Mark Stapleton

What the....?

Anyway, it was fun.

Anyway, nice work Kathleen.

You should consider participating in the JFK debate. You too, Kathy.

Thanks Kathy and Mark for your kind words.

It must have been an industrial accident, trapping the arms of the three men and requiring immediate amputations. The surgeon hurriedly performed the amputations.

Am I on the right path?

Were they all surgeons, by any chance?

Only one. The man who sent the original parcel.

Bingo.

The man who mailed the parcel in the first place was the surgeon who had removed the arms of the other three. The parcel contained the surgeon's left arm. You stated earlier that they all knew whose arm it was. He botched the minor surgery on the other three, resulting in amputations being necessary in those cases.

In order to avoid an expensive medical malpractice suit, the surgeon agreed to have his left arm amputated and presented for inspection as recompense.

He paid his debt. The only remaning evidence of this unusual and illegal undertaking was quickly destroyed.

Surely this was based on a true story.

I have had a lot of complaints recently about the insulting comments of some members of this forum. The names of certain people are constantly being mentioned. They are nearly always about posts on threads about the photographic evidence concerning the JFK assassination, 9/11 conspiracies and moon landings. In virtually every case, the culprits are Americans. I suppose this abusive behaviour must be part of their culture, however, people from outside the United States find it very offensive.

I spend a considerable amount of money on this forum. We recently upgraded to a much more expensive package. I also spend a great deal of time on this forum. This is in itself an expensive business as I am self-employed. I do not have the time to monitor these people. Especially as they tend to post on threads that I have little interest in.

Warnings do not seem to work. Therefore, I am considering banning the worst offenders from the forum. Do you agree? I await your advice on how to proceed.

John,

FWIW, I'm against banning members. In the case of Tim Gratz, I agreed with your actions because Tim was threatening legal action which could have adversely effected the Forum's viability. Thus, he was threatening the Forum and its membership.

However, unless insults become grossly offensive (a subjective concept for sure, and who determines what is grossly offensive?), I don't think monitoring such complaints is worth the time and effort.

Actually, insults delivered with wit and guile have gone into history as some of the world's most quotable quotes. I would have hated to miss out on witnessing the great verbal jousts between Tim and Robert Charles-Dunne, with Robert providing much of the wit. The fact that much of Robert's wit passed silently over Tim's head made it much funnier, imo.

Maybe we should have 'cleverest insults in history' thread. Oafs might learn something.

I'm stumped (excuse the pun).

Burning the arm in the fire is the part that confuses me, but I'm confident the answer to this riddle lies therein.

Were they all surgeons, by any chance?

Here here to that, John.

Your efforts in this regard are greatly appreciated, Maurice.

Were they all involved in an accident which resulted in their having only one arm?

Did they become acquainted in hospital waiting for amputations?

Do they all possess a left arm or a right arm?

Were all the parties involved one-armed or two-armed?

I'm thinking it's quite possible for a one-armed person to open a parcel and then re-package it.

Mark,

A bit of trivia for you.

In 1968, Jeanne Murray-Vanderbilt gave a dinner party in her Manhattan apartment. An article titled 'The Unexpected Guest' was written about it at the time.

The guest list included Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Gardner Cowles, Edward Bennett Williams, Tyler and Bess Abel, Mr. and Mrs. David Ogilvy, Jack Valenti, Lansing Lamont and Teddy Kollek.

James

James,

Fascinating. I think Teddy might have been a party animal of the highest order. In '68 he was Mayor of Jerusalem but I've read that he made frequent trips back to the States.

I'm afraid I don't know who Ogilvy and Abel were. The rest are an eclectic mix--author, publisher, enigmatic ex-advertising man, Mayor of Jerusalem, President & First Lady. Interesting to speculate on which topics were discussed.......race riots, the Mexico Olympics, MLK, RFK......ah, to be a fly on the wall.

I hope LBJ's SS detail were not guilty of substance abuse.

Teddy Kollek, New York based arms procurer for Israel and Mayor of Jerusalem for 30 years died recently, aged 95.

The following article is interesting, especially the references to Frank Sinatra "friend of Zion to the end."

