells when
used chronically, but marijuana's effect on that process was uncertain.

Now, a team led by Xia Zhang of the department of psychiatry at the
University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon may have found evidence the drug
spurs new brain cells to form in a region of the brain called the
hippocampus, and this in turn reduces anxiety and depression.

Marijuana appears "to be the only illicit drug whose capacity to produce
increased ... neurons is positively correlated with its (anti-anxiety) and
anti-depressant-like effects," Zhang and colleagues wrote in the November
issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The paper was posted online
Thursday.

In the study, rats were given injections of HU210 -- a synthesized version
of a cannabinoid chemical found in marijuana -- twice per day fo! r 10 days.

Zhang told United Press International this would be "a high dose" of smoked
marijuana, but he added he is not certain how many equivalent joints it
would take or whether patients now using the drug typically would be getting
this much HU210.

Although HU210 was injected, Zhang said there would be no difference if it
was obtained by smoking marijuana.

The rats showed evidence of new neurons in the hippocampus dentate gyrus, a
region of the brain that plays a role in developing memories.

Zhang's team suspected the new brain cells also might be associated with a
reduction in anxiety and depression, because previous studies had indicated
medications used to treat anxiety and depression achieve their effect this
way.

To find out, they treated rats with HU210 for 10 days and then tested them
one month later. When placed in a new environment, the rats were quicker to
ea! t their food than rats that did not receive the compound, which suggested
there was a reduction in anxiety behaviors.

Another group of rats treated with HU210 showed a reduction in the duration
of immobility in a forced swimming test, which is an indication the compound
had an anti-depressant effect.

Asked how he thought the findings might impact the debate over using
marijuana to treat medical conditions, Zhang said, "Our results indicate
cannabinoids could be used for the treatment of anxiety and depression."

He added that his view is "marijuana should be used as alcohol or nicotine,"
noting "it has been used for treating various diseases for years in other
countries."

Last June the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 that the federal ban on marijuana
supersedes the laws of certain states that allow the substance to be used
for medicinal purposes, such as the treatment of pain, nausea in cancer
pa! tients and glaucoma. Eleven states have passed laws legalizing marijuana
use by patients with a doctor's approval, including California, Alaska,
Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.

The Bush administration, through the Department of Justice's Drug
Enforcement Agency, began conducting raids in California in 2001 on patients
using marijuana. Two of those arrested by the DEA -- Angel Raich, who
suffers from brain cancer, and Diane Monson, who used the drug to help
alleviate chronic back pain -- sued Attorney General John Ashcroft,
requesting a court order to be allowed to grow and smoke marijuana, which
led to the Supreme Court decision.

Paul Armentano, senior policy analyst with the National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws, told UPI he thought the findings "would have a
positive impact on moving forward this debate, because it is giving ... a
scientific explanation that! further supports long-observed anecdotal
evidence, and further lends itself to the notion that marijuana, unlike so
many other prescription drugs and controlled substances, appears to have
incredibly low toxicity and as a result lacks potential harm to the brain
that many of these drugs have."

The DEA Web site, however, contends that "marijuana is a dangerous,
addictive drug that poses significant health threats to users," including
cancer and impaired mental functioning.

Armentano said this is a distortion of what scientific studies actually
show. Studies in animals indicate marijuana actually may protect against
many forms of cancer, rather than cause the disease, he said. In addition,
studies in marijuana smokers have found little evidence of cognitive
deficits, and even when they do, the defects disappear if the person stops
smoking for 30 days.

E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com
Copyright 20! 05 by United Press International
From: http://about.upi.com/products/health_business/UPI-20051013-024854-9860R

Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE): Free Americans Resisting the Fourth Reich on Behalf of All Species.

“A Flaming Arrow Aimed at the Circled Wagons of American Injustice!”
Reviewer: Come Again Moon

This is an important CD
Available at http://cdbaby.com/cd/harveyarden --Listen Free!

How can we rate this CD, it is like trying to rate the experience of the heart beat of GrandMother Earth.
This album is important. Leonard invites you into his cell, with the care and grace of a loving, holy spirit and Harvey Arden's riveting, narration carries us through the journey of Leonard's Sun Dance as we are all, accompanied to new levels of understanding, by Rev. Goat and the New Orleans Light. Ordering more than one copy of this CD really is a good idea and Little Eagle, thank you for the excellent suggestion.
One of my copies will be given to my Congressperson.
Mitakye Oyasin Moon


Leonard Peltier in His Own Words

My Life is My Sun Dance: Prison Writings of Leonard Peltier
Read by Harvey Arden, music by Reverend Goat and New Orleans Light
Mi Abuelo Records

Order at

Review by Norm Dixon

Leonard Peltier is one of the United States’ longest-serving political prisoners, jailed in 1976 in a blatantly rigged trial, during which the US government and the FBI refused to put any limits on the depths they would stoop to see this militant leader of the Native American people silenced for life. Almost 30 years later, Harvey Arden has done his bit to break that silence with the release of My Life is My Sun Dance, a series of readings from Peltier’s prison writings.

Arden’s expressive voice creates an emotional connection between the listener and the author of the words, who has been bricked up in high-security prisons and kept isolated from his people and his many supporters. Through Arden, accompanied by the smooth jazz moods of New Orleans Light, Peltier talks directly to us and you can feel and share his humanity, defiance and fears. Peltier’s writing is conversational and poetic, it is hopeful and inspiring. One listen of this CD and you will really care about this humane and gentle, but fierce warrior for social justice.

Peltier tells us about the terrors and uncertainties of prison life, about the history of Washington’s long oppression of the Native American people and how his individual oppression is simply a continuation of it. He discusses his people’s spirituality and how it is bound to the struggle to end the oppression of all peoples. And Peltier outlines the specifics of the events that landed him in jail, and the details of what must be one of the most outrageous frame-ups in US history.

In the early 1970s, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota was the scene of a serious conflict between the corrupt, pro-government, assimilationist reservation authorities and militant reservation residents who were demanding that Native Americans control their own affairs. The residents were also demanding that they be permitted to continue to practice their traditional culture without hindrance.

It emerged that uranium had been found on the reservation land, and the federal government and its Indian puppets were determined to crush the militants in order to get their hands on it. Rich ranchers were also being allowed to graze the sensitive semi-arid country for minimal or no fees.

In 1973, the residents sought the assistance of the radical American Indian Movement (AIM) and together they occupied the village of Wounded Knee (the same site where, less than 100 years earlier, a horrific US Army massacre of 300 Native Americans had taken place). The response of the US government was to launch a paramilitary attack in which two residents were killed. The stand-off lasted 71 days, before the government promised to investigate the residents’ complaints. It was another promise made to Native Americans that was never kept.

In the aftermath of the Wounded Knee occupation, the reservation authorities outlawed the AIM and banned traditional ceremonies and practices. A reign of terror was instigated, in which thugs known as Guardians of the Oglala Nation (literally spelled GOON), attempted to drive out all opponents of the pro-government reservation leaders. Between 1973 and 1976, more than 60 “traditionalists” were murdered. The FBI refused to investigate these deaths and continued to arm the GOONs with weapons and information in order to prevent AIM again gaining a foothold at Pine Ridge.

In desperation, Pine Ridge residents again appealed for AIM activists to help them defend themselves. Leonard Peltier was among the dozens of militants who responded. The traditional people, many of whom were elderly, feared for their lives. AIM provided support such as cutting fire wood, collecting water and preparing meals, as well as offering protection from attacks by GOONs. AIM activists were armed for their own protection.

On June 26, 1975, two unmarked cars chased a red truck onto the Jumping Bull ranch at Pine Ridge, the home of a number of families being defended by AIM. It later emerged that the cars were driven by FBI agents, who were supposedly chasing a person accused of the heinous crime of stealing cowboy boots. The agents opened fire on the ranch and its residents, who fired back in self defence. Within minutes, more than 150 FBI SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs police and GOONs had surrounded the ranch and a fierce, largely one-sided fire-fight erupted.

When the smoke cleared, AIM member Joe Killsright Stuntz and two FBI agents were found shot dead. Miraculously, Peltier and the other people in the camp escaped. Following the largest hunt in FBI history, three AIM activists — Dino Butler, Robert Robideaux and Leonard Peltier — were charged with the murder of the agents. However Robideaux and Butler were tried in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the jury found them not guilty of murder because they had simply returned fire in self-defence when fired upon by unknown assailants.

Meanwhile, Peltier had escaped to Canada knowing that he would never get a fair trial in the US — that is if he wasn’t gunned down by the FBI first. He was captured in Canada on February 6, 1976. The US government presented the Canadian court with affidavits signed by a woman claiming to be Peltier’s companion, who claimed that she had seen Peltier shoot the FBI agents. This was a blatant lie. The woman had never met Peltier and she was not present at Pine Ridge during the shoot-out. She later revealed that the FBI forced her to sign the lies written for her by the FBI.

Peltier was tried before an all-white jury in North Dakota, before a hostile judge who refused to allow use of the self-defence argument. The FBI created a climate of fear around the proceedings in an attempt to convince the jurors that Peltier was a terrorist. The government withheld evidence that pointed to his innocence. This evidence was finally released from FBI files seven years later under the Freedom of Information Act.

Prosecutor Lynn Crook failed to produce a single witness who could identify Peltier as the shooter, and concealed ballistics reports that showed that Peltier’s rifle could not be linked to shell casings found near the scene. Yet in his summation, Crook accused Peltier of firing the fatal bullets that killed the agents. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Seventeen years later, in November 1992, Crook admitted to the court reviewing Peltier’s case, “We don’t know who killed the agents”.

Despite Crook’s admission, and even though the appeals court found that Peltier may have been acquitted had evidence not been improperly withheld by the FBI, a new trial was denied.

In 2000, US President Bill Clinton stated that he was considering Peltier’s request for clemency. However, the FBI launched a massive disinformation campaign, which included a march by more than 500 FBI agents outside the White House in December 2000. Peltier’s name was not among those granted clemency by Clinton a month later.

Peltier may become eligible for parole in 2008, but it will be fought tooth and nail by the FBI and other powerful forces who want to keep this inspiring liberation fighter silent. The US authorities continue to make life difficult for Peltier and his supporters. On June 30, he was suddenly transferred from Leavenworth prison in Kansas to Terre Haute in Indiana. His lawyers were not informed and he has been kept in solitary confinement for more than month.

Yet no matter how hard they try, such repression cannot keep Peltier silent, as Harvey Arden’s brilliant tribute shows.

Order at

If you’d like to know more, visit , where Peltier’s prison writing in book form can be purchased. Peter Matthiessen’s classic In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Penguin Books) is well worth searching out, as is the documentary Incident at Oglala, produced by Robert Redford.
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From: Green Left Weekly, September 21, 2005

Deconstructing the Columbus Myth

Was the "Great Discoverer" Italian or Spanish, Nazi or Jew?

by Ward Churchill

Copyright © 1995 by Ward Churchill. Reprinted with permission from Ward Churchill, Since Predator Came (Littleton, CO: Aigis Publications, 1995). This essay originally appeared in Indigenous Thought, Vol. 1, Nos. 2–3 (March–June 1991).

Christopher Columbus was a genuine titan, a hero of history and of the human spirit.... To denigrate Columbus is to denigrate what is worthy in human history and in us all.
-- Jeffrey Hart, National Review, October 15, 1990

It is perhaps fair to say that our story opens at Alfred University, where, during the fall of 1990, I served as distinguished scholar of American Indian Studies for a program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Insofar as I was something of a curiosity in that primarily Euroamerican staffed and attended institution, situated as it is within an area populated primarily by white folk, it followed naturally that I quickly became a magnet for local journalists seeking to inject a bit of color into their otherwise uniformly blanched columns and commentaries. Given our temporal proximity to the much–heralded quincentennial celebration of Christopher Columbus' late fifteenth–century "discovery" of a "New World" and its inhabitants, and that I am construed as being in some part a direct descendant of those inhabitants, they were wont to query me as to my sentiments concerning the accomplishments of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

My response, at least in its short version, was (and remains) that celebrating Columbus and the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere that he set off is greatly analogous to celebrating the glories of nazism and Heinrich Himmler. Publication of this remark in local newspapers around Rochester, New York, caused me to receive, among other things, a deluge of lengthy and vociferously framed letters of protest, two of which I found worthy of remark.

The first of these was sent by a colleague at the university, an exchange faculty member from Germany, who informed me that while the human costs begat by Columbus' navigational experiment were "tragic and quite regrettable," comparisons between him and the Reichsführer SS were nonetheless unfounded. The distinction between Himmler and Columbus, his argument went, resided not only in differences in "the magnitude of the genocidal events in which each was involved," but the ways in which they were involved. Himmler, he said, was enmeshed as "a high–ranking and responsible official in the liquidation of entire human groups" as "a matter of formal state policy" guided by an explicitly "racialist" ideology. Furthermore, he said, the enterprise Himmler created as the instrument of his genocidal ambitions incorporated, deliberately and intentionally, considerable economic benefit to the state in whose service he acted. None of this pertained to Columbus, the good professor concluded, because the "Great Discoverer" was ultimately "little more than a gifted seaman," an individual who unwittingly set in motion processes over which he had little or no control, in which he played no direct part, and which might well have been beyond his imagination. My juxtaposition of the two men, he contended, therefore tended to "diminish understanding of the unique degree of evil" which should be associated with Himmler, and ultimately precluded "proper historical understandings of the Nazi phenomenon."

The second letter came from a member of the Jewish Defense League in Rochester. His argument ran that, unlike Columbus (whom he described as "little more than a bit player, without genuine authority or even much of a role, in the actual process of European civilization in the New World which his discovery made possible"), Himmler was a "responsible official in a formal state policy of exterminating an entire human group for both racial and economic reasons," and on a scale "unparalleled in all history." My analogy between the two, he said, served to "diminish public respect for the singular nature of the Jewish experience at the hands of the Nazis," as well as popular understanding of "the unique historical significance of the Holocaust." Finally, he added, undoubtedly as a crushing capstone to his position, "It is a measure of your anti–semitism that you compare Himmler to Columbus" because "Columbus was, of course, himself a Jew."