He was also a good buddy of James Jesus Angleton. Isn't that interesting?

http://www.tnr.com/blog/spine?pid=68565

This one credits Kollek with helping establish the intelligence links with the CIA and Mossad in the 1950's:

http://www.sandersresearch.com/index.php?o...4&Itemid=61

Do you get most images of your images of Tehran via the LMM*?

Here's a pleasant, thoughtful audio-visual corrective

_____________________

* Lying Mainstream Media

Looks like a nice country inhabited by normal people going about their business.

Sid, I'm confused. According to the western media, especially the Murdoch media, Iran is a nation of unspeakable evil, whose people, whipped into a frenzy by crazy mullahs, spend every waking moment dreaming of destroying the west and wiping Israel off the map. This is why America and Israel must strike first to save all our ungrateful hides. Most of the west doesn't understand the dire peril we are in. America and Israel know best. Iran plans to blow up the world and luckily we have those two superhero nations--Israel and the US--to save us.

That pleasant little montage of yours must be phony.

Sorry--double trouble.

And the color mucked up again. It doesn't seem to work the way it used to. I'll refrain from using it. Only the first and last paragraphs in RED were meant to appear in RED.

Chapter 8.

In this chapter Piper takes a look at the mysterious intelligence identity James Jesus Angleton and explains how he may have been a key 'behind the scenes' player in the JFK assassination saga, especially when it came to the contrived schemes which pointed the blame in the wrong direction.

Born in 1917, the same year as JFK, he was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) while at Yale University and soon became a rising star in the world of clandestine activities. On Angleton's wartime work with Jewish resistance groups, former CIA advisor Wilbur Crane Eveland wrote this:

CIA operations had started before Allen Dulles became director that had long range implications from which the US might find it difficult to disengage. Stemming from his wartime OSS liason with Jewish resistance groups based in London, James Angleton had arranged an operational-intelligence exchange agreemnet with Israel's Mossad, upon which the CIA relied for much of its intelligence about the Arab states.(1)

According to Angleton's biographer Tom Mangold, CIA Director Allen Dulles and his Deputy Richard Helms were Angleton's 'mentors'. However, Helms was Angletons 'chief patron' (2). This friendship, says Mangold, was the most important factor in giving him freedom of movement within the CIA. He was extended such trust by his superiors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities.

Piper bemoans the fact that Mangold's account of Angleton's career devotes insufficient attention to his ties with Israel. However, he quotes Mangold as stating the following: "I would like to place on the record, however, that Angleton's closest professional friends overseas, then and subsequently, came from the Mossad and that he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death".(3)

Piper further claims that Angleton had close personal ties with Ben-Gurion himself, dealing with the Israeli leader on an intimate basis, although Piper provides no references to support this. I have read in my travels that Angleton stated to a colleague in the late sixties that he had made more than 100 trips to Israel and that he sometimes thought 'it was the only sane country on earth'. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I read this so it should be regarded merely as heresay.

By 1951, Angleton was engaged 'in the underground Jewish network that ran down from Eastern Europe through Italy to the ports where shiploads of immigrants were loaded for Palestine', according to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, (Dangerous Liason: the inside story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship, New York, Harper Collins, 1991).

By 1954, Angleton had assumed the position of Chief of CIA counterintelligence. He had become "official CIA liason for all allied foreign intelligence agencies".(4). Piper claims that Angleton engaged in many clandestine activities, all of which were to the benefit of his two obsessions--fanatical anti-Communism and single minded devotion to Israel. These included a joint CIA/Mossad plot to kill Egyptian President Nasser in 1958 (scotched by John Foster Dulles), a plan to overthrow the Syrian Government the same year, his collaboration with organised crime in establishing the ZR/Rifle team in order to kill Castro and close collaboration with Mossad (in particular Mossad chief Isser Harel and Ephraim Evron) in regard to Israel's activities in the nuclear field.

Corroboration of Piper's assertions regarding Israel's nuclear activities comes from an independent source. In the latter years of the Eisenhower Administration, the Israeli Government sought to conceal its efforts to produce a nuclear weapon. It had been working on this project with French assistance since 1956. Avner Cohen's comprehensive study of Israel's nuclear programme, "Israel and the Bomb" points out that US intelligence had become aware--through U-2 aerial reconnaissance flights--in April 1958 that construction of a 'probable' nuclear related site was under way in the Negev desert. However, the US didn't officially make this discovery until it became the front page story in the New York Times on December 19, 1960. (much to the consternation of the intelligence community, the Arab states and the new President-elect, JFK). Cohen cites two reasons for the failure, one analytical and one bureaucratic. Regarding the bureaucratic failure, Cohen wrote:

Important information was available but was not disseminated through the system. Israel may also have had friends in high places in the intelligence and nuclear establishments who might have helped to suppress the early information. Information about Israel was jealously held within the CIA, where James Jesus Angleton was in charge of the Israeli desk. Angleton did not share sensitive information about other agencies, and also withheld much of it from other CIA sections.(5)

Piper also claims that Angleton's wartime links with the Jewish underground in Europe enabled him to maintain close links with the criminal underworld in Italy and France. Piper cites historian Alfred McCoy (a Forum member) and his 1991 work "The Politics of Heroin" in drawing a line through the French Corsican Mafia, the CIA, Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Marseille's heroin shipments and attempts on De Gaulle, with Angleton as the fulcrum for these connections. Frankly, it's a bit beyond the scope of his book and a bit much for me, but its not implausible, imo.

Piper's point about Angleton is well made, imo. He was a great friend of Israel, he ran cover for them and his obsession with communist threats everywhere served Israel well. That's probably why they dedicated a monument to his memory after his death (contained in the photo section). Piper adds that two articles about Angleton's role in the assassination written by Lisa Pease appear in the book "The Assassinations" (LA, Feral House Press, 2003).

Notes.

1. Wilbur Crane Eveland., Ropes of Sand, New York: W W Norton & Co, 1980, p.95.

2. Tom Mangold., Cold Warrior--James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, p.307.

3. Ibid, p.362.

4. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn., Dangerous Liason: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship, New York: Harper Collins, 1991, p.42.

5. Avner Cohen., Israel and the Bomb, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p.84.

One of the talk shows had a blurb the other day where they showed the new Sec of Def Gates boasting about how the number of recruitments in the past two months had exceeded expectations. Then they showed how they'd also lowered expectations by more than half. The All-Volunteer Army is maxed out and Bush's speech reflects a "join up and you won't have to see combat" offer, an offer that many of those overseas would have jumped at if given the choice.

Yes, I read recently that the US armed services have lowered the entry requirements in order to boost the dwindling numbers.

I don't necessarily agree that Bush's offer implies they won't see combat, Pat. Cannon fodder is what they're looking for, imo. "Allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them" sounds to me like they'll be in the line of fire.

Of course, if Bush really wanted to prove to America the authenticity of his civilian recruitment drive, he would persuade some of the neocons in his inner circle to serve on missions abroad.....like Iraq. If the lobbyists urging escalation in the region want to gain public support for their cause, they could lead by example and volunteer themselves and possibly members of their families to serve in the 'defining struggle of our time'. The war on terror is a real war, they keep telling us.

Dying for your cause is heroic and noble. Come on all you neocons in Washington. How about it?

This part of george Bushs speech last night has not received any attention in the major news media, but when I heard it I was thunderstruck.

He said:

"A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time."

And I went huh?

George Bush want to revamp Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps and turn it into his own private army?

Steve Thomas

It surely qualifies for a WTF, Steve.

If you've quoted him correctly, it means the recruitment drive for the armed services must be failing.

A cynic might wildly speculate that perhaps the US Government is planning to liberate some of the 2.1 million prisoners currently languishing in American jails, so they can go and 'liberate' some of the most dangerous parts of the Middle East. Could be a great cost saving measure for the Government. Defining struggles require desperate measures.

They're all screaming for a democracy over there, according to the Fox Network.

Whether or not I'm right, it sounds like another masterstroke from the President. I hope he gives God the credit.

The problem has recurred today.

I can make this post and view the forum - but only through a proxy server.