I must confess the last assertion struck me first, and only partly because I'd never before heard claims that Christopher Columbus was of Jewish ethnicity. "What possible difference could this make?" I asked in my letter of reply. "If Himmler himself were shown to have been of Jewish extraction, would it then suddenly become anti–semitic to condemn him for the genocide he perpetrated against Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and others? Would his historical crimes then suddenly be unmentionable or even `okay'?" To put it another way, I continued, "Simply because Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, Bugsey Siegel and Lepke were all Jewish `by blood', is it a gesture of anti–semitism to refer to them as gangsters? Is it your contention that an individual's Jewish ethnicity somehow confers exemption from negative classification or criticism of his/her conduct? What are you saying?" The question of Columbus' possible Jewishness nonetheless remained intriguing, not because I held it to be especially important in its own right, but because I was (and am still) mystified as to why any ethnic group, especially one which has suffered genocide, might be avid to lay claim either to the man or to his legacy. I promised myself to investigate the matter further.

A Mythic Symbiosis

Meanwhile, I was captivated by certain commonalities of argument inherent to the positions advanced by my correspondents. Both men exhibited a near–total ignorance of the actualities of Columbus' career. Nor did they demonstrate any particular desire to correct the situation. Indeed, in their mutual need to separate the topic of their preoccupation from rational scrutiny, they appeared to have conceptually joined hands in a function composed more of faith than fact. The whole notion of the "uniqueness of the Holocaust" serves both psychic and political purposes for Jew and German alike, or so it seems. The two groups are bound to one another in a truly symbiotic relationship grounded in the mythic exclusivity of their experience: one half of the equation simply completes the other in a perverse sort of collaboration, with the result that each enjoys a tangible benefit.

For Jews, at least those who have adopted the zionist perspective, a "unique historical suffering" under nazism translates into fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that they are "the chosen," entitled by virtue of the destiny of a special persecution to assume a rarified status among—and to consequently enjoy preferential treatment from—the remainder of humanity. In essence, this translates into a demand that the Jewish segment of the Holocaust's victims must now be allowed to participate equally in the very system which once victimized them, and to receive an equitable share of the spoils accruing therefrom. To this end, zionist scholars such as Irving Louis Horowitz and Elie Wiesel have labored long and mightily, defining genocide in terms exclusively related to the forms it assumed under nazism. In their version of "truth," one must literally see smoke pouring from the chimneys of Auschwitz in order to apprehend that a genocide, per se, is occurring.1 Conversely, they have coined terms such as "ethnocide" to encompass the fates inflicted upon other peoples throughout history.2 Such semantics have served, not as tools of understanding, but as an expedient means of arbitrarily differentiating the experience of their people—both qualitatively and quantitatively—from that of any other. To approach things in any other fashion would, it must be admitted, tend to undercut ideas like the "moral right" of the Israeli settler state to impose itself directly atop the Palestinian Arab homeland.

For Germans to embrace a corresponding "unique historical guilt" because of what was done to the Jews during the 1940s is to permanently absolve themselves of guilt concerning what they may be doing now. No matter how ugly things may become in contemporary German society, or so the reasoning goes, it can always be (and is) argued that there has been a marked improvement over the "singular evil which was nazism." Anything other than outright nazification is, by definition, "different," "better," and therefore "acceptable" ("Bad as they are, things could always be worse."). Business as usual—which is to say assertions of racial supremacy, domination, and exploitation of "inferior" groups, and most of the rest of the nazi agenda—is thereby free to continue in a manner essentially unhampered by serious stirrings of guilt among the German public so long as it does not adopt the literal trappings of nazism. Participating for profit and with gusto in the deliberate starvation of much of the Third World is no particular problem if one is careful not to goose step while doing it.

By extension, insofar as Germany is often seen (and usually sees itself) as exemplifying the crowning achievements of "Western Civilization," the same principle covers all European and Euro–derived societies. No matter what they do, it is never "really" what it seems unless it was done in precisely the fashion the nazis did it. Consequently, the nazi master plan of displacing or reducing by extermination the population of the western USSR and replacing it with settlers of "biologically superior German breeding stock" is roundly (and rightly) condemned as ghastly and inhuman. Meanwhile, people holding this view of nazi ambitions tend overwhelmingly to see consolidation and maintenance of Euro–dominated settler states in places like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, the United States, and Canada as "basically okay," or even as "progress." The "distinction" allowing this psychological phenomenon is that each of these states went about the intentional displacement and extermination of native populations, and their replacement, in a manner slightly different in its particulars from that employed by nazis attempting to accomplish exactly the same thing. Such technical differentiation is then magnified and used as a sort of all–purpose veil, behind which almost anything can be hidden, so long as it is not openly adorned with a swastika.

Given the psychological, socio–cultural, and political imperatives involved, neither correspondent, whether German or Jew, felt constrained to examine the factual basis of my analogy between Himmler and Columbus before denying the plausibility or appropriateness of the comparison. To the contrary, since the paradigm of their mutual understanding embodies the a priori presumption that there must be no such analogy, factual investigation is precluded from their posturing. It follows that any dissent on the "methods" involved in their arriving at their conclusions, never mind introduction of countervailing evidence, must be denied out of hand with accusations of "overstatement," "shoddy scholarship," "stridency" and/or "anti–semitism." To this litany have lately been added such new variations as "white bashing," "ethnic McCarthyism," "purveyor of political correctitude," and any other epithet deemed helpful in keeping a "canon of knowledge" fraught with distortion, deception, and outright fraud from being "diluted."3

Columbus as Proto–Nazi

It is time to delve into the substance of my remark that Columbus and Himmler, nazi lebensraumpolitik, along with the "settlement of the New World" bear more than casual resemblance to one another. It is not, as my two correspondents wished to believe, because of his "discovery." This does not mean that if this were "all" he had done he would be somehow innocent of what resulted from his find, no more than is the scientist who makes a career of accepting military funding to develop weapons in any way "blameless" when they are subsequently used against human targets. Columbus did not sally forth upon the Atlantic for reasons of "neutral science" or altruism. He went, as his own diaries, reports, and letters make clear, fully expecting to encounter wealth belonging to others. It was his stated purpose to seize this wealth, by whatever means necessary and available, in order to enrich both his sponsors and himself.4 Plainly, he prefigured, both in design and by intent, what came next. To this extent, he not only symbolizes the process of conquest and genocide which eventually consumed the indigenous peoples of America, but bears the personal responsibility of having participated in it. Still, if this were all there was to it, I might be inclined to dismiss him as a mere thug rather than branding him a counterpart to Himmler.

The 1492 "voyage of discovery" is, however, hardly all that is at issue. In 1493 Columbus returned with an invasion force of 17 ships, appointed at his own request by the Spanish Crown to install himself as "viceroy and governor of [the Caribbean islands] and the mainland" of America, a position he held until 1500.5 Setting up shop on the large island he called Española (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he promptly instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) and systematic extermination of the native Taino population.6 Columbus' programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as 8 million at the outset of his regime to about 3 million in 1496.7 Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time the governor departed. His policies, however, remained, with the result that by 1514 the Spanish census of the island showed barely 22,000 Indians remaining alive. In 1542, only 200 were recorded.8 Thereafter, they were considered extinct, as were Indians throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate population which totaled more than 15 million at the point of first contact with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known.9

This, to be sure, constitutes an attrition of population in real numbers every bit as great as the toll of 12 to 15 million—about half of them Jewish—most commonly attributed to Himmler's slaughter mills. Moreover, the proportion of indigenous Caribbean population destroyed by the Spanish in a single generation is, no matter how the figures are twisted, far greater than the 75 percent of European Jews usually said to have been exterminated by the nazis.10 Worst of all, these data apply only to the Caribbean Basin; the process of genocide in the Americas was only just beginning at the point such statistics become operant, not ending, as they did upon the fall of the Third Reich. All told, it is probable that more than 100 million native people were "eliminated" in the course of Europe's ongoing "civilization" of the Western Hemisphere.11

It has long been asserted by "responsible scholars" that this decimation of American Indians which accompanied the European invasion resulted primarily from disease rather than direct killing or conscious policy.12 There is a certain truth to this, although starvation may have proven just as lethal in the end. It must be borne in mind when considering such facts that a considerable portion of those who perished in the nazi death camps died, not as the victims of bullets and gas, but from starvation, as well as epidemics of typhus, dysentery and the like. Their keepers, who could not be said to have killed these people directly, were nonetheless found to have been culpable in their deaths by way of deliberately imposing the conditions which led to the proliferation of starvation and disease among them.13 Certainly, the same can be said of Columbus' regime, under which the original residents were, as a first order of business, permanently dispossessed of their abundant cultivated fields while being converted into chattel, ultimately to be worked to death for the wealth and "glory" of Spain.14

Nor should more direct means of extermination be relegated to incidental status. As the matter is framed by Kirkpatrick Sale in his book, The Conquest of Paradise:

The tribute system, instituted by the Governor sometime in 1495, was a simple and brutal way of fulfilling the Spanish lust for gold while acknowledging the Spanish distaste for labor. Every Taino over the age of fourteen had to supply the rulers with a hawk's bell of gold every three months (or, in gold–deficient areas, twenty–five pounds of spun cotton); those who did were given a token to wear around their necks as proof that they had made their payment; those who did not were, as [Columbus' brother, Fernando] says discreetly, "punished"—by having their hands cut off, as [the priest, Bartolomé de] Las Casas says less discreetly, and left to bleed to death.15

It is entirely likely that more than 10,000 Indians were killed in this fashion, on Española alone, as a matter of policy, during Columbus' tenure as governor. Las Casas' Brevísima relación, among other contemporaneous sources, is also replete with accounts of Spanish colonists (hidalgos) hanging Tainos en mass, roasting them on spits or burning them at the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed and so forth, all of it to instill in the natives a "proper attitude of respect" toward their Spanish "superiors."

[The Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother's breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks.... They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.16

No SS trooper could be expected to comport himself with a more unrelenting viciousness. And there is more. All of this was coupled to wholesale and persistent massacres:

A Spaniard ... suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill [a group of Tainos assembled for this purpose]—men, women, children and old folk, all of whom were seated, off guard and frightened.... And within two credos, not a man of them there remain[ed] alive. The Spaniards enter[ed] the large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same way, with cuts and stabs, began to kill as many as were found there, so that a stream of blood was running, as if a great number of cows had perished.17

Elsewhere, Las Casas went on to recount:

In this time, the greatest outrages and slaughterings of people were perpetrated, whole villages being depopulated.... The Indians saw that without any offense on their part they were despoiled of their kingdoms, their lands and liberties and of their lives, their wives, and homes. As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures ... [many surrendered to their fate, while the survivors] fled to the mountains [to starve].18

The butchery continued until there were no Tainos left to butcher. One might well ask how a group of human beings, even those like the Spaniards of Columbus' day, maddened in a collective lust for wealth and prestige, might come to treat another with such unrestrained ferocity over a sustained period. The answer, or some substantial portion of it, must lie in the fact that the Indians were considered by the Spanish to be untermenschen, subhumans. That this was the conventional view is borne out beyond all question in the recorded debates between Las Casas and the nobleman, Francisco de Sepulveda, who argued for the majority of Spaniards that American Indians, like African blacks and other "lower animals," lacked "souls." The Spaniards, consequently, bore in Sepulveda's estimation a holy obligation to enslave and destroy them wherever they might be encountered.19 The eugenics theories of nazi "philosopher" Alfred Rosenberg, to which Heinrich Himmler more or less subscribed, elaborated the mission of the SS in very much the same terms.20 It was upon such profoundly racist ideas that Christopher Columbus grounded his policies as initial governor of the new Spanish empire in America.21

In the end, all practical distinctions between Columbus and Himmler—at least those not accounted for by differences in available technology and extent of socio–military organization—evaporate upon close inspection. They are cut of the same cloth, fulfilling precisely the same function and for exactly the same reasons, each in his own time and place. If there is one differentiation which may be valid, it is that while the specific enterprise Himmler represented ultimately failed and is now universally condemned, that represented by Columbus did not and is not. Instead, as Sale has observed, the model for colonialism and concomitant genocide Columbus pioneered during his reign as governor of Española was to prove his "most enduring legacy," carried as it was "by the conquistadors on their invasions of Mexico, Peru, and La Florida."22 The Columbian process is ongoing, as is witnessed by the fact that, today, his legacy is celebrated far and wide.

The Emblematic European

This leaves open the question as to whom, exactly, the horror which was Columbus rightly "belongs." There are, as it turns out, no shortage of contenders for the mantle of the man and his "accomplishments." It would be well to examine the nature of at least the major claims in order to appreciate the extent of the mad scramble which has been undertaken by various peoples to associate themselves with what was delineated in the preceding section. One cannot avoid the suspicion that the spectacle bespeaks much of the Eurocentric character.

Was Columbus Italian?

The popular wisdom has always maintained that Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, a city–state which is incorporated into what is now called Italy. Were this simply an historical truth, it might be accepted as just one more uncomfortable fact of life for the Italian people, who are—or should be—still trying to live down what their country did to the Libyans and Ethiopians during the prelude to World War II. However, there is much evidence that draws Columbus' supposed Genoese origin into question. For instance, although such records were kept at the time, there is no record of his birth in that locale. Nor is there reference to his having been born or raised there in any of his own written work, including his personal correspondence. For that matter, there is no indication that he either wrote or spoke any dialect which might be associated with Genoa, nor even the Tuscan language which forms the basis of modern Italian. His own writings—not excluding letters penned to Genoese friends and the Banco di San Grigorio, one of his financiers in that city—were uniformly articulated in Castilian, with a bit of Portuguese and Latin mixed in.23 Moreover, while several variations of his name were popularly applied to him during his lifetime, none of them was drawn from a dialect which might be considered Italian. He himself, in the only known instance in which he rendered his own full name, utilized the Greek Xpõual de Colón.24 Still, Genoa, Italy, and those of Italian descent elsewhere in the world (Italo–Americans, most loudly of all) have mounted an unceasing clamor during the twentieth century, insisting he must be theirs. Genoa itself invested considerable resources into "resolving" the question during the 1920s, ultimately printing a 288–page book assembling an array of depositions and other documents—all of them authenticated—attesting that Columbus was indeed Genoese. Published in 1931, the volume, entitled Christopher Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His Genoese Origin, presents what is still the best circumstantial case as to Columbus' ethnic identity.25

Spanish?

Counterclaims concerning Columbus' supposed Iberian origin are also long–standing and have at times been pressed rather vociferously. These center primarily on the established facts that he spent the bulk of his adult life in service to Spain, was fluent in both written and spoken Castilian, and that his mistress, Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, was Spanish.26 During the 1920s, these elements of the case were bolstered by an assortment of "archival documents" allegedly proving conclusively that Columbus was a Spaniard from cradle to grave. In 1928, however, the Spanish Academy determined that these documents had been forged by parties overly eager to establish Spain's exclusive claim to the Columbian legacy. Since then, Spanish chauvinists have had to content themselves with arguments that The Discoverer is theirs by virtue of employment and nationality, if not by birth. An excellent summary of the various Spanish contentions may be found in Enrique de Gandia's Historia de Cristóbal Colón: analisis crítico, first published in 1942.27

Portuguese?

Portuguese participation in the fray has been less pronounced, but follows basically the same course—sans forged documents—as that of the Spanish. Columbus, the argument goes, was plainly conversant in the language and his wife, Felipa Moniz Perestrello, is known to have been Portuguese. Further, the first point at which his whereabouts can be accurately determined was in service to Portugal, plying that country's slave trade along Africa's west coast for a period of four years. Reputedly, he was also co–proprietor of a book and map shop in Lisbon and/or Madiera for a time, and once sailed to Iceland on a voyage commissioned by the Portuguese Crown. Portugal's desire to extend a serious claim to Spain's Admiral of the Ocean Sea seems to be gathering at least some momentum, as is witnessed in Manuel Luciano de Silva's 1989 book, Columbus Was 100% Portuguese.28

Jewish?

The idea that Columbus might have been a Spanish Jew is perhaps best known for having appeared in Simon Weisenthal's Sails of Hope in 1973.29 Therein, Weisenthal contends that the future governor of Española hid his ethnicity because of the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain ordered by King Ferdinand of Aragon on March 30, 1492 (the decree was executed on August 2 of the same year). The logic goes that because of this rampant anti–semitism, the Great Navigator's true identity has remained shrouded in mystery, lost to the historical record. Interestingly, given the tenacity with which at least some sectors of the Jewish community have latched on to it, this notion is not at all Jewish in origin. Rather, it was initially developed as a speculation in a 1913 article, "Columbus a Spaniard and a Jew?", published by Henry Vignaud in the American History Review.30 It was then advanced by Salvador de Madariaga in his unsympathetic 1939 biography, Christopher Columbus. Madariaga's most persuasive argument, at least to himself, seems to have been that Columbus' "great love of gold" proved his "Jewishness."31 This theme was resuscitated in Brother Nectario Maria's Juan Colón Was a Spanish Jew in 1971.32 Next, we will probably be told that The Merchant of Venice was an accurate depiction of medieval Jewish life, after all. And, from there, that the International Jewish Bolshevik Banking Conspiracy really exists, and has since the days of the Illuminati takeover of the Masonic Orders. One hopes the Jewish Defense League doesn't rally to defend these "interpretations" of history as readily as it jumped aboard the "Columbus as Jew" bandwagon.33

Other Contenders

By conservative count, there are presently 253 books and articles devoted specifically to the question of Columbus' origin and national/ethnic identity. Another 300–odd essays or full volumes address the same questions to some extent while pursuing other matters.34 Claims to his character, and some imagined luster therefrom, have been extended not only by the four peoples already discussed, but by Corsica, Greece, Chios, Majorca, Aragon, Galicia, France, and Poland.35 One can only wait with baited breath to see whether or not the English might not weigh in with a quincentennial assertion that he was actually a Britain born and bred, sent to spy on behalf of Their Royal British Majesties. Perhaps the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians will advance the case that Columbus was actually the descendant of a refugee Viking king, or the Irish that he was a pure Gaelic adherent to the teachings of Saint Brendan. And then there are, of course, the Germans...

In the final analysis, it is patently clear that we really have no idea who Columbus was, where he came from, or where he spent his formative years. It may be that he was indeed born in Genoa, perhaps of some "degree of Jewish blood," brought up in Portugal, and ultimately nationalized as a citizen of Spain, Province of Aragon. Perhaps he also spent portions of his childhood being educated in Greek and Latin while residing in Corsica, Majorca, Chios, or all three. Maybe he had grandparents who had immigrated from what is now Poland and France. It is possible that each of the parties now vying for a "piece of the action" in his regard are to some extent correct in their claims. And, to the same extent, it is true that he was actually of none of them in the sense that they mean it. He stands, by this definition, not as an Italian, Spaniard, Portuguese, or Jew, but as the quintessential European of his age, the emblematic personality of all that Europe was, had been, and would become in the course of its subsequent expansion across the face of the earth.

As a symbol, then, Christopher Columbus vastly transcends himself. He stands before the bar of history and humanity, culpable not only for his literal deeds on Española, but, in spirit at least, for the carnage and cultural obliteration which attended the conquests of Mexico and Peru during the 1500s. He stands as exemplar of the massacre of Pequots at Mystic in 1637, and of Lord Jeffrey Amherst's calculated distribution of smallpox–laden blankets to the members of Pontiac's confederacy a century and a half later. His spirit informed the policies of John Evans and John Chivington as they set out to exterminate the Cheyennes in Colorado during 1864, and it road with the 7th U.S. Cavalry to Wounded Knee in December of 1890. It guided Alfredo Stroessner's machete–wielding butchers as they strove to eradicate the Aché people of Paraguay during the 1970s, and applauds the policies of Brazil toward the Jivaro, Yanomami, and other Amazon Basin peoples at the present moment.

Too, the ghost of Columbus stood with the British in their wars against the Zulus and various Arab nations, with the United States against the "Moros" of the Philippines, the French against the peoples of Algeria and Indochina, the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in Indonesia. He was there for the Opium Wars and the "secret" bombing of Cambodia, for the systematic slaughter of the indigenous peoples of California during the nineteenth century and of the Mayans in Guatemala during the 1980s. And, yes, he was very much present in the corridors of nazi power, present among the guards and commandants at Sobibor and Treblinka, and within the ranks of the einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front. The Third Reich was, after all, never so much a deviation from as it was a crystallization of the dominant themes—racial supremacism, conquest, and genocide—of the European culture Columbus so ably exemplifies. Nazism was never unique: it was instead only one of an endless succession of "New World Orders" set in motion by "The Discovery." It was neither more nor less detestable than the order imposed by Christopher Columbus upon Española; 1493 or 1943, they are part of the same irreducible whole.

The Specter of Hannibal Lecter

At this juncture, the entire planet is locked, figuratively, in a room with the socio–cultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm, he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers, his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter's pathology that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon whom he feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he can never be stopped. The socio–cultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter is the core of an expansionist European "civilization" which has reached out to engulf the planet.

In coming to grips with Lecter, it is of no useful purpose to engage in sympathetic biography, to chronicle the nuances of his childhood, and catalogue his many and varied achievements, whether real or imagined. The recounting of such information is at best diversionary, allowing him to remain at large just that much longer. More often, it inadvertently serves to perfect his mask, enabling him not only to maintain his enterprise, but to pursue it with ever more arrogance and efficiency. At worst, the biographer is aware of the intrinsic evil lurking beneath the subject's veneer of civility, but—because of morbid fascination and a desire to participate vicariously—deliberately obfuscates the truth in order that his homicidal activities may continue unchecked. The biographer thus reveals not only a willing complicity in the subject's crimes, but a virulent pathology of his or her own. Such is and has always been the relationship of "responsible scholarship" to expansionist Europe and its derivative societies.

The sole legitimate function of information compiled about Lecter is that which will serve to unmask him and thereby lead to his apprehension. The purpose of apprehension is not to visit retribution upon the psychopath—he is, after all, by definition mentally ill and consequently not in control of his more lethal impulses—but to put an end to his activities. It is even theoretically possible that, once he is disempowered, he can be cured. The point, however, is to understand what he is and what he does well enough to stop him from doing it. This is the role which must be assumed by scholarship vis–à–vis Eurosupremacy, if scholarship itself is to have any positive and constructive meaning. Scholarship is never "neutral" or "objective"; it always works either for the psychopath or against him, to mystify socio–cultural reality or to decode it, to make corrective action possible or to prevent it.

It may well be that there are better points of departure for intellectual endeavors to capture the real form and meaning of Eurocentrism than the life, times, and legacy of Christopher Columbus. Still, since Eurocentrists the world over have so evidently clasped hands in utilizing him as a (perhaps the) preeminent signifier of their collective heritage, and are doing so with such an apparent sense of collective jubilation, the point has been rendered effectively moot. Those who seek to devote their scholarship to apprehending the psychopath who sits in our room thus have no alternative but to use him as a primary vehicle of articulation. In order to do so, we must approach him through deployment of the analytical tools which allow him to be utilized as a medium of explanation, a lens by which to shed light upon phenomena such as the mass psychologies of fascism and racism, a means by which to shear Eurocentrism of its camouflage, exposing its true contours, revealing the enduring coherence of the dynamics which forged its evolution.

Perhaps through such efforts we can begin to genuinely comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible fact that so many groups are presently queuing up to associate themselves with a man from whose very memory wafts the cloying stench of tyranny and genocide. From there, it may be possible to at last crack the real codes of meaning underlying the sentiments of the Nuremberg rallies, those spectacles on the plazas of Rome during which fealty was pledged to Mussolini, and that amazing red–white–and–blue, tie–a–yellow–ribbon frenzy gripping the U.S. public much more lately. If we force ourselves to see things clearly, we can understand. If we can understand, we can apprehend. If we can apprehend, perhaps we can stop the psychopath before he kills again. We are obligated to try, from a sense of sheer self–preservation, if nothing else. Who knows, we may even succeed. But first we must stop lying to ourselves, or allowing others to do the lying for us, about who it is with whom we now share our room.

Notes

1. See, for example, Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1976); and Elie Weisel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Publishers, 1968). The theme is crystallized in Roger Manvell and Fraenkel Heinrich, Incomparable Crime; Mass Extermination in the 20th Century: The Legacy of Guilt (London: Hinemann Publishers, 1967).

2. See, for example, Richard Falk, "Ethnocide, Genocide, and the Nuremberg Tradition of Moral Responsibility," in Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs, Virginia Held, Sidney Morganbesser and Thomas Nagel, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 123–37; Monroe C. Beardsley, "Reflections on Genocide and Ethnocide," in Genocide in Paraguay, Richard Arens, ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), pp. 85–101; and Robert Jaulin, L'Ethnocide à travers Les Amériques (Paris: Gallimard Publishers, 1972), and La décivilisation, politique et pratique de l'ethnocide (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974).

3. Assaults upon thinking deviating from Eurocentric mythology have been published with increasing frequency in U.S. mass circulation publications such as Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, Commentary, Scientific American, and the Wall Street Journal throughout 1990–91. A perfect illustration for our purposes here is Jeffrey Hart, "Discovering Columbus," National Review (15 Oct. 1990), pp. 56–57.

4. See Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. and trans., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: Heritage Publishers, 1963).

5. The letter of appointment to these positions, signed by Ferdinand and Isabella, and dated May 28, 1493, is quoted in full in Benjamin Keen, trans., The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1959), pp. 105–06.

6. The best sources on Columbus' policies are Troy Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492–1526 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973); and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Iberian Mediterranean and Atlantic Traditions in the Formation of Columbus as a Colonizer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

7. Regarding the 8–million figure, see Sherburn F. Cook and Borah Woodrow, Essays in Population History, Vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), esp. Chap. VI. The 3–million figure pertaining to the year 1496 derives from a survey conducted by Bartolomé de Las Casas in that year, covered in J. B. Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, Vol. 2 (New York: Putnam's Sons Publishers, 1903–1904), p. 348ff.

8. For summaries of the Spanish census records, see Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947), p. 200ff. See also Salvador de Madariaga, The Rise of the Spanish American Empire (London: Hollis and Carter Publishers, 1947).

9. For aggregate estimates of the pre–contact indigenous population of the Caribbean Basin, see William Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Henry Dobyns, Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); and Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). For additional information, see Henry Dobyns' bibliographic Native American Historical Demography (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1976).

10. These figures are utilized in numerous studies. One of the more immediately accessible is Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1981).

11. See Henry F. Dobyns, "Estimating American Aboriginal Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate," Current Anthropology, No. 7, pp. 395–416.

12. An overall pursuit of this theme will be found in P. M. Ashburn, The Ranks of Death (New York: Coward Publishers, 1947). See also John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953). Broader and more sophisticated articulations of the same idea are embodied in Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbia Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972), and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

13. One of the more thoughtful elaborations on this theme may be found in Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgement at Nuremberg (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

14. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984).

15. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 1990), p. 155.

16. Bartolomé de las Casas, The Spanish Colonie (Brevísima revacíon) University Microfilms reprint, 1966).

17. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Vol. 3, Augustin Millares Carlo and Lewis Hanke, eds. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951), esp. Chap. 29.

18. Bartolomé de Las Casas, quoted in J. B. Thatcher, op. cit., p. 348ff.

19. See Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959). See also Rob Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1989).

20. The most succinctly competent overview of this subject matter is probably Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (New York: Dodd and Mead Company, 1972).

21. The polemics of Columbus' strongest supporters among his contemporaries amplify this point. See, for example, Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias (Seville, 1535; Salamanca, 1547, 1549) (Valladoid, 1557) (Madrid: Academia Historica, 1851–55), esp. Chaps. 29, 30, 37.

22. Kirkpatrick Sale, op. cit., p. 156.

23. On Columbus' written expression, see V. I. Milani, "The Written Language of Christopher Columbus," Forum italicum (1973). See also Cecil Jane, "The question of Literacy of Christopher Columbus," Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 10 (1930).

24. On Columbus' signature, see J. B. Thatcher, op. cit., p. 454.

25. City of Genoa, Christopher Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His Genoese Origin (Genoa: Instituto d'Arti Grafiche, 1931) (English language edition, 1932).

26. José de la Torre, Beatriz Enríquez de Harana (Madrid: Iberoamericana Publishers, 1933).

27. Enrique de Gandia, Historia de Cristóbal Colón: analisis crítico (Buenos Aires, 1942).

28. Manuel Luciano de Silva, Columbus Was 100% Portuguese (Bristol, Rhode Island: self–published, 1989).

29. Simon Weisenthal, Sails of Hope (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1973).

30. Henry Vignaud, "Columbus a Spaniard and a Jew?" American History Review, Vol. 18 (1913). This initial excursion into the idea was followed in more depth by Francisco Martínez in his El descubrimiento de América y las joyas de doña Isabel (Seville, 1916); and Jacob Wasserman in Christoph Columbus (Berlin: S. Fisher Publishers, 1929).