As I explained to John before - I have no idea what\'s causing the problem, which seems to occur periodically - and subsequently recitify itself after some time. It may be something on my own computer - but curiously, only access to this site seems to be affected.

If anyone else gets the same problem it would be interesting to compare notes.

I don't like the sound of that, Sid.

Apologies for the confusing appearance of the previous post. Of the eight RED coloured paragraphs, paras 2 and 3 shouldn't have turned out RED. I've attempted to edit without success. Hopefully, readers will get the gist of it. (of course you will, you're smart.)

MS.

My apologies for the delay, but back to business:

Chapter 7--"Israel's Godfather"

In this chapter, Piper probes the multitude of links which connect the shadowy figure of Meyer Lansky to many of the main players in the JFK assassination saga.

Briefly, Lansky was born Maier Suchowjansky in Grodno, Russia in 1902 and arrived in the US in 1911. He rose from the immigrant slums of NYC to preeminence in the underworld, along with childhood friends Benjamin Seigel, Charles Lucania and Frank Costello. In Luciano's autobiography, he claims Lansky was his 'consigliere' or chief advisor. Luciano claimed Lansky's nickname was 'the genius'.

Prohibition in the 1920's, being the stupid policy that it was, made them all millionaires before 1930. Being farsighted gangsters, they realised that the survival of their empire depended on adequate protection, so the corruption of the legal and political system in the US basically went right to the top. When the Great Depression ended prohibition, the shrewder gangsters, like Lansky, had purchased significant interests in legal distilleries. Lansky also diversified into casinoes, notably in Cuba, under the patronage of Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista.

Piper claims FDR himself sent Lansky as a personal emissary to Cuba to meet Batista. The purpose was to influence Batista to institute reforms that would quell the growing communist movement in that country. It was during this period (the 1930's) that Lansky began cementing the long and profitable business and personal friendship with Batista and other Cuban leaders which would earn tremendous wealth for all concerned. Piper adds that among those on the recieving end of Lansky's largesse was Carlos Prio Soccaras, who ultimately became a business partner in gun-running activities with Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby.

Luciano's imprisonment in 1936 on prostitution charges created a vacuum in the underworld power structure. Luciano and others, including Lansky biographer Hank Messick (Lansky, Berkeley Medallion Books, 1971), claimed that Lansky became the unofficial treasurer of the underworld, which greatly enhanced his power and influence, but not necessarily his fame. Messick claimed that the media focus has been overwhelmingly directed at the Sicilian wing of the mafia, leaving the Jewish side largely overlooked. He wrote:

The real leaders of crime have remained hidden while the nation's law enforcement have chased minor punks. Naive is he who believes this development is accidental. Research reveals that non-Mafia leaders of crime have been hiding behind the vendetta-ridden society (Italian Mafia) for decades.....attempts to frame me have been made, and I've been smeared as anti-Semitic from coast to coast by gangsters who used religion as a cloak.

Piper adds that the original name for the crime syndicate--'Union Siciliano'--was suggested by Lansky. Luciano confirmed this himself in his autobiographical work, "The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano". Piper adds that, henceforth, this gave the criminal underworld a decidedly Sicilian imagery. Genius has its rewards.

Lansky's role in OSS-Naval Intelligence operations during WW2 as the possible explanation for Lansky's immunity from prosecution from Federal authorities is worth consideration. Piper writes (pp 81-82):

Writing in Secret File, Hank Messick comments: "Was Lansky rewarded? No final answer is possible, but he has been strangely immune to prosecution at the Federal level. Twice the IRS Intelligence Division has recommended prosecution and twice the Justice Department has declined. Lansky remains the only top man in the national crime syndicate to escape untouched. Because of his brains and the troubles of his colleagues, he rules as undisputed chairman of the board.

Lansky himself acknowledged his role in the so called "Operation Underworld". "Sure, I'm the one who put Lucky and Naval Intelligence together", he told his friend, Israeli newsman Uri Dan. Lansky's reasons were interesting: "The reason I co-operated was because of strong personal feelings. I wanted the Nazis beaten. I was a Jew and I felt for those Jews in Europe who were suffering. They were my brothers."