31. Salvador de Madariaga, Christopher Columbus (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). His lead was followed by Armando Alvarez Pedroso in an essay, "Cristóbal Colón no fue hebero" (Revista de Historica de América, 1942) and Antonio Ballesteros y Beretta in Cristóbal Colón y el descubrimiento de América (Barcelona/Buenos Aires: Savat Publishers, 1945).

32. Brother Nectario Maria, Juan Colón Was A Spanish Jew (New York: Cedney Publishers, 1971).

33. A much sounder handling of the probabilities of early Jewish migration to the Americas may be found in Meyer Keyserling, Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries (Longmans, Green Publishers, 1893) (reprinted 1963).

34. For a complete count, see Simonetta Conti, Un secolo di bibliografia colombiana 1880–1985 (Genoa: Cassa di Risparmio di Genova e Imperia, 1986).

35. These claims are delineated and debunked in Jacques Heers, Christophe Columb (Paris: Hachette Publishers, 1981).

Copyright © 1995 by Ward Churchill.

LETTER FROM A FRIEND
by Mutabaruka

from where i stand

i can cleary see your tormented faces

how you must hate me

i wonder how many think of killin me

of assasinating their countries leader

but again lookin at you all

i see fear

passive fear

fear of death

no martyrs are among you



so i am safe within the confines of the law

to overtax you

underpay you

overwork you

police force you

bury you

black people

my people

victims of society

victims of western democracy

no martyrs are among you

even though our country achieved independence

european rule still prevails

neo-colonialism has its roots deep in our soil

i care not

as long as i am well paid

no martyrs are among you



so i am safe within the confines of your passitivity

to stand on this rostrum



and address you

and fill your oppressed ears

with mockin promises

as i speak, i speak for all who are here with me

brown and nearly white

for color, class and creed

has no meanin where the almighty dollar is concerned

and on behalf of the government

here and abroad

i would like to thank you voters

for dippin your finger in the blood

thus markin an X

givin us the wrong to do wrong

you dont have to hear my thoughts

you know them

no martyrs are among you

Editors Note: A good friend just sent this short video link -
http://filmstripinternational.com/


Compliments of Free Voice of America (FVOA): Accurate News and Interesting Commentary for Amerika's Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free.

Apocalypse Now
How Mankind Is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth
by Maria Gilardin
www.dissidentvoice.org/
September 21, 2005

This headline appeared in the London Independent in early February of 2005, following a conference at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, England, where 200 of the world’s leading scientists issued the most urgent warning to date: that dangerous climate change is taking place today, and not the day after tomorrow.

Floods, storms, and droughts. Melting polar ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. Scientists from the fields of glaciology, biology, meteorology, oceanography, and ecology reported seeing a dramatic rise over the last 50 years of all the indicators of climate change: increase in average world temperatures, extreme weather events, in the levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and in the level of the oceans.

The award winning environmental writer Geoffrey Lean wrote: “Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world . . . will puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster -- destroying the climate that has allowed human civilization to flourish over the past 11,000 years.”

The overwhelming majority of scientists and international climate monitoring bodies now agree that climate change is taking place, that humans are responsible, and that time is running out. In fact, we could reach “the point of no return” in a decade, reported Lean.

Melting glaciers all across the world include: the Broggi in the Peruvian Andes, Glacier Ururashraju in the Cordillera Blanca of Peru, the Pasterze in Austria, Portage Glacier near Anchorage, Alaska, Mount Hood in Oregon, Mount Kilimanjaro in northeastern Tanzania, the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park, and the Rhone Glacier in Switzerland.

The earth is getting warmer. While average warming is just under 1 degree Celsius worldwide, the Polar Regions show warming of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, due to feedback effects. With the melt of white snow, that previously reflected some of the heat back into the atmosphere (albedo effect), newly exposed darker surfaces absorb heat, and accelerate melting of more ice and snow.

A world average warming of under 1 degree Celsius may seem small. However, historically, the difference between warm periods and an ice age has been only 5 to 6 degrees Celsius. The transformation from the last ice age to the present climate resulted from a slow rise in temperature, which took 5,000 years to fully complete, allowing life on Earth to adapt to the changes. We could bring about a 5- to 6- degree change in only 150 years if we don’t start constraining the use of fossil fuels.

It is not only the fundamental change in the composition of air, water, and soil that we need to consider. The speed at which these changes are forced upon the planet already leads to high extinction rates.

Scientists at the Exeter meeting agreed that warming over 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures would be dangerous -- and we are almost half way there. To burn up the world’s remaining coal reserves, they estimated, would raise the average temperature by 3 to 8 degrees C in less than 150 years.

Quite a few climate “skeptics”, fossil fuel executives, and members of the Bush administration are still denying that there is such a thing as human-caused global warming. Many of them claim that the sun has just grown hotter. However, a warmer sun would have heated the stratosphere as well. In contrast, the stratosphere is cooling -- suggesting a blanket of greenhouse gases that prevents the earth’s heat from radiating back into space.

We know how the greenhouse effect works. Venus, with a thick greenhouse cover is hot; Mars, with a thin greenhouse is cold. Earth’s blanket of greenhouse gases is made up of the byproducts of the industrial age and an outdated Victorian technology. Even though methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas, it is CO2 that makes up over 80% of the greenhouse gas mix. Ice core studies show that CO2 concentrations on this planet had been stable for the last millennium, never rising or falling more than 10 ppm, and fluctuating between 275 and 285 ppm. Now CO2 concentrations are beginning to exceed 370 ppm, and are rising from year to year. Other greenhouse gases show the same dramatic increase -- mainly in the past 40 to 50 years. We are already living under a dome of air that no one has breathed in a million years.

Ocean Warming and Acidification

The average temperature of the surface waters of the oceans, extending to a depth of several hundred meters, has risen by a 1/2 degree Celsius. This has occurred in just the past 40 years. The oceans have also become more acidic, due to the uptake of anthropogenic CO2. The Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England estimates that 48% of fossil-fuel CO2, or 400 billion tons, have been absorbed by the oceans, making them the largest reservoir of carbon, a load greater than that borne by the atmosphere or the earth. CO2, while more inert in the atmosphere, becomes highly reactive in oceans, leading to physical, biological, and geological changes.

Carol Turley, head of science at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, warns that no such ph changes in oceans have occurred in the past 20 million years, and that the capacity of oceans to take up CO2 is limited.

What might the consequences of such changes in the oceans be? An August 2005 article in the Globe and Mail, on starving sea birds washing up on Pacific coast beaches from California to British Columbia, reports that scientists believe that, at least for this year, the “bottom has fallen out of the coastal food chain.” Off the Oregon coast, the waters near the shore are 5 to 7 degrees warmer than normal. A layer of warm water along the whole Pacific coastline prevents the usual upwelling of cool water rich in phytoplankton, the base of the food web for all marine life.

Zooplankton, such as krill, depend on phytoplankton. The disappearance of zooplankton in turn affects seabirds and fish from sardines to whales. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found a 20 to 30 per cent drop in juvenile salmon off the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia; and monitoring in Central and Northern California shows the lowest number of juvenile rockfish in more than 20 years.

The world has not yet felt the real impact of global warming since the oceans have absorbed so much heat and CO2. The US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) put out two studies in March 2005. They suggest that due to the thermal inertia of the oceans global temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise for the next 100 years - even if greenhouse gas emissions come under control.

First Signs of a Gulf Stream Collapse

The opening presentations at the Exeter, UK conference gave the most comprehensive assessment of so-called “wild cards”, climate change events that risk feedback loops no longer responsive to human intervention. The run-away events, or ecological landslides include accelerated melting of the enormous ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, as well as the decline and possible reversal of the Gulf Stream that conveys heat from the tropics to Europe.

In the Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” the Gulf Stream stops flowing in a matter of days, creating an instant ice age on the Atlantic coast and Western Europe. Scientists at Exeter said it would take at least ten years for such an event to unfold and a few hundred years to set up the conditions. But they warned that the Thermohaline Circulation, as they call the Gulf Stream, has stopped flowing before -- and that we have already a greater than 50% likelihood of a shutdown if we do not enact strict climate policies.

The amount of heat transported North by the Gulf Stream, which keeps Western Europe 5 to 10 degrees Celsius warmer than it would normally be at its latitude, equals one million billion watts -- sufficient to satisfy the energy needs of 100 Earths. Even a partial failure of the Gulf Stream would have huge consequences.

The Gulf Stream picks up heat from the equatorial sun. Driven by warmth, the stream flows northeast towards Europe and the Greenland ice sheets, where the water cools and sinks. The cooler and saltier the water, the stronger the sinking motion. Dense cool and salty water from the Gulf Stream then flows back to the tropics at a deeper ocean level.

As the Polar Regions and the oceans are warming, melt-water from ice sheets and glaciers is changing the salinity of the ocean. A combination of the rising ocean surface temperature, and the decreasing salinity, already visibly changes the movement of sea currents that depend on differences in warmth and coolness, and the weight that higher salinity adds to the water as the driving force.

Large-scale salinity changes in the Arctic and sub-Arctic Seas were reported in June 2005, in the journal Science. Ruth Curry from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, analyzed temperature, salinity, and density data, collected in the North Atlantic Ocean over the last 55 years. Curry warned that excessive amounts of freshwater dumped into the North Atlantic could affect the flow of the Gulf Stream.

We know, from ice-core data, when the Gulf Stream has stopped flowing before. The most recent collapse, 15,000 years ago during the Younger Dryas, was caused by the sweetening of the North Atlantic Ocean, when glaciers covering North America melted and began flowing through the St. Lawrence waterway into the Atlantic, instead of into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi. Today’s accelerated melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets may recreate these conditions, not just for the Gulf Stream but also for other parts of the global ocean circulation.

In May of this year, the London Times reported that first signs of a slow down of the Gulf Stream had been detected by a Cambridge University researcher, who hitches rides on a Royal Navy submarine to one of the three areas where the Gulf Stream reverses its course. Peter Wadhams said that “until recently we could find giant ‘chimneys’ in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 meters below, but now they have almost disappeared.”

Off the coast of Greenland, the Odden Ice Shelf once grew out into the Greenland Sea every winter, and receded in the summer. The Odden triggered the annual formation of sinking water columns in that area. However, since 1997, the shelf has ceased to form. Where Wadhams had once observed 12 giant columns of sinking water under the ice, he now found only two -- and they were so weak that they were unable to reach the seabed.

Wadhams also predicts complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as early as 2020. On his submarine journeys, using sonar to survey the ice cap from underneath, he has observed a 46% thinning over the past 20 years.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is Melting

The biggest danger to the Gulf Stream comes from melt-water off the Greenland ice sheet, the second largest store of fresh water on this planet. If all of it were to melt, sea levels around the world would rise by 7 meters -- over 20 feet. However even a partial meltdown would affect the Gulf Stream, by diluting the salt water right at the crucial point where the Gulf Stream sinks and returns to the tropics.

Prof. Michael Schlesinger from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, whose climate model already predicts a 50% chance of Gulf Stream shutdown if we do not enact climate policies, and a 25% shutdown even if we limit greenhouse gases, based his estimate only on increased rainfall, due to global warming. He now says he will have to include additional melt-water from the Greenland ice sheet into his next set of data, because it appears that the melt has begun.

Observations on the Greenland ice sheet are done by G.P.S. (global positioning systems) and radar and laser via satellites and airplanes. G.P.S. data of the past 5 years show accelerated melting, and even the beginning of a possible feedback effect: the more the ice sheet melts the faster it starts to move. The reason for this acceleration, it is believed, is that melt-water from the surface of the ice sheet makes its way down to the bedrock below, where it acts as a lubricant, further speeding up the slippage and disintegration.

The question now is, when does this feedback process reach the point of no return? James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says that if greenhouse-gas emissions are not controlled now, the total disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet could be set in motion in a matter of decades. Although it could take hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years to fully play out, once begun the process would become self-reinforcing and cannot be halted.

The Gulf Stream is just one part of a complex global system of ocean currents that affect temperatures, winds, and rain across the whole planet. We now have charts of these powerful currents driven by heat and coolness, traversing all oceans, - Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. And they are all interconnected via the huge circumpolar current flowing around the Antarctic. Changes at the South Pole therefore would have an even larger effect than those in the Arctic.

Ice Shelf Collapses and the Melting of Antarctica

The Antarctic is the 5th largest continent. It holds 90% of the world’s fresh water. A comparison in scale to the Greenland ice sheet shows that if all Antarctic ice were to melt, sea levels would rise by over 169 feet. The Antarctic has had a permanent ice sheet for the last 30 million years.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge now reports rapid warming on the West Antarctic Peninsula and the WAIS, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Of the 224 glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula, over 87% are in retreat. Major ice shelves have collapsed. BAS scientists believe disappearing ice shelves are now contributing to more rapid melting of glaciers formerly protected by the floating ice shelf at their base.

Antarctica’s huge Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in just 35 days after a NASA satellite detected the first ruptures at the end of January 2002; it was roughly the size of Luxembourg. Soil sediments from that ice shelf reveal that Larsen B had been intact for 20,000 years - since the peak of the last ice age. No collapse of this size has happened since the end of the last Ice Age.

Larsen B's smaller neighbor, Larsen A, broke off in 1995. According to studies by the BAS, other much bigger ice shelves nearby, such as the Ross and Ronne, each larger than France, are also considered at risk of disintegrating.

Another troubling development in the Antarctic, according to the director of the BAS, Chris Rapley, is the accelerated flow of melt streams underneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Until recently, scientists were unable to explain the 20th century’s world-wide sea-level rises of between 1 and 2 mm per year, by the amount of ice that has melted from glaciers and ice sheets. Even after taking into account thermal expansion, they wondered where the extra water was coming from.

Recent discoveries show a major hidden source of water comes from polar ice sheets. In the Antarctic, ice streams, and a newly discovered network of tributaries underneath the ice sheets, drain 33 major basins. Flow rates are much faster than previously assumed. Ice streams, from the feed glaciers behind the collapsed Larsen A and B ice shelves, also show accelerated flows. The BAS calls this a “cork out of the bottle” effect.