Former Lansky associate (and covert FBI operative) Michael Milan also points to another critical Lansky connection that may have accounted for his immunity from Federal harassment:

"I knew that J Edgar Hoover and Lansky sometimes broke bread together. Mr. L was never rousted, was rarely served with federal subpoenas and was generally left alone to conduct his business..."

It was the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that was largely responsible for the establishment of the J Edgar Hoover Foundation in 1947. (Top Lansky associates have long been generous financial backers of the ADL). The Hoover Foundation's first president was Rabbi Paul Richman, Washington director of the ADL.

Piper adds that Hoover biographer Curt Gentry (J Edgar Hoover: the man and his secrets 1991) noted that the FBI was never strongly concerned with Lansky's activities. According to Gentry "the Dallas and Miami field offices had blind spots....there was a rumour, often heard in the underworld, that Lansky had his own man very high up in the FBI. William Sullivan had his own suspect, someone close to both Hoover and Tolson, who was reputedly living far above his means. Sullivan, of course, died in a strange hunting accident in 1977 just before he was about to appear before the HSCA.

Having established that Lansky had friends in high places, Piper goes on to outline Lansky's support for the Hagannah (Jewish terrorist underground), which included fundraising dinners and benefit nights at such places as Las Vegas's Colonial Inn (the casino which Jack Ruby once owned a shareholding). He also reportedly provided technical assistance to Israeli gun-running operations within the US (which included intercepting a shipment from a Pittsburgh arms dealer destined for Arabs). He also persuaded some of his associates to invest in Israeli bonds. Piper also cites journalist Robert Friedman's book, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane: From FBI informant to Knesst member (1990) in which the author claims that Lansky was a major contributor to the radical New York born Rabbi, who founded the militant Jewish Defense League.

If Piper is to be believed (and I think his thesis is plausible), Lansky's involvement in Operation Underworld ultimately opened the door for his entry into a global network of international intrigue. His vast financial resources and commitment to the state of Israel were welcomed wholeheartedly. Operation Underworld was headquartered in the Rockerfeller Centre in NYC, with famed British intelligence operative William Stephenson as its head and Louis Bloomfield his top aide. Piper claims that Stephenson worked closely with the ADL and the FBI in co-ordinating anti-Nazi intelligence operations in the US. Piper claims Stephenson was pivotal in the establishment of Mossad (more about this in chapter 15) and he believes there is little doubt that both Stephenson and Bloomfield were in close contact with Lansky and his men.

In 1947 Rudolph Sonneborn established the Sonneborn Institute. It was this institute which provided the Jewish Hagannah, and later the Irgun, with arms and money. The Institute's co-ordinator was Louis Bloomfield. Working with Bloomfield were liquor baron Sam Bronfman, Hank Greenspun and Lansky himself. Piper further claims that Teddy Kollek and James Jesus Angleton also collaborated with Lansky (more on JJA in later chapters).

The establishment of Tibor Rosenbaum's Banque de Credit International (BCI) in Geneva emerged as Lansky's main European money laundering conduit. Rosenbaum, an orthodox Rabbi, had vast connections to the Israeli cause, serving as president of the World Jewish Congress, co-founder of the World Zionist Congress and director of the Jewish Agency in Geneva. It was a money laundering bank, pure and simple.

BCI was to become Lansky's primary money laundering bank--sharing those money laundering services that the bank provided to Mossad. In its heyday, BCI included in its directors two longtime Lansky associates, Ed Levinson and John Pullman.

Levinson was one of the operators of the Fremont Casino in Vegas, a front man for Lansky's close friend Joseph (Doc) Stacher, and a frequent business partner of Bobby Baker (Serve U Corporation). There's a possible LBJ connection here, if I'm not mistaken. Pullman, claims Piper, was Lansky's key international money handler.

Lansky's connection to BCI first became part of the public record in 1970 during the criminal trial of Alvin Malnik, one of Lansky's lieutenants. Piper goes on to outline Lansky's global drug trafficking activities via BCI and the Bank of World Commerce in Nassau, Bahamas. Millions in small bills being transferred from Lanky's casinos, often masked as Israeli bond sales and Jewish philanthropies.