These “wild cards,” the melting of the polar ice caps and the acidification of the oceans, were only the most dramatic events on the agenda of the Exeter, UK, meeting on the dangers of climate-change. The number of scientific papers, recording changes in ecosystems due to global warming, escalated in five years, from 14 to more than a thousand. In one presentation after another, scientists described a crisis they had dedicated their lives to avoid.

Geoffrey Lean, who attended the conference, wrote that there were few in the room that did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly at their shoulders. The formal conclusion of the meeting, that climate change was “already occurring” and that “in many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought,” appeared in the press all over the world -- except in the United States. However even in the European press, very few writers took on the scientific details of this story, without which political action and organizing are impossible. Geoffrey Lean wrote: “Mankind is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth.”

Bush-Wars on Climate Science

After the Exeter meeting, in an interview for TUC Radio, the director of BAS, Chris Rapley, spoke about how, in public appearances, he bridges the gap between science, and popular understanding of these dramatic changes.

He said he always refers to the picture of Earth in space taken by Apollo 17: the small blue planet, tilted back to show the Antarctic, surrounded by inky blackness. The image, he says, shows that this is all there is, no other life-support system trails behind; and, that on the planet all is interconnected.

Earth is the most complex and complicated object in the universe that we know of, says Rapley, a radio astronomer by training. Only Earth has an ocean and clouds. Only Earth has physics, biology, geology, chemistry, and anthropology.

Humans have transformed the earth in a dramatic way, especially in the last 50 years. Not only have we drastically changed the carbon cycle by the burning of fossil fuel and coal, and by increasing forest fires; we have also changed the nitrogen cycle worldwide by the amount of nitrogen being fixed by industrial agriculture and fertilizer use.

We have transformed more than half the land surface through agriculture, deforestation, mining, industry, paving, and ever-growing cities. These changes have altered the climate systems by the way moisture is exchanged between Earth and the atmosphere.

We have destroyed biodiversity by shifting plants and animals into places and conditions where they cannot survive. Our own survival, as humans, is only slightly more secure. We are seeing the most basic of our needs -- air, water, housing, and energy -- disappear before our eyes. Rapley concluded that there is no way to imagine that humans could do all these things without an effect.

The demise of our common life-support system is accelerated by even more energy-intensive activities, by which a privileged group of people attempts to secure its survival.

The meeting in Exeter was held explicitly to convince the Bush administration to join the rest of the industrialized world, and to use the July 2005 G8 meeting to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The United States and Australia, the world’s two largest polluters, are -- to this day -- refusing to be part of any global agreement to limit CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

The G8 meeting came and went. The US, with 42% of global fossil fuel CO2, and 34% of combined greenhouse gas emissions, not only remained outside the climate- stabilization effort but also fought vigorously to prevent any progress in setting limits. Given the extraordinary amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the US, this country alone can dramatically slow climate change, or bring the planet to the boiling point.

Three weeks before the G8 summit, The Observer (UK) printed a set of leaked documents revealing how the Bush White House derailed attempts to address global warming. These submissions to the G8 action plan show that Washington officials deleted even the suggestion that global warming has already started.

Among the key sentences removed were: “Our world is warming. Climate change is a serious threat that has the potential to affect every part of the globe. And we know that ... mankind's activities are contributing to this warming. This is an issue we must address urgently.”

At the Exeter conference the International Climate Change Task Force, UK, said that if we do nothing the climate system will collapse. Stephen Byers, the co-chair of that task force and an advisor to Tony Blair, said the point of no return could be reached in a decade. The Bush delegation to the July 2005 G8 summit in Scotland, probably even George Bush himself, is aware of that deadline.

However the warning disappeared under the same blanket of denial and outright lies produced by industry, their paid scientists, and the Bush administration. Among all official documents that deny climate change, only one sends a different message: the report on “Climate Change as a National Security Concern,” commissioned for Donald Rumsfeld by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall, and made public in February 2004.

The Global Business Network wrote for the Pentagon: “the focus in climate research has slowly been shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change. A year later, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades.”

Whether in a decade as the UK scientists say, or two as the Pentagon study says, a consensus is developing that we are reaching a phase of dangerous, abrupt, and irreversible climate shifts. However, for the Bush administration, this is not an ecological or humanitarian, but only a military issue. They question only how to protect US borders from environmental refugees, how to overpower nations collapsing under the environmental pressures, how to keep access to food, water, and energy as other parts of the world go hungry and thirsty; how to keep nuclear pre-eminence, while those weapons in other countries fall into the hands of insurgents.

The eerie similarity of these goals and methods, with those of the so-called war on terrorism, raises the question of whether that war on terrorism is not really already a war on the Earth. And, as in the war on terrorism, the already occurring ecological disasters -- like the Osama bin Ladens -- are needed and promoted. And the religious fundamentalists are driving this forward because God has given them dominion over the planet to do as they wish.

And, as irrecoverable time passes, more bad news of ecological landslides emerges: In early August 2005, the New Scientist reported that, in Western Siberia, a permafrost area, the size of France and Germany combined, is thawing for the first time since the ice age, 11,000 years ago. What was until recently an expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometer across. The area’s peat bog contains an estimated 70 billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2, which, if released, could dramatically increase the rate of global warming.

Even in a best-case scenario, were the methane to be released slowly over a period of 100 years, it would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, said scientists at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK. The scientists from Tomsk State University and Oxford, who discovered the melt, said that this was yet another feedback effect, an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming.”

There may be some, cynical enough to think that climate change is an interesting science fiction experiment, or greedy enough to want to extract the last drop of oil from the dying Earth for a profit.

But what about the rest of us: not cynical, not greedy and arrogant? It is pretty clear that there need to be BIG changes in the way we live -- and that is frightening for many, since we have become so dependent on this technological civilization. However scientists tell us that the extreme weather events to come, such as floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and unprecedented heat waves, are more frightening than any change in the way we choose to live now.

There is a set of figures that is both deeply depressing and hopeful. The last published World Bank data for CO2 emissions per capita indicate that, while every man, woman, and child in the US puts out 20 metric tons of CO2 per annum, those in the European Union put out 8 per person per year; China 2; and the output of Nigerians, who supply us with much of the oil that we burn into CO2, is zero -- below scale. In 2002, US-Americans used over 12,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per person; Europeans used less than half the amount, while the use in China is 987 kilowatt-hours per person. The US per-capita use of oil is twice that of the European Union, and more than 8 times that of China.

What if China aspires to our standard of living? And why not, if we are not willing to cut back? Europe gets by with so much less CO2-output and energy-input, while already planning for further cuts. Where is the measure of global justice, between those who cause no harm and those whose extravagant use of fossil fuels harms everybody else?

Regardless of who is driving this: industry, the military, religious fundamentalists, or any permutation of government, be it red or blue, responsibility for the approaching climate collapse will fall overwhelmingly on the United States. Since the US government and corporations not only refuse to cut back but are driving eco-collapse forward, it is up to ordinary people to refuse collaboration and to control the perpetrators. For us living in the US, the opportunity and time to make a difference that will affect the entire planet is now.

*************
Maria Gilardin produces TUC Radio, a weekly half-hour radio program that is distributed for free to all radio stations via Pacifica Radio's KU Band, and as an mp3 file on TUC Radio's web site: www.tucradio.org. She may be reached at: tuc@tucradio.org

Related Links and Resources:

* Hadley Centre
* Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
* British Antarctic Survey
* Plymouth Marine Laboratory
* "As the World Burns," by Bill McKibben, Chris Mooney, & Ross Gelbspan, Mother Jones, May/June 2005.
* The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare
* Arctic Sea Ice Changes
* Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: Abrupt Climate Change
* Ice Core drilling on the Greenland Ice Sheet
* Siberian permafrost melting
* Carol Turley on Marine Snow
* Photos of Global Warming, Glacier Melting
* Douglas Quin recorded the sounds of breaking ice in the Antarctic

Sick Strategies
For Senseless Slaughter

by John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
from: 5-24-05

The murderous fools are not trying to end the war;
they're trying to keep it going as long as they can.

The cat is out of the bag now.

It happened quite by accident, as most revelations do. And it is seen by most of the world as the most revolting of the American/Israeli atrocities in the past few years, although it's hard to prioritize that claim because of the level and frequency of barbaric acts that are committed on a regular basis by those affluent automatons who call themselves the good guys.

Yet everyone but the comatose American populace — blinded by its Orwellian media and stupefied by its demented diet of physical and mental poisons — can see it.

So permit me to spell it out for those cowardly people who say they're living in the freest country on Earth, but absolutely refuse in their silent ignorance to see the blood they're spilling. No country that condones deliberate torture for any reason can ever be trusted.

The first hint came in Imad Khadduri's "A warning to car drivers" written in Arabic and posted on www.albasrah.net on May 11. The dispatch was quickly picked up by two of the most realistic and reliable news sites on the Web, www.uruknet.info, which I try to read every day, and www.globalresearch.ca, which I try to read every week, since it offers less breaking and more analytical news. I consider these two sites essential to keeping up with the real news of the world, and highly recommend that you monitor them, too.

Khadduri recounted a scam that opens up a clear window to seeing who is perpetrating all this inexplicable violence in Iraq. Beyond the American attempt to pacify an outraged and abused nation through demonic destruction, and beyond the Iraqi attempt to resist this totalitarian takeover by a foreign conqueror, there are more than numerous acts of violence that simply can't be understood by straightforward explanations.

I mean, when a mosque blows up and Americans blame Islamic terrorists, whether Sunni or Shiite, it makes no sense. Muslims never blow up their own houses of worship. Or when reporters sympathetic to either the Iraqi cause of freedom, or even just general principles of international justice, are suddenly assassinated and the blame is placed on often imaginary Islamic extremists whose perspective is supported by these writers, how can anyone believe that Muslims did it, even thought this is what the Zionist American press and government continue to insist.

So who’s doing all these demented deeds? As if we didn’t know ....

Khadduri’s report went like this:

“A few days ago, an American manned check point confiscated the driver license of a driver and told him to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license. The next day, the driver did visit the camp and he was allowed in the camp with his car. He was admitted to a room for an interrogation that lasted half an hour. At the end of the session, the American interrogator told him: ‘OK, there is nothing against you, but you do know that Iraq is now sovereign and is in charge of its own affairs. Hence, we have forwarded your papers and license to al-Kadhimia police station for processing. Therefore, go there with this clearance to reclaim your license. At the police station, ask for Lt. Hussain Mohammed, who is waiting for you now. Go there now quickly, before he leaves his shift work”.

The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him. He stopped the car and inspected it carefully. He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors.

The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated “hideous attack by foreign elements”.

The same scenario was repeated in Mosul, in the north of Iraq. A car was confiscated along with the driver’s license. He did follow up on the matter and finally reclaimed his car but was told to go to a police station to reclaim his license. Fortunately for him, the car broke down on the way to the police station. The inspecting car mechanic discovered that the spare tire was fully laden with explosives."

If this were the only example of this type I heard, I might have let it pass as just a story. But it wasn’t.

There was also the sorry tale of the Iraqi man who saw American soldiers plant a bomb which shortly thereafter exploded, and when he said so out loud for all to hear, he was hauled away, never to be seen again.

This story was reported on arguably the most authentic and riveting source of news from Iraq, the heart-rending "Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq," which is compiled by someone known only as Riverbend or Iraqi Girl http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/. Again, recommended reading.

She recounts, "the last two weeks have been violent ....

The number of explosions in Baghdad alone is frightening. There have also been several assassinations — bodies being found here and there. It's somewhat disturbing to know that corpses are turning up in the most unexpected places. Many people will tell you it's not wise to eat river fish anymore because they have been nourished on the human remains being dumped into the river. That thought alone has given me more than one sleepless night. It is almost as if Baghdad has turned into a giant graveyard.

The latest corpses were those of some Sunni and Shia clerics — several of them well-known. People are being patient and there is a general consensus that these killings are being done to provoke civil war. Also worrisome is the fact that we are hearing of people being rounded up by security forces (Iraqi) and then being found dead days later — apparently when the new Iraqi government recently decided to reinstate the death penalty, they had something else in mind.

But back to the explosions. One of the larger blasts was in an area called Ma'moun, which is a middle class area located in west Baghdad. It’s a relatively calm residential area with shops that provide the basics and a bit more. It happened in the morning, as the shops were opening up for their daily business and it occurred right in front of a butcher’s shop. Immediately after, we heard that a man living in a house in front of the blast site was hauled off by the Americans because it was said that after the bomb went off, he sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman.

I didn’t think much about the story — nothing about it stood out: an explosion and a sniper — hardly an anomaly. The interesting news started circulating a couple of days later. People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb. Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away.

The bombs are mysterious. Some of them explode in the midst of National Guard and near American troops or Iraqi Police and others explode near mosques, churches, and shops or in the middle of sougs. One thing that surprises us about the news reports of these bombs is that they are inevitably linked to suicide bombers. The reality is that some of these bombs are not suicide bombs — they are car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs. All we know is that the techniques differ and apparently so do the intentions. Some will tell you they are resistance. Some say Chalabi and his thugs are responsible for a number of them. Others blame Iran and the SCIRI militia Badir.

In any case, they are terrifying. If you're close enough, the first sound is a that of an earsplitting blast and the sounds that follow are of a rain of glass, shrapnel and other sharp things. Then the wails begin — the shrill mechanical wails of an occasional ambulance combined with the wail of car alarms from neighboring vehicles… and finally the wail of people trying to sort out their dead and dying from the debris.

Then there was this one.

On May 13, 2005, a 64 years old Iraqi farmer, Haj Haidar Abu Sijjad, took his tomato load in his pickup truck from Hilla to Baghdad, accompanied by Ali, his 11 years old grandson. They were stopped at an American check point and were asked to dismount. An American soldier climbed on the back of the pickup truck, followed by another a few minutes later, and thoroughly inspected the tomato filled plastic containers for about 10 minutes. Haj Haidar and his grandson were then allowed to proceed to Baghdad.

A minute later, his grandson told him that he saw one of the American soldiers putting a grey melon size object in the back among the tomato containers. The Haj immediately slammed on the brakes and stopped the car at the side of the road, at a relatively far distance from the check point. He found a time bomb with the clock ticking tucked among his tomatoes. He immediately recognized it, as he was an ex-army soldier. Panicking, he grabbed his grandson and ran away from the car. Then, realizing that the car was his only means of work, he went back, took the bomb and carried it in fear. He threw it in a deep ditch by the side of the road that was dug by Iraqi soldiers in preparation for the war, two years ago.