Another financial institution claimed by Piper to be responsible for financial support of the Mossad is American Bank and Trust, a subsidiary of the Swiss-Israel Trade Bank, another Mossad financial operation. Rosenbaum and Shaul Eisenberg were among its directors. The Swiss-Israel Trade Bank assumed management of AB and T on a very memorable day--November 22, 1963. Piper puts this down to coincidence--maybe. One of the newly installed directors was Abe Fienberg, fundraiser for JFK's 1960 campaign and later to become a close confidant of LBJ.

As an outside observer, I have just one observation.

The glowing tributes from John Simkin and Andy Walker concerning the abilities and integrity of Mr. Jones-Nerzic hold great weight with me. Combined with the protests from Mr. Jones' students, and the flimsy reason for his dismissal, it's hard to see this as anything other than an injustice.

Mr. Albiston is obliged to respond to this thread, despite what his masters recommend.

From 'The Australian' newspaper:

Addicted to myths about opiates

Almost everything you think you know about heroin addiction is wrong, writes Theodore Dalrymple in his latest book

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 20, 2007

IT is not only those who take heroin who are blinded by illusions, but almost the entire population, including - or especially - the experts. Every problem in contemporary society calls forth its equal and supposedly opposite bureaucracy. The ostensible purpose of this bureaucracy is to solve that problem.

But the bureaucracy quickly develops a survival instinct and so no more wishes the problem to disappear altogether than the lion wishes to kill all the gazelle in the bush and leave itself with no food for the future.

In short, the bureaucracy of drug addiction needs drug addicts far more than drug addicts need the bureaucracy of drug addiction. Thanks to propaganda assiduously spread for many years by everyone who has concerned himself with the subject, there is now a standard or received view of heroin addiction that is almost universally accepted by the general public, by the addicts and by the bureaucracy.

This view serves the interests of the addicts who wish to continue their habit while placing the blame elsewhere, as well as the bureaucracy that wishes to continue in employment, preferably forever and at higher rates of pay.

This standard or received view conceives opiate addiction as an illness and therefore implies that there is a bona fide medical solution to it. When all the proposed "cures" fail to work, as they usually do, and when the extension of quasi-medical services to addicts is accompanied not by a decline in the prevalence of the problem but, on the contrary, by an increase, who can blame addicts if, in continuing their habit, they blame not themselves but the incompetence of those who have set themselves up as their medical saviours and offered them solutions that do not work?

But where bureaucracies are concerned, nothing succeeds like failure. For example, the budget of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse increased by 16.2 per cent between 2001 and 2002, which would be quite a creditable performance if it had been a purely commercial enterprise. In the period, $US126,394,000 was added to its budget, but it would be foolhardy to suggest that a single drug addict stopped, or will stop, taking drugs because of this extra funding.

The standard or orthodox view of heroin addiction is as follows, a view that has a different function in the case of addicts, doctors and the general public. According to this view, a man is somehow or other exposed to heroin, more or less by chance. It has a pleasurable effect on him and he takes some more, and then some more again. Before long, indeed very quickly, he is physiologically addicted, and in order to avoid the terrible suffering caused by withdrawal, he has to take more and more heroin.

Unfortunately, in order to pay for this, he often has to resort to crime, unless he belongs to that small elite of addicts who come from the moneyed classes, for his addiction precludes normal paid work but requires a large income. His powers of self-control have by now been completely destroyed or subverted by heroin. Unless he takes a substitute drug, or possibly enters a lengthy and technically rigorous rehabilitation program, he cannot give up. He is hooked for life. He needs help.

There is only a very tiny grain of truth in all this. That physiological addiction exists is undoubted. But in practically all other respects, the standard view is wrong. It is a masterpiece of the old rhetorical tricks of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi. It overlooks the most obvious salient facts.

A man is somehow or other exposed to heroin. But how is a man exposed to heroin? The use of the passive voice is here very instructive. The heroin comes to the man, the man does not go to the heroin. It is as if the heroin had a will of its own, unlike the man.

People who are genuinely exposed to strong opiates by chance, in medical circumstances, for example after an operation, very seldom become addicted to them. The vast majority of heroin addicts do not become addicted via the medical route. In fact, I do not recall one among the many hundreds whom I have met. When I ask heroin addicts why they started taking heroin, most of them reply with one of two answers. These are: "I fell in with the wrong crowd" and "heroin's everywhere".

When I reply that it is odd how I meet many people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never under any circumstances meet any member of the wrong crowd itself, who must therefore be lurking permanently out of my sight and hearing, the addict who has attributed his addiction to his fortuitous acquaintance with the wrong crowd smiles, or even laughs, knowingly.

Of course, it is perfectly possible, likely even, that people live in social micro-climates, in some of which heroin addiction is much more common than in others.

But there is no micro-climate, other than the self-constituted one in which addicts live, in which heroin addiction is universal, literally inescapable, as it would have to be for its ubiquity to count as the explanation of any individual addict's addiction.

DISTRESS from opiate withdrawal is overwhelmingly a social or psychological condition: it is not caused by observable physiological changes. This has extremely important implications for practice. It means that anyone who suggests withdrawal is a serious condition, worthy of and necessitating medical attention and treatment, other than treatment of the most trivial kind, is, wittingly or not, increasing the distress that withdrawal causes.

In other words, the whole apparatus of care, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, counsellors, serves not to alleviate suffering but to create and exacerbate it. (I cannot resist quoting a law first enunciated by Colin Brewer about modern society: "Suffering increases to meet the means available for itsalleviation.")

The idea of the most common method of "treatment" is substitution of heroin with a drug called methadone. This substance, which is most often taken in syrup form, but is also available as an injection and as pills, is a synthetic opiate first developed in Germany just before World War II. What we end up with (at best) is a methadone addict as well as a heroin addict, whereas we had only a heroin addict before. Neither the quadrupling of methadone prescriptions in Britain between 1982 and 1992, nor the doubling of them in the US between 1999 and 2001, had any effect on the scale of the problem. Substantial numbers of people are killed by methadone. Heroin was involved in 58 per cent of the 3961 fatal poisonings from opiates between 1993 and 1998 in England and Wales, while methadone was involved in 49 per cent.

The resort to intoxicants is a permanent and ineradicable temptation that arises from human nature. Not everyone gives in to it, however, or is equally susceptible, by virtue of their situation in life. The majority of people sometimes resort to intoxicants (or, like me with alcohol, resort to them every day), without letting them interfere with their ability to function in the world. Indeed, taken in moderation, they probably increase their ability to do so.

But there are some people for whom the desire for the consolation of illusion, and the illusion of consolation, is constant. In most Western societies, there is now a class in which tedium vitae is very common, almost normal. This is the class from which the vast majority of heroin addicts now comes. The young of this class are disaffected, and have good reason to be so. They are for the most part poor, though not of course in the absolute sense. They have no interests, intellectual or cultural. The consolations of religion are closed to them. As for their family life, loosely so-called, it is usually of an utterly chaotic nature, a quicksand of step-parents, step and half-siblings, and quite without an orderly succession of generations. Their sexual relationships are a kaleidoscope of ephemeral couplings, often with abandoned offspring as a result, motivated by an immediate need for sexual release and often complicated by primitive egotistical possessiveness leading to violence and conflict.

Their economic prospects are poor. They are unskilled in countries in which the demand for unskilled labour is limited. Any work that they do will be repetitive and dull; and while a man might once have derived satisfaction from performing a menial task well, from leading a life of modest usefulness to others, this is not an age in which such humility is very common.

In large part, this is because people live to a quite unprecedented degree in the virtual world of so-called popular culture. From the very earliest age, their lives are saturated with images of celebrities, whose attainments are often modest but who have been whisked by good fortune into a world of immense and glamorous luxury.

Crime ceases to be crime, but is rather restitution or justified revenge. The result is that, while profoundly dissatisfied with their present lot, they do not have ambitions towards which they might work in a constructive fashion, but daydreams in which everything is solved at once in a magical way, daydreams from which the emergence into reality is always painful. Any aid to the perpetuation of the state of daydreaming is therefore greatly appreciated.