Upon returning from Baghdad, he found out that the bomb had indeed exploded, killing three sheep and injuring their shepherd in his head. He thanked God for giving him the courage to go back and remove the bomb, and for the luck in that the American soldiers did not notice his sudden stop at a distance and his getting rid of the bomb.

"They intended it to explode in Baghdad and claim that it is the work of the 'terrorists', or 'insurgents' or who call themselves the 'Resistance'.

I decided to expose them and asked your reporter to take me to Baghdad to tell you the story. They are to be exposed as they now want to sow strife in Iraq and taint the Resistance after failing to defeat it militarily. Do not forget to mention my name. I fear nobody but God, as I am a follower of Muqtada al-Sadir."

The background and admission of guilt for such satanic shenanigans was clearly outlined in Frank Morales' piece on globalresearch.ca: "The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi 'Insurgents' — and Global Terrorism," by Frank Morales http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR505A.html clearly demonstrates how Donald Rumsfeld said he was going to do exactly what these three sorry episodes show he actually did.

Morales writes:

Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. How could he be so sure of that? Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld. According to Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army, "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" network that would "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception," to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.

We never got the full story on those ghastly beheadings of Nick Berg and others. Nor have we ever understood who killed the American mercenaries in Fallujah that eventually precipitated one of the great slaughters in history. Nor have we ever been able to discern if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is actually a real person or just another bin Ladenesque boogeyman. Nor if the al-Qaeda website which claims responsibility for various atrocities is not really run by the CIA.

Provoking this type of violence also further conceals the sinister genocide the Israelis continue to perpetrate on the hapless Palestinians, which is exactly its point, as is the entire Iraq invasion and destruction, and as was the inside job mass murder on 9/11 in New York City. The purpose of all these despicable acts is to conceal what the Israelis and the Americans have been doing all along to the entire Arab world, namely enslaving and destroying it.

There is not now nor ever was an Arab terror threat. That was all invented by Rothschild, Rockefeller, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Bush, Cheney, Sharon, Zakheim, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Warren Buffett. These people are all traitors to not only their countries but to humanity in general, and should all be slammed and RICOed into Guantanamo immediately.

And so should the government officials, media lackeys, and ordinary citizens who, by their complicity or their ignorance, support them.

The main point in understanding these deliberate provocations to prevent peace is to understand how the American capitalist system, now hijacked by billionaires with no trace of conscience, thrives on war and profits from the misery of others.

The neocon murder menace has been for months ratcheting up the hyperbole about why we need to invade Iran — which some predict will happen in June — and just this week, rumors of troop movements in the Caribbean and lockdowns at Florida military bases appear to augur an imminent invasion of oil-producing Venezuela.

The overall plan is to create hell on Earth, and we are succeeding. By our silent complicity and cowardly reluctance to oppose and stop this homicidal behavior in the name of profit, we are all accessories to mass murder and the destruction of human society, not to even mention the extinction of individual human freedom and the God-given right to be safe and secure in the homes of our choice.

So now that you know, what are you going to do about it? You know if you do nothing, these same things will one day happen to you.

John Kaminski is a writer whose Internet essays are seen on hundreds of websites around the world. These stories have been compiled into two anthologies, “America’s Autopsy Report” and “The Perfect Enemy.” In addition, he has written “The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001,” a booklet written for those who still believe the government’s cynical lies about that tragic day. All three books are available at http://www.johnkaminski.com
***************

US/UK/ISRAEL DISCLOSED AS THE TERRORIST BOMBERS IN IRAQ !!!
[911TruthAction]

The British Thugs

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=15936&hd=0&size=1&l=x

British "Pseudo-Gang" Terrorists Exposed in Basra
Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire
September 20, 2005

Baghdad Dweller reports two British soldiers held by "Iraqi authorities" in Basra (also
described as "Shiite militiamen" in the corporate media), and subsequently freed after the
British stormed a police jail, were working undercover as bombers. Baghdad Dweller
includes a link to the Washington Post, where the following appears: "Iraqi security officials
on Monday variously accused the two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or
trying to plant explosives. Photographs of the two men in custody showed them in civilian
clothes."

Even though the Washington Post mentions two Brits were detained, apparently caught
red-handed shooting Iraqi police and planting explosives, it does not bother to mention
the SAS or its long and sordid history of engaging in covert pseudo-gang behavior and
conclude the obvious: Britain, and the United States—the latter having admitted
formulating the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) in 2002, a brain child of
neocons staffing the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, designed to "stimulate reactions"
on the part of "terrorists" (in Iraq, that would be the resistance)—are intimately involved in
sowing chaos and spreading violence in Iraq and more than likely soon enough in Iran and
Syria.

Of course, this unfortunate and embarrassing incident in Basra will fall off the front page
of corporate newspapers and websites soon enough, replaced with more appropriate, if
fantastical, propaganda implicating the Iraqi resistance and intel ops such as al-Zarqawi
for the violence, obviously engineered to create a civil war in Iraq and thus divide the
country and accomplish the neocon-Likudite plan to destroy Islamic culture and society.

Addendum

It is not surprising the corporate media in the United States and Britain would omit crucial
details on this story. In order to get the whole story, we have to go elsewhere—for
instance, China's Xinhuanet news agency. "Two persons wearing Arab uniforms [see the
M.O. cited above] opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the
attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers," an Interior
Ministry source told Xinhua. "The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with
explosives, the source said."

So, the next time you read or hear about crazed "al-Qaeda in Iraq" terrorists blowing up
children or desperate job applicants, keep in mind, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry,
the perpetrators may very well be British SAS goons who cut their teeth killing Irish
citizens.


:: Article nr. 15936 sent on 20-sep-2005 21:20 ECT

:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=15936

:: The incoming address of this article is :
kurtnimmo.com/?p=32

**************************************
Who's Blowing Up Iraq?
New evidence that bombs are being planted by British
by Mike Whitney
September 20, 2005

"The Iraqi security officials on Monday variously accused
two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or
TRYING TO PLANT EXPLOSIVES." Wash. Post, Ellen Knickmeyer, 9-20-05;
"British Smash into Jail to Free Two Detained Soldiers"

In more than two years since the United States initiated
hostilities against Iraq, there has never been a positive
identification of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Never.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't exist; it simply suggests
that prudent people will challenge the official version until
his whereabouts and significance in the conflict can be verified.

At present, much of the rationale for maintaining the occupation
depends on this elusive and, perhaps, illusory figure.
It's odd how Al-Zarqawi appears at the precise coordinates
of America's bombing-raids, and then, miraculously vanishes
unscathed from the scene of the wreckage. This would be a remarkable
feat for anyone, but especially for someone who only has one leg.

Al-Zarqawi may simply be a fantasy dreamed up by Pentagon planners
to put a threatening face on the Iraqi resistance.
The Defense Dept has been aggressive in its effort
to shape information in a way that serves the overall objectives
of the occupation. The primary aim of the Pentagon's
"Strategic Information" program is to distort the truth
in a way that controls the storyline created by the media.

Al-Zarqawi fits perfectly within this paradigm of intentional deception.

The manipulation of information factors heavily
in the steady increase of Iraqi casualties, too.
Although the military refuses "to do body counts";
many people take considerable interest in the daily death toll.

Last week, over 200 civilians were killed in seemingly random acts
of violence purportedly caused by al-Zarqawi.
But, were they?
Were these massive attacks the work of al-Zarqawi
as the western media reports or some other "more shadowy" force?

One member of the Iraqi National Assembly. Fatah al-Sheikh, stated,

"It seems that the American forces are trying to escalate
the situation in order to make the Iraqi people suffer..
There is a huge campaign for the agents of the foreign occupation
to enter and plant hatred between the sons of the Iraqi people,
and spread rumors in order to scare the one from the other.
- The occupiers are trying to start religious incitement
and if it does not happen, then they will try to start
an internal Shiite incitement."

Al-Sheikh's feelings are shared by a great many Iraqis.
They can see that everything the US has done, from the forming
a government made up predominantly of Shi'ites and Kurds,
to creating a constitution that allows the breaking up
to the country (federalism), to using the Peshmerga
and Badr militia in their attacks on Sunni cities,
to building an Interior Ministry entirely comprised of Shi'ites,
suggests that the Pentagon's strategy is to fuel the sectarian
divisions that will lead to civil war.
Al-Zarqawi is an integral facet of this broader plan.
Rumsfeld has cast the Jordanian as the agent-provocateur;
the driving force behind religious partition and antagonism.

But, al-Zarqawi has nothing to gain by killing innocent civilians,
and everything to lose. If he does actually operate in Iraq,
he needs logistical supporting all his movements;
including help with safe-houses, assistants, and the assurance
of invisibility in the community. ("The ocean in which he swims")
These would disappear instantly if he recklessly killed
and maimed innocent women and children.

Last week the Imam of Baghdad's al-Kazimeya mosque,
Jawad al-Kalesi said, that "al-Zarqawi is dead
but Washington continues to use him as a bogeyman
to justify a prolonged military occupation.

He's simply an invention by the occupiers to divide the people."
Al-Kalesi added that al-Zarqawi was killed in the beginning
of the war in the Kurdish north and that "His family in Jordan
even held a ceremony after his death." (AFP)

Most Iraqis probably agree with al-Kalesi, but that hasn't
deterred the Pentagon from continuing with the charade.
This is understandable given that al-Zarqawi is the last tattered
justification for the initial invasion. It's doubtful that
the Pentagon will ditch their final threadbare apology for the war.
But the reality is vastly different from the spin coming from
the military. In fact, foreign fighters play a very small role
in Iraq with or without al-Zarqawi. As the Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS) revealed this week in their report,

"Analysts and government officials in the US and Iraq overstated
the size of the foreign element in the Iraqi insurgency..
Iraqi fighters made up less than 10% of the armed groups'
ranks, perhaps, even half of that." The report poignantly notes
that most of the foreign fighters were not previously militants at all,
but were motivated by, "revulsion at the idea of an Arab land
being occupied by a non-Arab country."

The report concludes that the invasion of Iraq has added
thousands of "fresh recruits to Osama bin Laden's network;"
a fact that is no longer in dispute among those
who have studied the data on the topic.

The al-Zarqawi phantasm is a particularly weak-link in the
Pentagon's muddled narrative. The facts neither support
the allegations of his participation nor prove
that foreigners are a major contributor to the ongoing violence.
Instead, the information points to a Defense establishment
that cannot be trusted in anything it says,
and that may be directly involved in the terrorist-bombings
that have killed countless thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Regrettably, that is prospect that can't be ignored.
After all, no one else benefits from the slaughter.
(Note: Since this article was written, the Washington Post
has added to our suspicions. In an Ellen Knickmeyer article
"British Smash into Iraqi Jail to free 2 detained Soldiers"
9-20-05, Knickmeyer chronicles the fighting between British forces
and Iraqi police who were detaining 2 British commandos.
"THE IRAQI SECURITY OFFICIALS ON MONDAY VARIOUSLY ACCUSED
THE TWO BRITONS THEY DETAINED OF SHOOTING AT IRAQI FORCES
or TRYING TO PLANT EXPLOSIVES."

Is this why the British army was ordered to
"burst through the walls of an Iraqi jail Monday
in the southern city of Basra".followed by
"British armored vehicles backed by helicopter gun-ships"
ending in "hours of gun battles and rioting in Basra's streets"?
(Washington Post)

Reuters reported that
"half a dozen armored vehicles had smashed into the jail"
and the provincial governor, Mohammed Walli, told news agencies
that the British assault was "barbaric, savage and irresponsible."

So, why were the British so afraid to go through the normal channels
to get their men released? Could it be that the two commandos
were "trying to plant explosives" as the article suggests?

An interview on Syrian TV last night also alleges that the British
commandos "were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets".

"Al-Munajjid] In fact, Nidal, this incident gave answers
to questions and suspicions that were lacking evidence about
the participation of the occupation in some armed operations in Iraq.

Many analysts and observers here had suspicions that the occupation
was involved in some armed operations against civilians
and places of worship and in the killing of scientists.
But those were only suspicions that lacked proof.

The proof came today through the arrest of the two British soldiers
while they were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets.
This proves, according to observers, that the occupation
is not far from many operations that seek to sow sedition
and maintain disorder, as this would give the occupation
the justification to stay in Iraq for a longer period.

[Zaghbur] Ziyad al-Munajjaid in Baghdad, thank you very much.
Copyright Syrian Arab TV and BBC Monitoring, 2005"

And then there was this on Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, 9-19-05;
Interview with Fattah al-Shayk, member of
the National Assembly and deputy for Basra.

"the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons
and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car
laden with ammunition and was meant to explode
in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market.
However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them.
They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there
and killed some of them. The two arrested persons
are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra,
and they were held by the National Guard force,
but the British occupation forces are still surrounding
this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime."

Copyright Al Jazeera TV and BBC Monitoring, 2005
(Thanks to Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research
for the quotes from Al Jazeera and Syrian TV)

Does this solve the al-Zarqawi mystery?
Are the bombs that are killing so many Iraqi civilians
are being planted by British and American Intelligence?
We'll have to see if this damning story
can be corroborated by other sources.)

************************************************
Dahr Jamail in Iraq recently contacted the family of al-Zarqawi in Jordan and got
confirming evidence that he is dead.

The US/UK/Israel war criminals thus have lost all of their latest pretexts for being in Iraq.

Cleric says al-Zarqawi died long ago
Ajazera.net
Friday 16 September 2005

Al-Qaida's leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead but Washington continues to use
him as a bogeyman to justify a prolonged military occupation, an Iraqi Shia cleric says in
an interview.

Sheikh Jawad al-Kalesi, the imam of the al-Kazemiya mosque in Baghdad, told France's Le
Monde newspaper on Friday: "I don't think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi exists as such. He's
simply an invention by the occupiers to divide the people."

Al-Kalesi claimed that al-Zarqawi was killed in the Kurdish northern region of Iraq at the
beginning of the US-led war on the country as he was meeting with members of the Ansar
Al-Islam group affiliated to al-Qaida.

"His family in Jordan even held a ceremony after his death. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is
therefore a ploy used by the Americans, an excuse to continue the occupation. It's a
pretext so they don't leave Iraq."