The temptation to take opiates, and to continue to take them, arises from two main sources: first, man's eternal existential anxieties, to which there is no wholly satisfactory solution, at least for those who are not unself-consciously religious; and second, the particular predicament in which people find themselves.

The addict has a problem, but it is not a medical one: he does not know how to live. And on this subject the doctor has nothing, qua doctor, to offer. What he ought not do, however, is to mislead the addict, or allow the addict to mislead him, into thinking that the problem is medical and requires, or is susceptible to, a medical solution.

Edited extract from Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, by Theodore Dalrymple, published by Encounter Books and distributed by DA Information Services, $31.30. Dalrymple has worked as a prison doctor and as a psychiatrist in a general hospital in a British slum.

Sid,

It certainly seems like the destruction of Iraq has been a work in progress for some years now, and possibly part of some grand plan.

I suspect you may not get a lot of responses to a thread like this because years of indoctrination by the western media would cause many--even well informed readers--to view this type of scenario as quite radical. I hope I'm wrong.

The Giladi interview was fascinating. I haven't read his book but the excerpts indicate that a disturbing contempt for pluralistic society was evident from the beginning. It's also apparent that western media bias in the coverage of the Middle East situation is not a recent phenomenon.

Giladi doesn't mention who authored 'Venom of the Zionist Viper'. Do you know who it was?

Why is calling for attacking a WMD production facility that would only result in property damage and perhaps a few casualties not equivalent to calling for the killing or expulsion of the entire population of a country (totaling millions of people)? Perhaps if you think real hard you can figure it out!

For the nth time, Len, no-one in the Iranian Government has called for "the killing or expulsion of the entire population of a country" (Israel, or any other country).

At least, you and your chums have been unable to present evidence to that effect.

When you find some evidence, please do get back to me.

You further say, referring to the Zionist plans to attack Iran in an illegal first strike, "attacking a WMD production facility... would only result in property damage and perhaps a few casualties "

Care to share with us the analysis, or better, the evidence on which you base such marvellous optimism?

Remember the cakewalk?

One final thing. In an earlier reply, you attacked James Petras as follows.

As for the Petras essay, political and economic analysis from a sociologist who doesn’t cite any sources [Yawn]how compelling! It's basiclly just an update of his usual "Jews run America diatribe"

Now it's true that Petras doesn't use footnotes in that article, Len.

But here's a hint. Check what's inside the brackets. They look like this ( )

You'll find reference after reference - mostly to the Financial Times

It's obvious Colby isn't really trying to contribute to this thread.

He's just doing what he's best at---troublemaking.

There's no chance Iran would use a nuclear weapon to 'wipe Israel of the map'. Colby and his ilk are fully aware of this but want to use the spectre of this 'threat' to justify blatant acts of war against Iran and its allies.

Question for Len Colby (please don't ignore): Why would Iran use a nuclear weapon to destroy Israel when such an act would poison the whole region with fallout and almost certainly WIPE THE PALESTINIANS OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH?

Very interesting, Sid.

I've always been suspicious of Sirhan's alleged motive. It seems as false as Jack Ruby's motive. How could Sirhan be worried about a sharp American foreign policy shift towards Israel when LBJ's Middle East policy already strongly favored Israel--to the extent of ordering a total coverup of the USS Liberty incident as well as massively increasing US military support for Israel over the previous five years?

If US foreign policy had been even handed in 1968, then Sirhan's fears may have been credible, in that he may have believed shooting RFK might have saved US policy from swinging Israel's way.

The anonomous article is interesting, especially the references to Mankiewicz and Wayne. I've never fully acquainted myself with the minutiae of RFK, JFK is complicated enough. I've a feeling that in the unlikely event that one of these crimes is solved, the other will quickly follow.

On the Xymphora site, the following comment is made:

The two organisations FBI/ADL co-operated again a few weeks later when they arranged for the execution of two of the principals involved in the successful operation to purge America of its last great progressive politiian.

Do you know to whom they were referring?

It seems that the tally from America's strike in Somalia is 70 nomads and zero terrorists:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0113-02.htm

Well done Team America.