Al-Kalesi made the comments to Le Monde as he passed through Paris after attending an
inter-religious gathering in the eastern French city of Lyon organised by the Roman
Catholic Sant'Egidio Community.

Fake statement

The cleric dismissed statements attributed to Zarqawi.

He said an audio message posted on the Internet on Wednesday and attributed to al-
Zarqawi, was meant to push Shia "to find refuge with the Americans rather than join the
resistance."

The voice message had declared "all-out war" on Iraqi Shia and claimed responsibility for
a series of attacks that killed more than 150 people, most of them Shia waiting to be hired
as day labourers in Baghdad.

"If the occupation continues, the situation will only get worse and Iraqis will increasingly
join the resistance," al-Kalesi said.

Iraq's main Sunni Arab religious authority, the Association of Muslim Scholars, has
condemned the call to arms against Shia, calling it "very dangerous" and saying it "plays
into the hands of the occupier who wants to split up the country and spark a sectarian
war."

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=15926
**************
EDITORS NOTE: With Special Thanks to the President In Exile for this "Heads Up"....
Compliments of Free Voice of America (FVOA): Accurate News and Interesting Commentary for Amerika's Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free.

LETS ALL STOP THE MADNESS
by supporting the demonstations this SATURDAY the 24th of September

Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself...and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.
--Chief Joseph

“When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless. When I go amongst my people, we do not feel powerless; we feel oppressed. We do not want to make the trade...we must be willing in our lifetime to deal with reality. It's not revolution; it's liberation. We want to be free of a value system that's being imposed upon us. We do not want to participate in that value system. We don't want change in the value system. We want to remove it from our lives forever...We have to assume our responsibilities as power, as individuals, as spirit, as people...

We are the people. We have the potential for power. We must not fool ourselves. We must not mislead ourselves. It takes more than good intentions. It takes commitment. It takes recognizing that at some point in our lives we are going to have to decide that we have a way of life that we follow, and we are going to have to live that way of life...That is the only solution there is for us...”
--John Trudell

=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=
*+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+*
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Bombs Over Baghdad
by John Trudell

Bombs over Baghdad, Bombs over Baghdad
Bombs over Baghdad, Dancers of Death
Murder in the air, with the next breath
Macho Queens selling war-makers toys
Raining Destruction, Good Old Boys
Death bringer In Queen George's Eyes
Read his lips, war-maker lies
Religious Rights revenging sword
Thou shalt kill in the name of the Lord
The Sheep and the Cattle can't keep from milling
Some are more than ready some aren't willing
Volunteering in what they're not dying for
The Young Republican Guard crying for war.
Free speech as free as its thought
Controlled behavior reacts as its taught
Fighting for Peace can't comprehend
Hate out of love is violent pretends

Bombs Over Baghdad, Bombs Over Baghdad
Bombs Over Baghdad, Bombs Over Baghdad

Vampires drinking blood and oil cocktails
Their violence works it hardly ever fails
When blind man can't see he believes blind
Blind obedience is the child of mindless minds

New world order is an old world lie.
Fighting for peace, see how they die.
Dragging in God, as they turn violent.
God says nothing, he just remains silent.

Stop madmen from running loose.
Mother earth woman cant take the abuse
living right now is living for tomorrow
Time is saying there's no more time tomorrow

Vampires drinking blood and oil cocktails
Their violence works it hardly ever fails
Bombs over Baghdad Dancers of Death
Murder in the air with the next breath

Macho Queen war-maker toys
Raining destruction Good Old Boys
New world order is a whole world lie.
Fighting for peace, watch them all die.
Dragging in God, as they turn violent.
God says nothing, he just remains silent.

Bombs over Baghdad, Dancers of Death
Bombs over Baghdad, Dancers of Death
Bombs over Baghdad, Dancers of Death
Bombs over Baghdad, Dancers of Death
Bombs over Baghdad

=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=
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"Look at Us"
-- Spoken word from John Trudell's Tribal Voice

I see your tech no logical society devour you before your very eyes I
hear your anguished cries exalting greed through progress while you seek
material advances the sound of flowers dying carry messages through
the wind trying to tell you about balance and your safety But your
minds are chained to your machines and the strings dangling from your
puppeteers hands turning you, twisting you into forms and confusions
beyond your control Your mind for a job your mind for a t.v. your
mind for a hair dryer your mind for consumption with your atom bombs
your material bombs your drug bombs your racial bombs your class
bombs your sexist bombs your ageist bombs Devastating your natural
shelters making you homeless on earth chasing you into illusions
fooling you, making you pretend you can run away from the ravishing of
your spirit While the sound of flowers dying carry messages through
the wind trying to tell you about balance and your safety.

Trying to isolate us in a dimension called loneliness leading us into
the trap believe in their power but not in ourselves piling us with
guilt always taking the blame greed chasing out the balance trying
to isolate us in a dimension called loneliness economic deities
seizing power through illusions created armies are justified class
systems are democracy god listens to warmongers prayers tyranny is
here divide and conquer trying to isolate us in a dimension called
loneliness greed a parent insecurity the happiness companion
genocide conceived in sophistication tech no logic material civilization
a rationalization replacing a way to live trying to isolate us in
a dimension called loneliness

Look at us, we are of Earth and Water Look at them, it is the same
Look at us, we are suffering all these years Look at them, they are
connected. Look at us, we are in pain Look at them, surprised at our
anger Look at us, we are struggling to survive Look at them, expecting
sorrow be benign Look at us, we were the ones called pagan Look at
them, on their arrival Look at us, we are called subversive Look at
them, descending from name callers Look at us, we wept sadly in the long
dark Look at them, hiding in tech no logic light Look at us, we buried
the generations Look at them, inventing the body count Look at us, we
are older than America Look at them, chasing a fountain of youth Look
at us, we are embracing Earth Look at them, clutching today Look at
us, we are living in the generations Look at them, existing in jobs and
debts Look at us, we have escaped many times Look at them, they cannot
remember Look at us, we are healing Look at them, their medicine is
patented Look at us, we are trying Look at them, what are they doing
Look at us, we are children of Earth Look at them, who are they?
To God, we hope you don't mind,
but we would like to talk to you.
There are some things we need to straighten out.
It's about these Christians.
They claim to be from your nation,
but man, you should see the things they do!
All the time, blaming it on you.
Manifest Destiny
Genocide
Maximized profits
Sterilization
Raping the earth
Lying
Taking more than they need
and all the forms of the greed
We ask them 'Why?'
They say "It's God's will".
Damn! God
They make it so hard.
Remember Jesus?
Would you send him back to them?
Tell them not to kill him,
rather they should listen,
stop abusing his name and your's.
We do not mean to be disrespectful,
but you know how it is.
Our people have their own ways.
We never even heard of you until not long ago.
Your representatives spoke magnificent things of you,
which we were willing to believe,
but from the way they acted,
we know you and we were being deceived.
We do not wish you or your Christian children any bad,
but you all came to take all we had.
We have not seen you,
but we have heard so much.
It is time for you to decide,
what life is worth.
We already remember.
But maybe you forgot.
Look at us!
Look at us, we are of Earth and Water Look at them, it is the same.

=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=^=
*+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+**+*+*+*
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On February 11, 1979 he burned an American flag on the steps of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC. Twelve hours later, a fire "of suspicious origin" tourched his home on the Paiute Shoshone Reservation in Nevada, killing his wife, Tina, their three children, and Tina's mother. The FBI declined to investigate and the fire was deemed an accident. A 17,000 page FBI file bearing Trudell's name remains a testament to his years under government scrutiny.
John Trudell sees the illusory reality of technological society as a shadow world.

From Country Joe's site. John Trudell is a Vietnam-era Navy Veteran and original member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) His music is not specifically about war but always comes from a "warriors" heart and deals often with conflict. I consider him one of the greatest poets of the Vietnam War era. His work and information about him may be found at http://www.johntrudell.com/

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that
you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no
matter who does it or says it:
-- Malcolm X
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Rich Countries' Problem
Too much military – Too little humanity

by James Rothenberg

09/16/05 "ICH" -- -- The United States of America launched its invasion against Iraq on March 20, 2003. On March 21, the American Physical Society emailed Dr. Daniel Amit, an eminent Israeli physicist, seeking his review of a scientific paper. That same day came his two sentence reply: “I will not at this point correspond with any American institution. Some of us have lived through 1939.”

On April 8, the Editor-in-Chief acknowledged Dr. Amit’s refusal while holding out hope that in the not too distant future he reconsider his position because, “We regard science as an international enterprise and we do our best to put aside political disagreements…”

The following day came Dr. Amit’s eloquent reply: “Thank you for you letter of April 8. I would have liked to be able to share the honorable sentiments you express in your letter as well as your optimism in the future role of science and the scientific community. To be frank, and with much sadness and pain, after 40 years of activity and collaboration, I find very little reason for such optimism. What we are watching today, I believe, is a culmination of 10-15 years of mounting barbarism of the American culture the world over, crowned by the achievements of science and technology as a major weapon of mass destruction.

“We are witnessing man hunt and wanton killing of the type and scale not seen since the raids on American Indian populations, by a superior technological power of inferior culture and values. We see no corrective force to restrain the insanity, the self-righteousness and the lack of respect for human life (civilian and military) of another race.

“Science cannot stay neutral, especially after it has been so cynically used in the hands of the inspectors to disarm a country and prepare it for decimation by laser guided cluster bombs. No, science of the American variety has no recourse. I, personally, cannot see myself anymore sharing a common human community with American science. Unfortunately, I also belong to a culture of a similar spiritual deviation (Israel), and which seems to be equally incorrigible.

“In desperation I cannot but turn my attention to other tragic periods in which major societies, some with claims to fundamental contributions to culture and science, have deviated so far as to be relegated to ostracism and quarantine. At this point I think American society should be considered in this category. I have no illusions of power, as to the scope and prospect of my attitude. But, the minor role of my act and statement is a simple way of affirming that in the face of a growing enormity which I consider intolerable, I will exercise my own tiny act of disobedience to be able to look straight into the eyes of my grandchildren and my students and say that I did know.”

On September 7, 2005, the United Nations Human Development Report 2005 was released. Echoing Dr. Amit’s characterization of the US as “a superior technological power of inferior culture and values”, it accuses the rich countries (that would be us) of having “an overdeveloped military strategy and an under-developed strategy for human security.”

Among the report’s striking findings is that when it comes to inequality, poverty, and mortality rates, the US doesn’t have to take a back seat to anyone. Our child poverty rate exceeds 20%, like Mexico. Our child (under age 5) mortality rate has been rising since year 2000. Our infant mortality rate is the same as Malaysia.

How is this possible given our country’s enormous resources and great wealth? Lighter- skinned Americans benefit from these resources disproportionately from darker-skinned Americans that weigh down the averages. In the absence of a universal health insurance system (the US being alone among the wealthy nations in that regard), the poorer have to fend for themselves.

The report notes: “Unequal access to healthcare has a powerful effect on health inequalities linked to race, which are only partly explained by insurance and income inequalities. One study finds that eliminating the gap in healthcare between African Americans and white Americans would save nearly 85,000 lives a year. To put this figure in context, technological improvements in medicine save about 20,000 lives a year.

“The comparison highlights a paradox at the heart of the US health system. High levels of personal healthcare spending reflect the country’s cutting-edge medical technology and treatment. Yet social inequalities, interacting with inequalities in health financing, limit the reach of medical advance.”

Another paradox can be noted, this time in the document, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002. “Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty.”

Contrast those words with these that come later on: “It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge….Innovation within the armed forces will rest on experimentation with new approaches to warfare, strengthening joint operations, exploiting U.S. intelligence advantages, and taking full advantage of science and technology….Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”

You see, we don’t press for advantage – never have. We seek a balance of power by making certain, by use of force, that nobody even thinks of depriving us of our advantage, which we do not seek. Get it?

Copyright: James Rothenberg

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
******************************************************************************
From: BMT c/o Information Clearing House http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10304.htm

New Orleans: A New World Order Showcase
Foreign troops, gun confiscation, jackbooted privatized fascism

by Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
September 15 2005

The media curtain has begun to fall on New Orleans but the questions continue. In hindsight we can see the whole fiasco for what it really was, a showcase for the suffering that some would like every American city to undergo.

The bottom line on Katrina is that whether you believe it was all incompetence or part incompetence and part malevolence, the lasting pretext is the same.

When a disaster takes place, you have no rights and the federal government can arrest you if you don’t follow their every order.

Mandatory evacuation and gun confiscation are the order of the day in the new federalized Amerika.

The local government officials initially lambasted the federal government but then showed fealty to them and praised their efforts, a confidence trick that led many Americans to believe that the fault was incompetence at the local level and that federal government takeover was the solution.

We have to remember that New Orleans was already a federalized city. In March 2004 an unconstitutional law was passed allowing police officers to conduct searches of homes without warrants. This was why it was selected as the perfect staging ground for this beta test.

Now it has been announced that New Orleans is a federal city period. This is the model for every major American city, military patrolling the streets, mass round-ups and gun confiscation.

The gun confiscation began a week ago and yet the only follow up from the initial New York Times article are announcements from a couple of second amendment organizations. Besides that there’s been no recrimination whatsoever and no outrage at what amounts to a direct attack on the bill of rights.

As Kurt Nimmo pointed out the elitists are going to be far more successful in the long term by privatizing the police state, which manifested itself in the case of New Orleans with Blackwater and Israeli ISI privately hired security thugs used to support the federal police and national guard.

The London Guardian reported on the M-16 carrying Israeli ISI mercenaries who who veterans of the Israeli war in Lebanon.

The New York Times reported that the only people allowed to keep their guns were the security squads that had been hired by wealthier residents of New Orleans, which was totally misleading because 99% of these thugs were hired by the federal government. A few billionaires with mansions were able to afford the security but the middle class were not. This report gave the impression that the middle class were not being targeted for gun confiscation and so those readers were put back to sleep.

Having foreign mercenaries help police Americans, of which the pretext has been set by armed Mexican troops rolling in, is also a way of circumnavigating the Constitution by privatizing fascism.

So the precedent is set, and it’s alarming that there hasn’t been a bigger reaction against it.

The other major issue of course to arise out of the debacle is the deliberate sabotage of communication facilities and relief efforts by FEMA. This won't come as a surprise when you look at the past record of FEMA’s activities with keeping the Oklahoma City donations and the majority of the 9/11 funds.

The first three organizations on the government recommended donation list were the American Red Cross, Pat Robertson and Bnai Brith. What a choice! The American Red Cross seize on any disaster as a cash cow the first chance they get as we have documented on the website.

In the aftermath of Katrina we are faced with a government that purposefully and steadfastly refuses to take any responsibility or admit any mistakes.

This is partly due to inflated egos but at its core is the fact that, as Karl Rove said, the Neo-Cons create their own reality and live in their own world - a world in which mistakes are never made.

So even when it would be politically expedient to craft some sly rhetoric about how sorry they were, they can’t even bring themselves to do that. This isn't inclusive of the President. Bush is just the script reader, he’s just the frontman, the news anchor, he doesn’t write the news.

Bush was playing guitar and eating cake as Karl Rove is wrote the script.

As if it needed to get anymore obvious, Reuters carried a photograph from a UN security council meeting showing a note Bush had written and was about to hand to Condoleeza Rice. Bush was telling Condi that he needed a toilet break. We have a president that has to ask people to go to the toilet. How much more obvious does it have to get that he’s a total puppet?

But the President should not be criticized according to Laura Bush, a woman who couldn’t even remember the name of the hurricane, calling it 'Corrina' almost a week in. Too many fun and frolics at the Hollywood studio fake Crawford ranch must have gone to her head.

We shall not tolerate criticism of the government because there are real enemies out there who we need to be protected against. Adam Pearlman, the disenfranchised heavy metal jihadist that now is the PR man for Osama bin Laden, for example, he's really scaring me.

Don’t worry about SWAT teams with flaming skulls on the back of their T-shirts kicking down your door, taking your guns and throwing you in jail, there’s a punk in a turban trying but failing to grow a beard who says he’s going to attack LA and Melbourne on behalf of Al-CIA-da.

Don’t worry about a government that pours billions of dollars into fake turkey shoot wars to expand an empire while destroying the bill of rights at home and deliberately withdrawing those funds from basic levee and flood protection.

Don’t worry about that, the real threat is the fact that if you go to google maps you can see a few F-17’s parked on a runway at Edwards air force base. That’s the real danger, we need to ban that.

Don’t worry about the fact that armed Mexican troops are rolling into Texas, the real threat is old ladies with 40 year old hand guns.

The statements sent spewing from the frothing mouths of the Neo-Cons have again betrayed the fact that they’re completely devoid of any human feelings.

Barbara Bush saying the victims were better off.

Laura Bush saying the name of the hurricane was Corrina.

Tom Delay saying being forcibly detained in camp facilities was kind of fun.

Glenn Beck, the talk show host, saying that hurricane victims were scumbags and saying he hated the 9/11 families.

Immediately after 9/11 when we questioned the official version of events these were the same people who were called us crass, insensitive, and an insult to the family members. Now they're the ones calling the same family members scumbags.

Michael Chertoff calling Louisiana a city.

Dick Cheney saying the hurricane victims were thankful for what the federal government had done to them.

These idiots slip up so often in their public appearances because they lack any sense of humility and are all on their own private power trips.

The heroic doctors were showered with praise after they euthanized hurricane survivors deemed unworthy of life. The media presented it as so loving and necessary.

This is a situation where you have almost zero oversight, half the family members of these people probably can’t even contact their relatives and yet these heroic government workers are giving them lethal injections of morphine and killing them.

Survivors who had decided to stay in their own homes were treated no better.

Alex Jones has attended many Urban warfare drills where the military are trained to treat Americans as insurgents.

The Army Times reported that the hurricane survivors who won’t leave New Orleans are being treated as insurgents and that combat operations have begun to eliminate them.

FEMA treat evacuees as internees, registering them and giving them ID cards, preventing them from leaving the internment camps.

And then if all this wasn’t enough, we get Halliburton Brown and Root reconstruction no bid contracts and outsourcing of body recoveries to scandal ridden companies connected to the Bush family who have been caught dumping bodies in the past.

You can take any aspect of this whole fiasco and in it you’ll see the calling card of the New World Order.

Misery, suffering, death, authoritarianism, police state and then the elitists cashing their chips in on the devastation.

New Orleans was a New World Order showcase and unfortunately there are many more to come.
********
Source: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2005/150905nwoshowcase.htm

Locals, Officials Suggest Levees were Intentionally Blown
Evidence suggests there were "cracks" in levees that were intentionally
ignored, questions over how they failed.

Steve Watson/Prisonplanet | September 9 2005

Could the levees in New Orleans have been INTENTIONALLY blown out in order
to provide the justification for total FEMA federal takeover?

The locals certainly seem to think so, yet, as usual, the mainstream media
is barely picking up on this wave of opinion, so it is left to us once
again to bring the issue into the open.

This website distances itself from claims that the levees were blown to
target the lower class areas and save the richer areas. The fact is that
the disaster affected everyone, and now that the lower classes have largely
been evacuated, the middle class are being targeted by door to door raids.
Jack booted thugs are arresting people if they don't leave and confiscating
their firearms.

When Katrina hit, it drifted 15 miles to the east of where forecasters said
it would strike. Therefore it wasn't quite the monster described. The storm
passed through with relatively minor damage, it was the the storm surge
from the Gulf that caused Lake Pontchartrain to rise three feet and the
subsequent flooding.

Katrina hit early on Monday 29th August, the levees broke in three places -
along the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal, and the London Street
Canal. (Click here for a Map )

The main storm surge from Hurricane Katrina washed into Lake Pontchartrain
at around 7AM on August 29th when the counterclockwise motion of Katrina
was pushing water from the Gulf of Mexico into the lake.

Some are questioning the timeline of the levee failures, suggesting that
there was a 21 hour discrepancy between the storm surge and the collapse of
the levees . This is not the case. The first levee broke just a few hours
after the hurricane hit on the same morning.

This confusion may have arisen due to the fact that Homeland Security Chief
Michael Chertoff has said that the levees broke overnight between
Monday-Tuesday, and that he was not informed of this til midday Tuesday.

The breach of the 17th Street Canal levee resulted in the failure of a
crucial pumping station nearby, according to a statement made by New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

However, it seems that this exact scenario was expected and ignored. In an
interview with New Orleans radio station local radio station WWL-AM, Nagin
revealed how irate he was that this had been allowed to happen:

Nagin: You know what really upsets me, Garland? We told everybody the
importance of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, "Please, please take
care of this. We don't care what you do. Figure it out."
WWL: Who'd you say that to?
Nagin: Everybody: the governor, Homeland Security, FEMA. You name it, we
said it. And they allowed that pumping station next to Pumping Station 6 to
go under water. Our sewage and water board people ... stayed there and
endangered their lives. And what happened when that pumping station went
down, the water started flowing again in the city, and it starting getting
to levels that probably killed more people. In addition to that, we had
water flowing through the pipes in the city. That's a power station over
there. So there's no water flowing anywhere on the east bank of Orleans
Parish. So our critical water supply was destroyed because of lack of
action.


It has emerged though that some kind of work was carried out on the 17th
Street Canal levee. Reports have suggested that the funding was not there
to complete the job, but some work had been done:

"The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006.
But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to
finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street
Canal, site of the main breach on Monday."

Of course we know that it was the White House that slashed funding for such
projects in order to pump more money into the war in Iraq.

According to the New York Times, Dr. Shea Penland of the Pontchartrain
Institute was surprised because the break was "along a section that was
just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee, it had a vertical concrete
wall several feet thick."

It also seems that the broken section of the Industrial Canal levee was
having "construction" work done on it recently.

New York Times science reporter Dr. Andrew Revkin has stated of the 17th
Street Canal that "officials and [Army Corps] engineers said that after
they had found the widening gap in the concrete wall on the eastern side of
the canal, they had no quick-response plan to repair it."

Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the corps, said "plugging the gap was
a lower priority." The corps is directed by FEMA. "It is FEMA who is really
calling the shots and setting priorities here,"

Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps, was quoted in the
same article as saying "there were still no clear hints why the main breach
in the flood barriers occurred along the 17th Street Canal, normally a
conduit for vast streams of water pumped out of the perpetually waterlogged
city each day and which did not take the main force of the waves roiling
the lake. He said that a low spot marked on survey charts of the levees
near the spot that ruptured was unrelated and that the depression was where
a new bridge crossed the narrow canal near the lakefront."

This would refute the speculation that a dip in the retaining levee or
walls might have allowed water to slop over and start the collapse. So we
have an unexplained crack in several feet of concrete. FEMA decided not to
plug it and let the water flow until a US city was flooded and thousands
had drowned.

Dynamite? History repeating itself?

Many locals have come forward to suggest that the levees were breached on
purpose by the authorities. Resident Andrea Garland, now re-located to
Texas, wrote in her blog:

"Also heard that part of the reason our house flooded is they dynamited
part of the levee after the first section broke - they did this to prevent
Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used too
much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I know who is
responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government."

This scenario is not so crazy as it sounds, in fact this exact thing has
happened before in the same city. In 1927, the Mississippi River broke its
banks in 145 places, depositing water at depths of up to 30ft over 27,000
square miles of land.

The disaster changed American society, shifting hundreds of thousands of
delta-dwelling blacks into northern cities and cementing the divisions and
suspicions that benign neglect has ensured remain today. New Orleans'
(mainly white) business class pressurized the state to dynamite a levee
upstream, releasing water into (mainly black) areas of the delta. Black
workers were forced to work on flood relief at gunpoint, like slaves.

Two parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, which had a combined population
of 10,000, were destroyed. Just before Katrina, these parishes had about 10
times the 1927 population. Both parishes are now under many feet of water.

This information is covered in depth in a book by John M. Barry entitled
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it Changed
America, 1997 which has incidentally become heavily in demand after
Katrina.

Furthermore, levees were also intentionally broke after Hurricane Betsy
struck New Orleans in 1965, admittedly with less of an impact. The tactic
of breaking the dikes is not uncommon, as this CNN report on China's flood
plains highlights.

Engineers have now punched holes in several levees in parts of New Orleans
where flood levels were higher than the water in drainage canals leading to
Pontchartrain, in order to let water flow out.

Explosions?

There were reports of many explosions heard in New Orleans, officials say
they were transformers blowing up. Total Information Analysis has reported
a claim by intelligence expert Tom Heneghen that 25 earwitnesses cited
explosions immediately before the levee breach.

Similar reports are now appearing in many web blogs:

"He also mentioned that right before the mass flood there was a loud sound
like an explosion." - News from St. Bernard

"I'll tell you the worst thing I've heard and I heard it from my mother.
She said she heard several blasts - big booms - right before the levees
broke. Several blasts and then all the water came pouring in." - aangirfan

Although these are obviously not authoritative sources of information, it
is interesting to note how many local people are reporting this. So
interesting in fact that the mainstream has picked up on it in places.

The Washington Post reported on the comments of a retired school teacher:

"Mullen has a schoolteacher's kindly demeanor, so it was jarring to hear
him say he suspected that the levee breaks had somehow been engineered to
keep the wealthy French Quarter and Garden District dry at the expense of
poor black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward -- a suspicion I heard
from many other black survivors."

The Globe and Mail is also carrying a similar story.

ABC World News Tonight carried a report which contained an interview with a
local, who described how a floating barge had rammed the levee. The man
seemed convinced that the levee was purposefully broken. A transcript of
which has appeared on the net:

David Muir: "Was it solely the water that broke the levee? Or was it the
force of this barge that now sits where homes once did? Joe Edwards says
neither. People are so bitter, so disenfranchised in this neighborhood,
they actually think the city did it, blowing up the levee to save richer
neighborhoods, like the French Quarter."
Muir to Edwards as they stand on a bridge: "So you're convinced-"
Edwards: "I knows it happened."
Muir: "-that they broke the levee on purpose?"
Edwards: "They blew it."
Muir: "New Orleans' Mayor says there's no credence to this."
Mayor Ray Nagin: "That storm was so powerful and it pushed so much water
-- there's no way anyone could have calculated -- would dynamite the levee
to have the kind of impact to save the French Quarter."
Muir concluded: "An LSU expert who looked at the video today, says that
while the barge may have caused it, it was most likely the sheer force of
the water that brought the levee, along the lower 9th ward, down."

The mysterious barge story has also been reported by many other local
residents. "The evacuees who witnessed the barge striking the levee also
want to know why the major media is not covering this story."

The London Observer carried an intriguing story of a man named Correll
Williams, a 19-year-old meat cutter. The article states that:

"Williams only left his apartment after the authorities took the decision
to flood his district in an apparent attempt to sluice out some of the
water that had submerged a neighbouring district. Like hundreds of others
he had heard the news of the decision to flood his district on the radio.
The authorities had given people in the district until 5pm on Tuesday to
get out - after that they would open the floodgates."

Some final intriguing footage reveals a journalist questioning former
President Bill Clinton as to why many locals feel that the levees were
purposefully broken.

This was during the press conference with Clinton and George Bush Snr
announcing their combined "relief effort" for New Orleans. Ignore the first
15 minutes of sickening joking and backslapping between the two and skip to
the last minute of footage. Upon hearing the question Clinton appears to be
surprised and then simply walks off.

Source: http://www.prisonplanet.com/Pages/090905levees.htm

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PLEASE NOTE:
Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE): Free Americans Proclaiming Total Emancipation and Working Towards Democracy.

Pride Of Man

by Quicksilver Messenger Service

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came

Can't you see that flash of fire

Ten times brighter than the day

And behold a mighty city broken in the dust again

Oh, God, pride of man broken in the dust again

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came

Babylon is laid to waste, Egypt's buried in her shame

The mighty men are all beaten down

Their kings are fallen in the waste

Oh, God, pride of man broken in the dust again

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came

Terror is on every side, lo our leaders are dismayed

For those who place their faith in fire

In fire their faith shall be repayed

Oh, God, pride of man broken in the dust again

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came

And shout a warnin' unto the nation that the sword of God is raised

Yes, Babylon, that mighty city, rich in treasure, wide in fame

Oh, God, pride of man broken in the dust again - yeah

Oh oh-oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh

And it shall cause your tower to fall

Make of you a pyre of flame

Oh you, who dwell on many waters

Rich in treasure, wide in fame

You bow unto your, your God of gold

Your pride of might shall be your shame

For only God can lead his people

Back unto the earth again

Oh, God, pride of man broken in the dust again

A holy mountain be restored

Have mercy on the people - the people, Lord

Ah-ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah