Steven Gaal

Atos told incontinent woman to ‘wear nappy’ Sarah Cassidy Thursday 17 January 2013 Thousands of sick or disabled people have died after undergoing assessments to find out whether they were fit to work, the House of Commons was told today. Atos, the firm contracted to conduct work capability assessment (WCA) tests for the Government, was condemned by MPs for “ruthlessly” pressurising sick and disabled people into returning to their jobs. The debate was told of cases of people who had committed suicide after being stripped of their benefits under the process and of an incontinence sufferer who was told she could return to work wearing a nappy. Former Labour minister Michael Meacher opened the debate saying that 1,300 people had died after being placed in the “work-related activity group”, for those currently too ill to be employed but expected to start preparing for an eventual return to work. A further 2,200 died before the assessment process was completed and 7,100 died after being judged to be entitled to unconditional support because they are too ill or disabled to work. Mr Meacher asked: “Is it reasonable to pressurise seriously disabled persons into work so ruthlessly when there are already 2.5 million people unemployed and, on average, eight persons chasing every vacancy, unless they are also provided with the active and extensive support they obviously need in order to get and to hold down work, which is certainly not the case at present?” Labour’s Iain Wright, MP for Hartlepool, told MPs that one of his constituents, a woman who suffered from Crohn’s disease, had been told she could wear a nappy to work. “What sort of country have we become, what sort of ethical values does the Government have, if that’s the degrading and crass way in which decent law abiding constituents of mine are being dealt with?” he said. “All the evidence that I have in my constituency demonstrates that the system is not working and the most vulnerable and ill constituents in Hartlepool are paying the price. The Government is treating my constituents like dirt, it needs to change.” Shadow Employment minister Stephen Timms said there was no doubt the current arrangements were causing “immense problems and immense anxiety”. He added: “We shouldn’t be allowing this to continue, the system does need fast and fundamental reform.” Kevan Jones, a former Labour minister, said suicides of claimants who were found fit to work by Atos had been reported. “There are...a number of well-publicised cases where people have taken their own lives because of this system,” he said. “It is not too strong to say that this Coalition Government has blood on their hands for the deaths of those individuals.” A spokeswoman for Atos Healthcare said: “We know that this can be a difficult process for people and we do all we can to make sure the service we provide is as professional and compassionate as possible. We have been doing this work...for over a decade and our doctors, nurses and physiotherapists are fully trained and experienced, with many coming directly from the NHS.” Victory in vain: Cancer patient’s fight Cecilia Burns, 51, from Northern Ireland died last summer shortly after winning her campaign to get her benefits reinstated. Ms Burns, who was being treated for breast cancer, had her benefits cut by £30 a week after an assessment by Atos. She started a campaign to have the decision overturned but died shortly after the money was reinstated.

http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/baby-you-can-drive-my-car/29209/

PRE 911 closed down investications (secret team red below) 1996: Vulgar Betrayal Investigation Launched Vulgar Betrayal, the most significant US government investigation into terrorist financing before 9/11, is launched. This investigation grows out of investigations Chicago FBI agent Robert Wright had begun in 1993 (see After January 1993), and Wright appears to be the driving force behind Vulgar Betrayal. He later will say, “I named the case Vulgar Betrayal because of the many gross betrayals many Arab terrorists and their supporters” committed against the US, but the name will later prove to be bitterly ironic for him. Over a dozen FBI agents are assigned it and a grand jury is empanelled to hear evidence. Wright will be removed from the investigation in late 1999 (see August 3, 1999), and it will be completely shut down in early 2000 (see August 2000). [Chicago Tribune, 8/22/2004; LA Weekly, 8/25/2004; Judicial Watch, 12/15/2004] The investigation will first identify suspected terrorism financier Yassin al-Qadi as a target in 1997, but it will run into many obstacles in investigating him and others. Assistant US attorney Mark Flessner, the lead prosecutor for Vulgar Betrayal, will later claim that supervisors at the Justice Department’s headquarters obstructed the investigation because it appeared to trace terrorism financing to important figures in Saudi Arabia, a key US ally. Wright will later state that had the leads into al-Qadi and others been fully investigated, “I believe the FBI could have identified other significant links to Osama bin Laden, links which may have been addressed to prevent future attacks against the United States by bin Laden and his terrorist trainees.” [Chicago Tribune, 8/22/2004] <a href="http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a1098alqadi#a1098alqadi" title="View in context">October 1998: Vulgar Betrayal Investigation Nearly Shut Down Mark Flessner. Two months after the US embassy bombings in Africa (see 10:35-10:39 a.m., August 7, 1998), FBI agent Robert Wright and his Vulgar Betrayal investigation discover evidence they think ties Saudi multimillionaire Yassin al-Qadi to the bombings. Since 1997, Wright had been investigating a suspected terrorist cell in Chicago that was connected to fundraising for Hamas. They discovered what they considered to be clear proof that al-Qadi and other people they were already investigating had helped fund the embassy bombings. Wright asks FBI headquarters for permission to open an investigation into this money trail at this time, but the permission is not granted. Wright will later recall, “The supervisor who was there from headquarters was right straight across from me and started yelling at me: ‘You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.’” Instead, they are told to merely follow the suspects and file reports, but make no arrests. Federal prosecutor Mark Flessner, working with the Vulgar Betrayal investigation, later will claim that a strong criminal case was building against al-Qadi and his associates. “There were powers bigger than I was in the Justice Department and within the FBI that simply were not going to let [the building of a criminal case] happen. And it didn’t happen.… I think there were very serious mistakes made. And I think, it perhaps cost, it cost people their lives ultimately.” [ABC News, 12/19/2002] Flessner later will speculate that Saudi influence may have played a role. ABC News will report in 2002, “According to US officials, al-Qadi [has] close personal and business connections with the Saudi royal family.” [ABC News, 11/26/2002] Wright later will allege that FBI headquarters even attempted to shut down the Vulgar Betrayal investigation altogether at this time. He says, “They wanted to kill it.” [ABC News, 12/19/2002] However, he will claim, “Fortunately an assistant special agent in Chicago interceded to prevent FBI headquarters from closing Operation Vulgar Betrayal.” [Federal News Service, 5/30/2002] When the story of this interference in the alleged al-Qadi-embassy bombings connection will be reported in late 2002, Wright will conclude, “September the 11th is a direct result of the incompetence of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit. No doubt about that. Absolutely no doubt about that. You can’t know the things I know and not go public.” He will remain prohibited from telling all he knows, merely hinting, “There’s so much more. God, there’s so much more. A lot more.” [ABC News, 12/19/2002] August 2000: Vulgar Betrayal Investigation Shut Down Frances Townsend. [source: White House]Vulgar Betrayal, the most significant US government investigation into terrorist financing before 9/11, shuts down. FBI agent Robert Wright launched the investigation in 1996 (see 1996) and was removed from the investigation in late 1999 (see August 3, 1999). Apparently the investigation accomplished little after Wright’s departure. [LA Weekly, 8/25/2004; Judicial Watch, 12/15/2004; ABC News, 12/19/2002] Mark Flessner, an assistant US attorney assigned to Vulgar Betrayal in 1996, later will recall, “Vulgar Betrayal was a case where the FBI’s intelligence agents would not cooperate with the criminal agents trying to put these guys in jail. They refused to let us arrest them. They only wanted to watch them conduct their business.” He will also claim that Frances Townsend, a Justice Department official working a variety of posts, helps close down the investigation. He will say Townsend did not share information but “deliberately obstructed it. And I found that very disconcerting.” He will claim that she completely supports FBI intelligence agents and refuses to share their information with the Vulgar Betrayal investigation. A federal grand jury was impaneled in 1996 to support Vulgar Betrayal, but without the information from FBI intelligence, Flessner did not have enough evidence to return indictments. “I couldn’t even get permission to do the basic things you do, such as collecting phone numbers from their targets’ incoming and outgoing calls, and addresses from their mail.” With the shut down of the investigation in 2000, Flessner will resign from the Justice Department in frustration. After 9/11, Townsend will be appointed President Bush’s Homeland Security Adviser and counterterrorism director for the National Security Council. [LA Weekly, 8/25/2004] ################################ POST 911 closed down investigations Financial Ties to Al-Qaeda in US ruling class Economic Relations to Sept 11 www.google.com/search?as_q=newsweek+%22green+quest%22 LIST of Al-Qaeda members working for USG Al-Qaeda members history with the US gov ECONOMIC TYRANNY Globalism, poverty, war Nazi-History in America, Europe The CIA (precursors), the Dulles Bros, Wall Street firms, and Nazis formed a joint partnership on hundreds of German and American corporations, and other corporations in France, Spain, and later in Latin America. They co-founded Saudi Arabia, and put King Ibn Saud in charge of it. see CIA and Wahabbis below http://www.spitfirelist.com/f462.html note: Dave Emory and John Loftus seem strongly pro-Israel and anti-Arab (claiming to be anti-Wahabbi), to the point of being dismissive about acts of state terrorism against Palestinians. Suicide bombers and brutal IDF military occupation are not mutually exclusive points of view, that you have to choose one to criticize. Indira Singh (Guns and Butter audio directly below) is not prejudiced against Arabs and pro-Israel like Loftus. She's just a bank security risk mgmt person. However the Loftus/Emory material still has interesting facts about who associates with whom. "It was not until Operation Green Quest, a joint task force headed by U.S. Customs which sought to disrupt terrorist financing, picked up the scent of the SAAR Network that a raid occurred. In March, 2002, Green Quest, in a victory for Americans everywhere, raided the SAAR Network in 15 locations in the largest terrorist financial bust in U.S. history. . . ." Accused terrorist financier Yasin Al-Qadi is one of the main investors in Ptech. Al-Qaeda BUSTED!!! SO FAR, SO GOOD ... RIGHT? "Furthermore, the FBI was aware that Ptech, the Boston-area computer software firm, had millions of dollars in sensitive government contracts with several government agencies, including the FBI itself, the FAA, the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Defense, NORAD, the IRS, and the White House, proving a visible and viable threat to national security. Frighteningly, when an employee told the President of Ptech he felt he had to contact the FBI regarding Qadi’s involvement in the company, as he saw in the news that Qadi was allegedly connected to funding al Qaeda, the President of Ptech allegedly told a subordinate not to worry because Yaqub Mirza, who was on the board of directors of the company and was himself a target of a terrorist financing raid in March 2002, had contacts high within the FBI. The FBI ignored the repeated requests of concerned employees at Ptech. After repeated meetings with increasingly higher-ranking FBI officials where the employees beseeched the agency to look into the company, the bureau did nothing, despite knowing that Qadi was a primary financier of Ptech." --- continued below box more: Guns and Butter - Ground Zero 911, Blueprint For Terror, PTECH Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 excerpt: About this program: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/16057 "Ground Zero 911, Blueprint For Terror, Part Two" Indira Singh worked on Wall Street from 1975 Until June 28th, 2002 when she was summarily terminated due to her investigation into computer software company, Ptech. - interview with a JP Morgan software architect about tech ties to Sept. 11 at the highest level. If you have time listen to Part One first. PRIOR BACKGROUND (below): In Part One, She described her work as an emergency medical technician at ground zero, and began to describe her professional work for JPMorgan Chase (as Risk Technology Architect) and her first client meeting with software engineer, Ptech. Listening Options: Streaming part 2: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/16057 Download part 2: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/14703 Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 Ground Zero 911: Blueprint For Terror, Part One With 911 whistleblower, Risk Technology Architect and Ground Zero Emergency Medical Technician, Indira Singh. www.Takeoverworld.info/mp3/gnb_20050427-Indira_Singh.mp3 Makhtab al-Khidimat (MAK), 1985-1989: Precursor to Al-Qaeda Puts Down US Roots the milieu of the 3/20-targeted SAAR network significantly overlaps the GOP’s ethnic outreach organization and the Bush administration. That fact may well explain the FBI’s and CIA’s hostile interest in the investigators of Operation Green Quest. The FBI and CIA launched investigations of the investigators, instead of the alleged terrorists. "The CIA was investigating ME and the SAAR investigators from Green Quest and Customs. The CIA and the FBI investigated everyone who had anything to do with the SAAR investigation. White vans and SUV’s with dark windows appeared near all the homes of the SAAR investigators. All agents, some of whom were very experienced with surveillance, knew they were being followed. So was I. I felt that I was being followed everywhere and watched at home, in the supermarket, on the way to work . . . and for what? . . ." (Terrorist Hunter by "Anonymous" [Rita Katz] Green Quest investigators from the Department of Homeland Security charge that the FBI is deliberately sabotaging their investigations. "The FBI-Justice move, pushed by DOJ criminal Division chief Michael Chertoff and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, (Operation Green Quest was either disbanded or moved to DHS under Michael Chertoff) The question I have to ask here is, did the Republicans/slash/CIA/slash/FBI REALLY pull off Sept 11, or does it just LOOK like they did, because Republicans and Intelligence are so deeply in bed with terrorist money conduits. I'd still say "they did it", because of proven and documented FBI involvement in WTC1993, tied to Democrats ... and Clinton's response which was a crackdown on civil liberties. Also, Russia and their "fake government terrorism" google "Disbelief" about Russia. Talat Othman (a close associate of both Georges Bush) interceded on behalf of the targets of Operation Green Quest. "One of the Muslim activists who met with Paul O’Neill was Talat Othman, a longtime friend and former business associate of President Bush. The two served together on the board of the Texas-based oil company Harken Energy starting in the late 1980’s and have remained close ever since. Othman sat on Harken’s board as the representative of Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a Saudi business magnate and a close associate of suspected terrorist financier Khalid bin Mahfouz. Othman was chairman of the Islamic Institute. He had also been the board member of Harken Energy representing the interests of Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, the Saudi investor who had helped Bush make his fortune by bailing out Harken in the late eighties. [Kahlid Bin Mahfouz was one of the principal figures in the BCCI investigation, overseen by now-FBI chief Robert Mueller—D.E.] Bakhsh now heads an oil company that is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the energy giant formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney." ("Charity Cases: Why Has the Bush Administration Failed to Stop Saudi Funding of Terrorism?" by David Armstrong; Harper’s; March/2004; p. 82.) "On March 12, 2000, Bush and his wife, Laura, met with more Muslim leaders at a local mosque in Tampa, Florida. Al-Arian brought in Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the number-two leader in Islamic Jihad, to be the director of WISE. "Al-Arian also brought to Tampa as a guest speaker for WISE none other than Hassan Turabi, the powerful Islamic ruler of Sudan who had welcomed Osama bin Laden and helped nurture al Qaeda in the early nineties. . . The charges refer to the Islamic Jihad as ‘a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in acts of violence including murder, extortion, money laundering, fraud, and misuse of visas, and operated worldwide including in the Middle District of Florida.’ In that context, it is frightening to note that search warrants in the Al-Arian case were "accidentally" destroyed. Was this REALLY an accident? The destruction of the documents threatens the Al-Arian case! He was acquitted.

A New Book Transforms Our Understanding of What the Vietnam War Actually Was Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been written (some 30,000 books and counting), it scarcely seems possible, but such, it turns out, has literally been the case. Now, in Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth. Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information, court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and firsthand interviews in Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country. It has been Turse’s great achievement to see that, thanks to the special character of the war, its prime reality -- an accurate overall picture of what physically was occurring on the ground -- had never been assembled; that with imagination and years of dogged work this could be done; and that even a half-century after the beginning of the war it still should be done. Turse acknowledges that, even now, not enough is known to present this picture in statistical terms. To be sure, he offers plenty of numbers -- for instance the mind-boggling estimates that during the war there were some two million civilians killed and some five million wounded, that the United States flew 3.4 million aircraft sorties, and that it expended 30 billion pounds of munitions, releasing the equivalent in explosive force of 640 Hiroshima bombs. Yet it would not have been enough to simply accumulate anecdotal evidence of abuses. Therefore, while providing an abundance of firsthand accounts, he has supplemented this approach. Like a fabric, a social reality -- a town, a university, a revolution, a war -- has a pattern and a texture. No fact is an island. Each one is rich in implications, which, so to speak, reach out toward the wider area of the surrounding facts. When some of these other facts are confirmed, they begin to reveal the pattern and texture in question. Turse repeatedly invites us to ask what sort of larger picture each story implies. For example, he writes: “If one man and his tiny team could claim more KIAs [killed in action] than an entire battalion without raising red flags among superiors; if a brigade commander could up the body count by picking off civilians from his helicopter with impunity; if a top general could institutionalize atrocities through the profligate use of heavy firepower in areas packed with civilians -- then what could be expected down the line, especially among heavily armed young infantrymen operating in the field for weeks, angry, tired, and scared, often unable to locate the enemy and yet relentlessly pressed for kills?” Like a tightening net, the web of stories and reports drawn from myriad sources coalesces into a convincing, inescapable portrait of this war -- a portrait that, as an American, you do not wish to see; that, having seen, you wish you could forget, but that you should not forget; and that the facts force you to see and remember and take into account when you ask yourself what the United States has done and been in the last half century, and what it still is doing and still is. Scorched Earth in I Corps My angle of vision on these matters is a highly particular one. In early August 1967, I arrived in I Corps, the northernmost district of American military operations in what was then South Vietnam. I was there to report for the New Yorker on the “air war.” The phrase was a misnomer. The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no “war” of that description. There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam. These ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second; to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that crowded the skies. All this was abetted by continuous artillery fire into “free-fire” zones and naval bombardment from ships just off the coast. By the time I arrived, the destruction of the villages in the region and the removal of their people to squalid refugee camps was approaching completion. (However, they often returned to their blasted villages, now subject to indiscriminate artillery fire.) Only a few pockets of villages survived. I witnessed the destruction of many of these in Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh provinces from the back seat of small Cessnas called Forward Air Control planes. As we floated overhead day after day, I would watch long lines of houses burst into flames one after another as troops moved through the area of operation. In the meantime, the Forward Air Controllers were calling in air strikes as requested by radio from troops on the ground. In past operations, the villagers had been herded out of the area into the camps. But this time, no evacuation had been ordered, and the population was being subjected to the full fury of a ground and air assault. A rural society was being torn to pieces before my eyes. The broad results of American actions in I Corps were thus visible and measurable from the air. No scorched earth policy had been announced but scorched earth had been the result. Still, a huge piece was missing from the puzzle. I was not able to witness most of the significant operations on the ground firsthand. I sought to interview some soldiers but they would not talk, though one did hint at dark deeds. “You wouldn’t believe it so I’m not going to tell you,” he said to me. “No one’s ever going to find out about some things, and after this war is over, and we’ve all gone home, no one is ever going to know.” In other words, like so many reporters in Vietnam, I saw mainly one aspect of one corner of the war. What I had seen was ghastly, but it was not enough to serve as a basis for generalizations about the conduct of the war as a whole. Just a few years later, in 1969, thanks to the determined efforts of a courageous soldier, Ron Ridenhour, and the persistence of a reporter, Seymour Hersh, one piece of the hidden truth about ground operations in I Corp came to light. It was the My Lai massacre, in which more than 500 civilians were murdered in cold blood by Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, of the Americal Division. In subsequent years, news of other atrocities in the area filtered into the press, often many years after the fact. For example, in 2003 the Toledo Blade disclosed a campaign of torture and murder over a period of months, including the summary execution of two blind men by a “reconnaissance” squad called Tiger Force. Still, no comprehensive picture of the generality of ground operations in the area emerged. It has not been until the publication of Turse’s book that the everyday reality of which these atrocities were a part has been brought so fully to light. Almost immediately after the American troops arrived in I Corps, a pattern of savagery was established. My Lai, it turns out, was exceptional only in the numbers killed. Turse offers a massacre at a village called Trieu Ai in October 1967 as a paradigm. A marine company suffered the loss of a man to a booby trap near the village, which had in fact had been mostly burned down by other American forces a few days earlier. Some villagers had, however, returned for their belongings. Now, the Marine company, enraged by its loss but unable to find the enemy, entered the village firing their M-16s, setting fire to any intact houses, and tossing grenades into bomb shelters. A Marine marched a woman into a field and shot her. Another reported that there were children in the shelters that were being blown up. His superior replied, “Tough xxxx, they grow up to be VC [Vietcong].” Five or ten people rushed out of a shelter when a grenade was thrown into it. They were cut down in a hail of fire. Turse comments: “In the story of Trieu Ai one can see virtually the entire war writ small. Here was the repeated aerial bombing and artillery fire… Here was the deliberate burning of peasant homes and the relocation of villagers to refugee camps... Angry troops primed to lash out, often following losses within the unit; civilians trapped in their paths; and officers in the field issuing ambiguous or illegal orders to young men conditioned to obey -- that was the basic recipe for many of the mass killings carried out by army soldiers and marines over the years.” The savagery often extended to the utmost depravity: gratuitous torture, killing for target practice, slaughter of children and babies, gang rape. Consider the following all-too-typical actions of Company B, 1st Battalion, 35th infantry beginning in October 1967: “The company stumbled upon an unarmed young boy. 'Someone caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him...' medic Jamie Henry later told army investigators. A radioman and another medic volunteered for the job. The radioman... ’kicked the boy in the stomach and the medic took him around behind a rock and I heard one magazine go off complete on automatic...’ “A few days after this incident, members of that same unit brutalized an elderly man to the point of collapse and then threw him off a cliff without even knowing whether he was dead or alive... “A couple of days after that, they used an unarmed man for target practice... “And less than two weeks later, members of Company B reportedly killed five unarmed women... “Unit members rattled off a litany of other brutal acts committed by the company... [including] a living woman who had an ear cut off while her baby was thrown to the ground and stomped on...” Pumping Up the Body Count Turse’s findings completed the picture of the war in I Corps for me. Whatever the policymight have been in theory, the reality, on the ground as in the air, was the scorched earth I had witnessed from the Forward Air Control planes. Whatever the United States thoughtit was doing in I Corps, it was actuallywaging systematic war against the people of the region. And so it was, as Turse voluminously documents, throughout the country. Details differed from area to area but the broad picture was the same as the one in I Corps. A case in point is the war in the Mekong Delta, home to some five to six million people in an area of less than 15,000 square miles laced with rivers and canals. In February 1968, General Julian Ewell, soon to be known by Vietnamese and Americans alike as “the Butcher of the Delta,” was placed in charge of the 9th Infantry Division. In December 1968, he launched Operation Speedy Express. His specialty, amounting to obsession, was increasing “the body count,” ordained by the high command as the key measure of progress in defeating the enemy. Theoretically, only slain soldiers were to be included in that count but -- as anyone, soldier or reporter, who spent a half-hour in the field quickly learned -- virtually all slain Vietnamese, most of them clearly civilians, were included in the total. The higher an officer’s body count, the more likely his promotion. Privates who turned in high counts were rewarded with mini-vacations. Ewell set out to increase the ratio of supposed enemy soldiers killed to American soldiers killed. Pressure to do so was ratcheted up at all levels in the 9th Division. One of his chiefs of staff “went berserk,” in the words of a later chief of staff. The means were simple: immensely increase the already staggering firepower being used and loosen the already highly permissive “rules of engagement” by, for example, ordering more night raids. In a typical night episode, Cobra gunships strafed a herd of water buffalo and seven children tending them. All died, and the children were reported as enemy soldiers killed in action. The kill ratios duly rose from an already suspiciously high 24 “Vietcong” for every dead American to a completely surreal 134 Vietcong per American. The unreality, however, did not simply lie in the inflated kill numbers but in the identities of the corpses. Overwhelmingly, they were not enemy soldiers but civilians. A “Concerned Sergeant” who protested the operation in an anonymous letter to the high command at the time described the results as he witnessed them: “A battalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 battalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 a month 1500, easy. (One battalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay [My Lai] each month for over a year.” This range of estimates was confirmed in later analyses. Operations in I Corp perhaps depended more on infantry attacks supported by air strikes, while Speedy Express depended more on helicopter raids and demands for high body counts, but the results were the same: indiscriminate warfare, unrestrained by calculation or humanity, on the population of South Vietnam. Turse reminds us that off the battlefield, too, casual violence -- such as the use of military trucks to run over Vietnamese on the roads, seemingly for entertainment -- was widespread. The commonest terms for Vietnamese were the racist epithets “gooks,” “dinks,” and “slopes.” And the U.S. military machine was supplemented by an equally brutal American-South Vietnamese prison system in which torture was standard procedure and extrajudicial executions common. How did it happen? How did a country that believes itself to be guided by principles of decency permit such savagery to break out and then allow it to continue for more than a decade? Why, when the first Marines arrived in I Corps in early 1965, did so many of them almost immediately cast aside the rules of war as well as all ordinary scruples and sink to the lowest levels of barbarism? What chains of cause and effect linked “the best and the brightest” of America’s top universities and corporations who were running the war with the murder of those buffalo boys in the Mekong Delta? How did the gates of hell open? This is a different question from the often-asked one of how the United States got into the war. I cannot pretend to begin to do it justice here. The moral and cognitive seasickness that has attended the Vietnam War from the beginning afflicts us still. Yet Kill Anything that Moves permits us, finally, to at least formulate the question in light of the actual facts of the case. Reflections would certainly seem in order for a country that, since Vietnam, has done its best to unlearn even such lessons as were learned from that debacle in preparation for other misbegotten wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, however, are a few thoughts, offered in a spirit of thinking aloud. The Fictitious War and the Real One Roughly since the massacre at My Lai was revealed, people have debated whether the atrocities of the war were the product of decisions by troops on the ground or of high policy, of orders issued from above -- whether they were “aberrations” or “operations.” The first school obviously lends itself to bad-apple-in-a-healthy-barrel thinking, blaming individual units for unacceptable behavior while exonerating the higher ups; the second tends to exonerate the troops while pinning the blame on their superiors. Turse’s book shows that the barrel was rotten through and through. It discredits the “aberration” school once and for all. Yet it does not exactly offer support for the orders-from-the-top school either. Perhaps the problem always was that these alternatives framed the situation inaccurately. The relationship between policy and practice in Vietnam was, it turns out, far more peculiar than the two choices suggest. It’s often said that truth is the first casualty of war. In Vietnam, however, it was not just that the United States was doing one thing while saying another (for example, destroying villages while claiming to protect them), true as that was. Rather, from its inception the war’s structure was shaped by an attempt to superimpose a false official narrative on a reality of a wholly different character. In the official war, the people of South Vietnam were resisting the attempts of the North Vietnamese to conquer them in the name of world communism. The United States was simply assisting them in their patriotic resistance. In reality, most people in South Vietnam, insofar as they were politically minded, were nationalists who sought to push out foreign conquerors: first, the French, then the Japanese, and next the Americans, along with their client state, the South Vietnamese government which was never able to develop any independent strength in a land supposedly its own. This fictitious official narrative was not added on later to disguise unpalatable facts; it was baked into the enterprise from the outset. Accordingly, the collision of policy and reality first took place on the ground in Trieu Ai village and its like. The American forces, including their local commanders, were confronted with a reality that the policymakers had not faced and would not face for many long years. Expecting to be welcomed as saviors, the troops found themselves in a sea of nearly universal hostility. No manual was handed out in Washington to deal with the unexpected situation. It was left to the soldiers to decide what to do. Throughout the country, they started to improvise. To this extent, policy was indeed being made in the field. Yet it was not within the troops’ power to reverse basic policy; they could not, for instance, have withdrawn themselves from the whole misconceived exercise. They could only respond to the unexpected circumstances in which they found themselves. The result would combine an incomprehensible and impossible mission dictated from above (to win the “hearts and minds” of a population already overwhelmingly hostile, while pulverizing their society) and locally conceived illegal but sometimes vague orders that left plenty of room for spontaneous, rage-driven improvisation on the ground. In this gap between the fiction of high policy and the actuality of the real war was born the futile, abhorrent assault on the people of Vietnam. The improvisatory character of all this, as Turse emphasizes, can be seen in the fact that while the abuses of civilians were pervasive they were not consistent. As he summarizes what a villager in one brutalized area told him decades later, “Sometimes U.S. troops handed out candies. Sometimes they shot at people. Sometimes they passed through a village hardly touching a thing. Sometimes they burned all the homes. ‘We didn’t understand the reasons why the acted in the way they did.’” Alongside the imaginary official war, then, there grew up the real war on the ground, the one that Turse has, for the first time, adequately described. It is no defense of what happened to point out that, for the troops, it was not so much their orders from on high as their circumstances -- what Robert J. Lifton has called “atrocity-producing situations” -- that generated their degraded behavior. Neither does such an account provide escape from accountability for the war’s architects without whose blind and misguided policies these infernal situations never would have arisen. In one further bitter irony, this real war came at a certain point to be partially codified at ever higher levels of command into policies that did translate into orders from the top. In effect, the generals gradually -- if absurdly, in light of the supposed goals of the war -- sanctioned and promoted the de facto war on the population. Enter General Ewell and his body counts. In other words, the improvising moved up the chain of command until the soldiers were following orders when they killed civilians, though, as in the case of Ewell, those orders rarely took exactly that form. Nonetheless, the generals sometimes went quite far in formulating these new rules, even when they flagrantly contradicted official policies. To give one example supplied by Turse, in 1965, General William Westmoreland, who was made commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1964, implicitly declared war on the peasantry of South Vietnam. He said: “Until now the war has been characterized by a substantial majority of the population remaining neutral. In the past year we have seen an escalation to a higher intensity in the war. This will bring about a moment of decision for the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he stays alive.” Like his underlings, Westmoreland, was improvising. This new policy of, in effect, terrorizing the peasantry into submission was utterly inconsistent with the Washington narrative of winning hearts and minds, but it was fully consistent with everything his forces were actually doing and about to do in I Corps and throughout the country. A Skyscraper of Lies One more level of the conflict needs to be mentioned in this context. Documents show that, as early as the mid-1960s, the key mistaken assumptions of the war -- that the Vietnamese foe was a tentacle of world communism, that the war was a front in the Cold War rather than an episode in the long decolonization movement of the twentieth century, that the South Vietnamese were eager for rescue by the United States -- were widely suspected to be mistaken in official Washington. But one other assumption was not found to be mistaken: that whichever administration “lost” Vietnam would likely lose the next election. Rightly or wrongly, presidents lived in terror of losing the war and so being politically destroyed by a movement of the kind Senator Joe McCarthy launched after the American “loss” of China in 1949. Later, McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, would describe his understanding of the president’s frame of mind at the time this way: "LBJ isn't deeply concerned about who governs Laos, or who governs South Vietnam -- he's deeply concerned with what the average American voter is going to think about how he did in the ball game of the Cold War. The great Cold War championship gets played in the largest stadium in the United States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses, how does he do in the next election? So don't lose. Now that's too simple, but it's where he is. He's living with his own political survival every time he looks at these questions.” In this context, domestic political considerations trumped the substantive reasoning that, once the futility and horror of the enterprise had been revealed, might have led to an end to the war. More and more it was understood to be a murderous farce, but politics dictated that it must continue. As long as this remained the case, no news from Vietnam could lead to a reversal of the war policies. This was the top floor of the skyscraper of lies that was the Vietnam War. Domestic politics was the largest and most fact-proof of the atrocity-producing situations. Do we imagine that this has changed? Jonathan Schell is a Fellow at The Nation Institute, and the peace and disarmament correspondent for the Nation magazine. Among many other works, he is the author of The Real War, a collection of his New Yorker reportage on the Vietnam War. [Under review in this essay: Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books, 2013). Jonathan Schell’s classic Vietnam books, The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half, are now collected in The Real War (Da Capo Press).]

From Kindergarten to University: Homeland Security Culture in America by Sancho Jones In early March of 2009, The Department of Homeland Security, held it’s annual National Fusion Center Conference [1]. The conference highlighted the necessity for Fusion Centers to achieve Baseline Capabilities in the sharing of information and intelligence with the federal government and each other. At the end of the same month the DHS gave a press release [2] to announce their selection of Purdue, and Rutgers Universities to co-lead the newest Center of Excellence (COE). Centers of Excellence were created through the Homeland Security Act of 2002; the first centers began operation in 2004. With the addition of the newest one above, there are a total of 12 Centers across the country. The total number of these centers is skewed; as each center is in collaboration with multiple universities; as well as being partners with local, state, federal, and international entities. These COE’s also work with national laboratories, and corporate partners such as the RAND corporation to offer viable real world applications. In the end, there aren’t 12 centers, but a web of several hundred, and possibly thousands of centers. The official list[3] of 12 centers are overseen by the Orwellian “Office of University Programs” [4]. The “Strategic Objectives” of this office are quoted as follows: Foster a homeland security culture within the academic community through research and educational programs. Strengthen U.S. scientific leadership in homeland security research. Generate and disseminate knowledge and technical advances to advance the homeland security mission. Integrate homeland security activities across agencies engaged in relevant academic research. Create and leverage intellectual capital and nurture a homeland security science and engineering workforce. Notice, their admitted overall goal is not only to ‘disseminate knowledge’ and technical advances for the homeland security ‘mission’, but also to create a Homeland Security Culture within the educational system; [5], 6]. Each COE website[3] has an education link; not all sites have their educational portion up for viewing. The ones who do have the educational curricula visible, show programs offered for K-12 and college curricula, into graduate school education. From Purdue University’s COE website [7], “This program is designed to support undergraduate and graduate students in developing the skills to become preeminent scientists in the homeland security specific and technical community.” The Orwellian Office of University Programs, is not only creating “Obama’s Youth”, but also creating “scientists” who are studied in Department of Homeland Security disciplines! Two Centers of Excellence stood out from the rest. The first, is Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism [8], or START which is based at the University of Maryland. Amongst other activities, they do as the name suggests; they create studies. Hidden amongst the Islamic Jihad studies[9] were the reports of the real terrorists; you, and I! Two reports stuck out more than the rest. The first was a study conducted from 2007 to 2008, and finished with the creation of the U.S. Extremist Criminal Terror database[10]. The study, and now database focus on far-right extremists; the data base of U.S. Extremist Crime, comprises 1990 to 2005. The other study of interest was,“Homegrown Radicalization and the Role of Social Networks and Social Inclusiveness in the United States”[11]. There is no finished report of this study. The last update was, July 31, 2008. It seems this study is the one requested through The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 1955/S. 1959)[12] “The act would establish a national commission and a university-based “Center for Excellence” to study and propose legislation to prevent the threat of “radicalization” of Americans.” Interestingly enough, just a few months after the final START study update on July 31, 2008, the DHS released, The “Domestic Extremism Lexicon”[13]. This Lexicon was a “newly unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warns against the possibility of violence by unnamed “right-wing extremists” concerned about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty and singles out returning war veterans as particular threats.”[14] All this came from the START Center of Excellence! Most interesting of all these Centers of Excellence, is the newest one; which was awarded to Purdue, and Rutger Universities. It’s the Center of Excellence in Command, Control and Interoperability (C2L). There are direct links to both the Rutgers, and part of the Purdue websites from the DHS official list[3]. The link for Purdue goes to PURVAC; which is the Purdue University Regional Visualization, and Analytics Center[15]. It is labeled at the bottom as a Center of Excellence, but not the C2L website. After a little hunting around, and *no* direct links from PURVAC, I was able to come across the official Command, Control, and Interoperability(C2L) website. VACCINE: “Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments,“ is the C2L Center of Excellence[16]. The stated goal is, “To help the 2.3 million DHS personal by turning massive data into actionable knowledge through innovative visual analytic techniques is vital to the mission of the Command, Control, and Interoperability (CCI) Division of The Department of Homeland Security, as well as all of the mission areas of DHS.” They’ve got some catchy informational research projects, such as Jigsaw, Panviz, and a host of others; which all culminate to what appears as the solution sought by the DHS Fusion Center Conference in March[1]. It seems like VACCINE is the answer to culminating all the Centers of Excellence, and the Fusion Centers into the next generation; a cure for the 21st century American. Focused on culminating, and disseminating information through all phases of life, and government; from childhood to adulthood. YOU will comply. In learning about the 12 Centers of Excellence; there seems to be a jaded, and deliberately hidden nature about them. The problem with this is that continually when reading through all the COE websites, there were two aspects that really stuck out. The first was a concentration on education beginning at Kindergarten, and the overall presentation of what is to be taught, is of a hidden nature. Secondly, is the fact that even though the information is hidden for our benefit; so as to keep it a secret from “We The Terrorists”, I noticed that in every single COE website, the partners included foreign countries, and multi national corporations. It’s okay for foreign countries, global corporations, and agents there of, to know what is being taught to the 21th century American, but not okay for “We The People” to know. This investigation yielded massive amounts of information; which had no ends. The information shows the US Government, dancing around it’s true intentions with “powder puffing” a monster. These 12 Centers of Excellence headed by the DHS Office of University Programs, is not all there are. The rabbit hole opens to another 106 universities[17], and the accompanying affiliations with multiple universities, foreign countries, stake holders, and private corporation partners; sponsored by a joint program between the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. These are not just DHS centers of excellence, but are as follows: “The National Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAEIAE) and the CAE-Research (CAE-R) are outreach programs designed and operated initially by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the spirit of Presidential Decision Directive 63, National Policy on Critical Infrastructure Protection, May 1998. The NSA and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in support of the President’s National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, February 2003, now jointly sponsor the program. The goal of the program is to reduce vulnerability in our national information infrastructure by promoting higher education in information assurance (IA), and producing a growing number of professionals with IA expertise in various disciplines. ”[18] Simply they are the same as the COE’s, but with more agencies involved, and just another way to cover government outcome based education through ‘spookier’ means. They are to create more homeland security molded, subservient 21st century citizens. Interestingly enough both the CAEIAE schools[19], and the COE schools have to meet requirements set forth by private foundations. Another point of interest regarding these CAEIAE schools is they are usually located so as to permit easy access to DoD installations, federal research centers, and other agency facilities. These universities, and their disseminated information are not just a national problem for Americans, but the entire world. They are creating educational programs from kindergarten, and they are partnered with several foreign countries. It’s seemingly more, and more a 1984 Orwellian hell of reality, that Americans are being made into a “new breed”; now with the words of Patrick Henry: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Notes [1] http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1236792314990.shtm[2] http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/pressreleaseD … -31-09.pdf [3] http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/editorial_0498.shtm [4] http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/structure/editorial_0555.shtm [5] http://www.robodoon.com/reece.htm [6] http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/tnmfobe1196.html [7] http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/vac … career.php [8] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/ [9] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/research … ndex.asp#1 [10] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/research … .asp?id=36 [11] http://www.start.umd.edu/start/research … .asp?id=45 [12] http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stor … ntion-act/ [13] http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=96916 [14] http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=94803 [15] https://engineering.purdue.edu/PURVAC/ [16] http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/vaccine/ [17] http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_ro … ters.shtml [18] http://www.esu.edu/compusec/NSA&CAE.html [19] http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=National … 5bf9d43a8f Final note: the study by START, and published by the DHS has been amended to reflect Islamic Extremism, but with the overall same title: New Report on Homegrown Terrorism in the US, and UK.http://hsdl.hsdl.org/hslog/?q=node/4837

The Case Against Ralph Eberhart, NORAD’s 9/11 Commander Submitted by RL McGee on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 1:49pm NORAD Ralph Eberhart http://digwithin.net...01/12/eberhart/ Posted on January 12, 2013 By Kevin Ryan In a 2004 U.S. Senate hearing, Senator Mark Dayton remarked that “this country and its citizens were completely undefended” for “109 minutes” on 9/11.[1] Dayton went on to clarify that officials within the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) had covered up the facts about the lack of air defenses by lying to the 9/11 Commission, to Congress and to the American people. And they were not held accountable. One man was most responsible for both the air defense failures and the lying that covered it up. U.S. Air Force General Ralph Edward Eberhart had taken over command of NORAD from General Richard Myers in February 2000. The position included leadership of all air defense operations in North America and, also, the U.S. Space Command. Therefore, on 9/11, Eberhart was the man most responsible for failure to intercept the four hijacked aircraft over a period of nearly two hours. NORAD is the joint U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for monitoring and defending the airspace over North America. Long-standing operating procedures at NORAD, for dealing with airliners that have gone off-course or been hijacked, were not followed on 9/11. Each of the four flights involved in the 9/11 attacks should have been intercepted when they lost radio contact, deviated from their course, or turned off their transponders.[2] The procedures for interception were automatic and required no special orders to implement. Through these procedures, interceptor jets had been scrambled 129 times in the year 2000 and 67 times in the year prior to June 2001. A 1994 government report stated — “Overall, during the past four years, NORAD’s alert fighters took off to intercept aircraft (referred to as scrambled) 1,518 times, or an average of 15 times per site per year. Of these incidents, the number of suspected drug smuggling aircraft averaged … less than 7 percent of all of the alert sites’ total activity. The remaining activity generally involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft and assisting aircraft in distress.”[3] On 9/11, the NORAD interception system failed completely and we have been given multiple, conflicting explanations for why that happened. Considering that there is strong evidence for an alternative hypothesis of insider involvement in 9/11, it is reasonable to assume that an intentional compromising of the U.S. air defenses might have occurred that day. Adding to this suspicion is the fact that guilt tends to be reflected in false testimony. And as Senator Dayton said, NORAD officials “lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 Commission.”[4] Exactly which NORAD statements were lies and which were not is a matter that is still not clear to this day. This is partly because the explanations and testimony that are now said to have been false were far more damning to NORAD than the final account, which exonerates NORAD entirely. Why would NORAD leaders want to lie so as to make their performance look worse? In order to better determine the facts, investigators should begin with at least three areas of inquiry: 1) the times at which NORAD was notified (or made aware) of the hijackings, 2) the times at which NORAD responded in the form of scrambling jets to intercept, and 3) the instructions given to the interceptor pilots in terms of speed and direction. NORAD’s ever-changing story The military’s explanations began with a short description of the response to the hijackings. Two days after the attacks, General Richard Myers gave this account to the Senate Armed Services Committee, in an official hearing for his confirmation as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS). He said that no fighter jets were scrambled to intercept any of the hijacked 9/11 flights until after the Pentagon was hit.[5] Although Myers was not in command of NORAD on 9/11, he should have known two days later if normal procedures had been followed. As Acting CJCS on 9/11, and as Vice Chairman otherwise, his role was to ensure the president and secretary of defense were informed of critical military matters. A second story was given a week after the attacks, when NORAD provided a partial timeline of the notifications it had received from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the responses that followed. General Eberhart reiterated this timeline in testimony to the U.S. Senate a few weeks later and for over two years it stood as the official account.[6] This timeline said that NORAD had received notification about three of the hijacked planes with plenty of time left to ensure interception and had scrambled jets from multiple bases as the attacks proceeded. This timeline showed that NORAD was notified about the hijacking of Flight 175 at 8:43 am, a full twenty minutes before it impacted the south tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). Moreover, F-15 interceptor jets from Otis Air Force Base (AFB) were said to be airborne by 8:52, having been scrambled in response to the first hijacking. This allowed twice the time needed for the jets to reach New York City before Flight 175 crashed. Eberhart added that NORAD was notified about the hijacked Flight 77 coming into Washington at 9:24 am, fourteen minutes before it impacted the Pentagon. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee (repeatedly) that this was a “documented notification.”[7] If true, interceptor jets from Andrews AFB, only ten miles from the Pentagon, could have easily reached the errant airliner given this lead time. Although the military might now use the excuse that Andrews was not technically under the command of NORAD, the 9/11 Commissions says Eberhart’s statement was simply not true. In fact, both Commission counsel Dan Marcus and Team leader John Farmer were later very blunt about this being a false statement.[8] Therefore, it is clear that Eberhart should be brought up on a charge of contempt of Congress. It is illegal to make any materially false statement or representation in testimony to the Unites States Congress.[9] And that was not the only false statement that Eberhart apparently made to the senators. In May 2003, Eberhart’s subordinates General Arnold and Colonel William Alan Scott presented a slightly revised version of NORAD’s timeline. They contradicted the timeline for Flight 175, saying that NORAD was not notified of the hijacking until 9:05, three minutes after the aircraft crashed into the south tower. This was despite the fact that when asked by a U.S. Senator about “the second hijacked plane somewhere up there” (Flight 175), Eberhart had previously said “Yes, sir. During that time, we were notified.”[10] Arnold and Scott also revealed for the first time that NORAD was notified about the hijacking of Flight 93 at 9:16 am. This was 47 minutes before that flight allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania, at 10:03 am. Obviously, interceptor jets could have easily reached and escorted Flight 93 given this revised timeline. The fourth and final story from NORAD was the official account given by the 9/11 Commission Report, now supported by NORAD. In this explanation NORAD received “no advance notice” on any of the last three hijacked airliners.[11] Instead of 20 minutes of notice on Flight 175, and 14 minutes notice on Flight 77, and 47 minutes notice on Flight 93, we were told that NORAD was not notified about any of them until it was too late. The military was off the hook entirely. All the evidence for notifications and response, which had constituted the official account for nearly three years, had been thrown out the window. In place of these documents and testimonies, new explanations were given for why the scrambled aircraft never reached the hijacked airliners. These included unbelievable claims of communication failures and misdirection of the scrambled jets, as well as the introduction of a never-before mentioned “Phantom 11” scenario.[12] The 9/11 Commission Report account was supported two years later by an article in Vanity Fair. [13] Allegedly, the author of the article was given privileged access to audio tapes that were not available to the public. Although the newly revealed “NORAD tapes” ostensibly bolstered the Commission’s new timeline, credible explanations were never given for throwing out the years of testimony and evidence that supported entirely different timelines. The changing stories given by NORAD led to placing more blame for the failed air defenses on the FAA. After NORAD’s 2003 timeline was issued, however, the FAA publicly stated that NORAD had in fact been informed throughout all the developments that morning. FAA official Laura Brown wrote a memo to the 9/11 Commission in which she stated that FAA shared “real-time information” with NORAD about “loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest, including Flight 77.”[14] FAA leadership certainly did fail that morning and there are shocking questions to be answered in that regard.[15] Not the least of these questions is why evidence that might have helped was destroyed by an FAA official after the attacks.[16] But the multiple stories given by the military indicate that NORAD was at least as culpable as the FAA in the inexplicable lack of air defense. And the facts indicate that NORAD was in the loop earlier than its 2003 timeline suggested, meaning that there is no reasonable explanation for why NORAD-controlled jets did not intercept most, if not all, of the planes hijacked on 9/11. When questioned by the 9/11 Commission, Eberhart confirmed that if NORAD had been in the loop as the FAA said it was, his people would have been able “to shoot down all three aircraft — all four aircraft.”[17] Reasons to suspect Eberhart Investigation of NORAD and its commander Eberhart is warranted, apart from the evidence for lying to Congress. Additional reasons to focus on Eberhart include the following nine facts. 1. As Commander in Chief of the U.S. Space Command (CINCSPACE), Eberhart was responsible for setting Infocon levels.[18] Infocon is an alert system that defends against attacks on communications networks within the Department of Defense (DOD). Just 12 hours before the 9/11 attacks, an order was given to lower Infocon to its least protective level.[19] Setting Infocon at a lower level made it easier for people to hack or compromise the DOD computer networks, including the air defense system.[20] 2. As both CINCSPACE and Commander in Chief of NORAD (CINCNORAD), Eberhart was in charge of many of the highly coincidental military exercises (i.e. war games) that were going on that morning. 3. Eberhart did nothing effective in response to the 9/11 hijackings, despite being present in the military’s teleconference as those hijackings were in progress. He did not order the scrambling of jets, he did not order an escort for Air Force One, and he did not provide leadership. 4. Eberhart also failed to implement military control over U.S. airspace until well after the attacks were over. Although it was his prerogative to do so, Eberhart did not implement SCATANA, the process of assuming military control over the U.S. airspace, until two hours after the second plane hit the WTC and one hour after the last plane had been destroyed. Eberhart later said that he had waited until it finally became “obvious” to him that a coordinated terrorist attack was underway.[21] He told the 9/11 Commission that, although people were telling him to take control of the airspace earlier, he didn’t feel that the military could “provide traffic deconfliction like the FAA has.”[22] 5. In the middle of the 9/11 attacks, Eberhart decided to drive between Peterson Air Force Base and NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC). Normally this 12-mile drive takes 30 minutes but it took Eberhart between 45 minutes and an hour to make the drive that morning. No reason was ever given (or requested) for why Eberhart did not fly directly to CMOC from Peterson, making use of the Cheyenne Mountain helicopter port. Eberhart made conflicting statements about his reasons for making this trip, saying that he stayed for a while at Peterson because he “did not want to lose communication.”[23] Nevertheless, Eberhart lost communication at the most important time by leaving at approximately 9:30 am, when two of the hijacked planes were still flying wildly off-course. His reason for doing this was that things had “quieted down.”[24] 6. While on his way to the CMOC he was in the U.S. military’s air threat call via cell phone. In this call, at 9:49 am, Eberhart “directed all air sovereignty aircraft to battle stations, fully armed.”[25] Although this might sound like decisive action, the command apparently grounded all interceptor jets that had not yet taken off due to the fact that “battle stations” is a grounded status. Other military leaders later gave orders to actually scramble the jets. And despite his involvement, Eberhart portrayed himself as being out of the loop entirely. For example, he told the 9/11 Commission that he had “no knowledge of the circumstances that initiated the scramble” of fighter jets from Langley AFB and that he had just “recently” been made aware that it happened (in March 2004).[26] 7. Eberhart failed to explain the multiple changes in the account of 9/11 that were given by NORAD. In fact, he seemed to tell his staff to change the NORAD timeline as much as was needed in order to prevent further questioning about the military’s performance.[27] 8. For whatever reasons, Eberhart also gave out false information about the NORAD response to others. General Richard Myers, acting CJCS that morning, said that Eberhart told him there were “several hijack codes in the system.” Yet none of the four planes had squawked the hijack code on 9/11 and therefore it is not clear how such codes could have been in the system.[28] 9. NORAD failed to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission. Even as late as March 2004, the Commission was struggling to get basic documents about 9/11 performance from Eberhart’s organization.[29] In some cases, such as with the after-action reports that follow all military actions, the Commission never received the NORAD documents. Of all these concerns, it is the military exercises that NORAD was conducting on 9/11 that have drawn the most attention from concerned citizens. When questioned about them, Eberhart claimed that the impact of the 9/11 exercises on NORAD’s response was that they “at most cost us 30 seconds.”[30] That was clearly not the case. NORAD’s coincidental exercises After several government officials had made incorrect statements about the military’s preparation for hijackings and the use of planes as weapons, General Myers responded to a pointed question on the subject. He reported that NORAD had practiced “five exercise hijack events,” between November 1999 and October 2000, all of which “included a suicide crash into a high value target.”[31] Records since released show that NORAD practiced approximately 28 hijack exercise events in the 20 months leading up to 9/11. At least six of these were focused on hijackings located entirely within the Unites States, which puts to rest the excuse that NORAD was only looking for threats coming from outside of U.S. borders.[32] One of these exercises, Vigilant Guardian in October 2000, practiced interception of an airliner hijacked for a suicide attack against the 39-story United Nations building in New York City, just a few blocks from the WTC.[33] Another air defense exercise, called Amalgam Virgo and practiced just three months before 9/11, was accompanied by a planning document that had a picture of Osama bin Laden on the cover.[34] Many of the military exercises or war games that were occurring on the day of 9/11 were run under the control of CINCNORAD Eberhart. In fact, Eberhart was in command of the war games that had the greatest impact on the nation’s air defenses. Of course, he had help. NORAD is divided into several large areas that cover the U.S. and Canada, one of which is the region of the continental U.S. called CONR, headed on 9/11 by General Larry Arnold. Within CONR there are three sectors. The 9/11 attacks took place in the airspace monitored by CONR’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS). Personnel at NEADS were therefore primarily responsible for trying to coordinate the NORAD response to the hijackings. CMOC was also an important facility in the response that should have been effective but was not. At NEADS, Colonel Robert Marr was in charge. Marr had been in the U.S. Air Force for over 20 years until 1994, at which time he spent a few months in Saudi Arabia as “director of combat operations.”[35] He then left the military to work two years for a private company called Phoenix Air. Coincidentally, Phoenix Air provided aircraft for the Amalgam Virgo exercises.[36] There is also reason to believe that Phoenix Air is associated with Huffman Aviation where the alleged 9/11 hijackers had trained.[37] After his stint at Phoenix Air, Marr returned to the military as the exercise coordinator at NEADS and, by 9/11, had risen to the position of commander of the facility. There were several NORAD exercises planned for 9/11: Vigilant Guardian and Vigilant Overview, both command post exercises (CPX), and Amalgam Virgo and Amalgam Warrior, which were field training (or FTX) exercises. All four of these exercises were CJCS approved and sponsored by CINCNORAD Eberhart.[38] Apollo Guardian was also running on 9/11. This was an exercise conducted by the U.S. Space Command, meaning Eberhart was in control of that too. FTX exercises are sometimes what are referred to as SPADEs, meaning “a track is taken out of radar coverage and then re-introduced as an unknown track.”[39] This exercise feature is interesting given that Flight 77 was lost on radar for a period of time on 9/11 and then reappeared in a way that has not yet been explained.[40] Amalgam Virgo 02, apparently only in the planning stages on 9/11, was a modification of Twin Star, a live-fly joint FAA/NORAD exercise conducted in 1995. This was described by NORAD exercise design manager Ken Merchant and Major Paul Goddard, the Canadian who was NORAD exercise chief.[41] According to Goddard, the plan was to have interceptor jets scramble and escort a hijacked airliner. During this exercise, “the fighters never got off on the appropriate heading, and it took them forever to catch up.”[42] It is interesting to consider that Amalgam Virgo 02, which was in the planning stages on 9/11, might actually have been in play on 9/11. One reason to consider this is that, on 9/11, the fighters “never got off on the appropriate heading, and it took them forever to catch up.” Another reason is that 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste showed considerable interest in Amalgam Virgo 02, as did the 9/11 Commission staff in its request for documents.[43] According to Ben-Veniste, this was a case in which “NORAD had already in the works plans to simulate in an exercise a simultaneous hijacking of two planes in the United States.”[44] The plan for Amalgam Virgo 02 was therefore similar to the 9/11 attacks, with multiple, simultaneous hijackings. Another large-scale exercise being conducted on 9/11 was Global Guardian, a joint nuclear war simulation run by the U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) in conjunction with NORAD. This was essentially a practice for Armageddon that involved live nuclear bombs and at least three airborne command and control airliners called E-4Bs.[45] The E-4B that was seen circling the White House during the 9/11 attacks might have been part of this exercise.[46] The 9/11 Commission did not mention most of these exercises in its report. To the contrary, the report mentioned only Vigilant Guardian and then only one time, in a deceptively stated footnote that said “On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the Soviet Union.”[47] This statement is false in several ways, not the least of which is that NORAD was scheduled to conduct at least five exercises on 9/11. And Vigilant Guardian was not simply an exercise involving one bomber from the former Soviet Union. Vigilant Guardian (VG) had been in play for several days as of 9/11. On September 9, it included a scenario in which terrorists hijacked an airliner and planned to attack New York City. The exercise presented a number of other scenarios based around airliner hijackings and in one of these, the fictitious terrorists threatened to “Rain Terror from the Skies.”[48] According to the VG planning documents, the 9/11 exercise was to be conducted “sim over live,” meaning the simulated hijackings were to be inserted into the live air control system. This was repeated in the instructions – “Ensure all tracks of interest (sim or live) are input on the live chart.”[49] Furthermore, the VG plan was that “All expansions will be Real World.” Although frequently misunderstood, the term “Real World” does not refer to an actual hijacking, it refers to the use of real aircraft in live-fly exercises.[50] Due to these confusing circumstances, NEADS staff confused the actual hijackings on 9/11 with the exercises. As researcher Matthew Everett explained — “What is remarkable… is that at a time when it should have been obvious to them that the U.S. was in the middle of a major terrorist attack, these key personnel [at NEADS] were uncertain whether what was happening was real or simulated.”[51] The confusion caused much more than a “30 second” problem as Eberhart suggested, because NEADS personnel thought the exercises were continuing well after the attacks. On 9/11, VG was scheduled to include a simulated hijacking at 9:40 am, within an hour of when Flight 11 struck the WTC. When they first learned that Flight 11 was hijacked, NEADS staff noted that the “exercise” appeared to be starting an hour early that morning. The evidence indicates that everyone at NEADS, including Colonel Marr, thought the actual hijackings were exercises. They even joked about it.[52] That might have been due to the VG plan stating that the NEADS building where Colonel Marr and company were located was a planned “exercise play area” and everyone there, knowingly or not, was “subject to exercise play.”[53] NEADS radar scopes were displaying simulated information at least until the time of the Pentagon attack. The same problem was going on at CMOC, another exercise play area, with radar screens showing false tracks as late as 10:12 am. In fact, personnel at CMOC called NEADs in an attempt to stop the exercise inputs.[54] Because those inputs did not stop, it appeared that someone wanted the NEADS and CMOC radar scopes to continue showing false information until after the four planes had been destroyed. Ken Merchant added that the National Military Command Center (NMCC), located at the Pentagon, regularly participated in NORAD exercises by interjecting emergency action messages (EAMs).[55] On 9/11 the performance of the NMCC, which plays a critical role in establishing the military chain of command and communicating orders, was remarkably poor. Officers there lacked any sense of urgency and were completely ineffective with regard to communications.[56] The disruptive effect of the ongoing NORAD exercises that morning continued until after all the hijacked planes had crashed. One military newspaper said VG continued until 30 minutes after attacks.[57] Global Guardian was “formally terminated” at 10:44 am but certain actions taken after that time, including that CMOC blast doors were closed (a needless action in terms of hijacked airliners), suggested that the exercise continued.[58] Investigating Eberhart Investigation of Ralph Eberhart and his subordinates would almost certainly reveal more of what the public needs to know. Whether Eberhart or others were part of a conspiracy to attack the United States is not the only reason. The main purpose would be to understand how such an inexplicable failure to follow the long-standing and most critical procedures of the U.S. defense system could be followed by a string of lies about that inexplicable failure. Eberhart was among the liars and he was in charge of NORAD at the time. Was he lying to make himself and his organization look bad, as the 9/11 Commission suggests? Or is he lying now, along with the 9/11 Commission, in order to remove NORAD’s responsibility and eliminate questioning about 9/11? A year after 9/11, Eberhart was rewarded for his performance by being placed in charge of the new NORTHCOM organization. He has more recently been praised and honored for his great work on 9/11. Called a “9/11 hero” despite having been a disastrous failure on that day, he was honored by having the new NORTHCOM headquarters at Peterson AFB named after him.[59] There is an intangible benefit to consider as well. Like a number of people who should be investigated for 9/11, Eberhart was a veteran of the only war in which the United States was defeated. He began his military career as a forward air controller stationed out of Pleiku Air Base in South Vietnam. Coincidentally, Benedict Sliney, who was in charge of FAA operations on 9/11, was an air traffic controller stationed in Pleiku at about the same time. Fighting in related operations was Michael Canavan, the FAA’s missing hijack coordinator on 9/11, who was in the 5th Special Forces Group (SFG). Also in the 5th SFG were Brian Michael Jenkins, who as Deputy Chairman of Kroll designed the WTC security systems, and CJCS Hugh Shelton, who was yet another high-level leader missing on 9/11. Shelton’s temporary replacement that morning, Richard Myers, was a combat pilot in Vietnam. Along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who were high-level leaders in the Nixon administration at the time, all these men were undoubtedly devastated by the defeat in Vietnam. Cheney and Rumsfeld experienced the only other significant defeat of their careers when President Ford lost the 1976 election a few years later. Other people who played critical roles on 9/11 and also worked under the Ford Administration included L. Paul Bremer, Frank Carlucci, Rudy Giuliani, and DOD employees Richard Clarke, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage. The defeats in Vietnam and the 1976 presidential election made their mark on these men. Years later, the attacks of 9/11 brought all of them a late chance for redemption and victory. And it made them all heroes. Eberhart benefited from the 9/11 attacks in more tangible ways as well. He continued on as head of NORAD and NORTHCOM through 2004. After that he went on to become the chairman for more than half a dozen stock or bond equity funds, and a board director for a similar number of companies profiting from increased military expenditures, oil and gas services, and “Homeland Security.”[60] The bottom line is that NORAD officials working for Ralph Eberhart covered up the facts about the lack of air defense on 9/11 by lying to the American people and by failure to cooperate with the 9/11 investigations. For those reasons alone, Eberhart’s performance that day and the related statements should be thoroughly investigated. Considering the nine facts presented above about Eberhart’s activities on 9/11, and that Eberhart appears to have violated U.S. law by lying to Congress, that investigation should be performed with the utmost assertiveness including formal charges and the use of subpoenas. [1] Nicholas Levis, Senator Dayton: NORAD Lied About 9/11, 911Truth.org, gust 1, 2004, http://www.911truth....040731213239607 [2] Bob Arnot, What Was Needed to Halt the Attacks?: Cockpit security, quick response not in evidence Tuesday, MSNBC, September 12, 2001, http://s3.amazonaws....snbc091201.html [3] United States General Accounting Office, Continental Air Defense: A Dedicated Force Is No Longer Needed, May 3, 1994, http://www.fas.org/man/gao/gao9476.htm [4] Nicholas Levis, Senator Dayton: NORAD Lied About 9/11 [5] Senate Armed Services Committee, General Myers Confirmation Hearing, September 13, 2001, http://emperors-clot...ckups/mycon.htm [6] Transcript of Hearing Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, October 25, 2001, U.S. Government Printing Office [7] Transcript of Hearing Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, October 25, 2001, U.S. Government Printing Office [8] See memo from Dan Marcus to the Inspector General of both the DOD and Department of Transportation, dated July 29, 2004. See also email response from John Farmer to 9/11 Commisison staff (dated 1/19/2004) and associated messages. See also memorandum from John Farmer and Philip Zelikow to the 9/11 Commissioners in which they state that “Team 8 has unearthed evidence strongly suggesting the possibility that a USAF officer, and possibly others at the USAF and FAA, must have known that the official story was false, yet persisted in telling it or did not correct the record.” [9] United States Code, 18 USC § 1001, http://www.law.corne...de/text/18/1001 This law is otherwise known as “making false statements”, http://en.wikipedia....alse_statements [10] The NORAD notification of Flight 175’s hijacking at 8:42 am was listed in an email from NORADJ3 to Eberhart. It was also listed in the NORAD timeline given by Eberhart to the Senate Armed Services Committee in October 2001. [11] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Thomas H. Kean, Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission Report, p 31 [12] David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission’s Incredible Tales, first published at 911Truth.org, December 13, 2005, http://www.globalres...ible-tales/1478 [13] Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes”, Vanity Fair, September 2006, 262-285 http://www.vanityfai..._Force_9-11.pdf [14] Kyle F. Hence, UQ Wire: Statement from FAA Contradicts 911 Report, Unanswered Questions Wire, August 2, 2004, http://www.scoop.co....0408/S00013.htm [15] Kevin R. Ryan, FAA Failures on 9/11: The Wall Street Lawyer and the Special Ops Hijack Coordinator, DgWithin.net, April 2011, http://digwithin.net...pecial-ops-h... [16] Matthew L. Wald, F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers’ Statements, The New York Times, May 6, 2004, http://www.nytimes.c...06CND-TAPE.html [17] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Transcript of twelfth public hearing, June 17,2004, http://govinfo.libra...mission_Hear... [18] On 1 October 1999, the Commander, USSPACECOM (USCINCSPACE), assumed command of a brand new mission area, DoD-Computer Network Defense (CND). Also effective the same date, the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) delegated to USCINCSPACE the authority to declare DoD Infocon levels. [19] 1st Fighter Wing History Excerpt, July through December 2001, p 61, http://www.scribd.co...es-Fdr-1st-F... The Infocon level was raised again during the morning of September 11, immediately after the second attack on the World Trade Center. [20] The Infocon alert system was developed in response to a coordinated hacking called Solar Sunrise that occurred in 1998 and started at Andrews Air Force Base. For more on Solar Sunrise, see Kevin Poulsen, Video: Solar Sunrise, the Best FBI-Produced Hacker Flick Ever, Wired, September 23, 2008, . http://www.wired.com...ideo-solar-sun/ [21] 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with CINCNORAD Eberhart, prepared by Geoffrey Brown,, March 1, 2004, http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00788.pdf [22] Transcript: 9/11 Commission Hearings for June 17, 2004, published at The Washington Post, June 17, 2004 [23] 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with CINCNORAD Eberhart [24] 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with CINCNORAD Eberhart [25] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Thomas H. Kean, Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission Report, p 38 [26] 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with CINCNORAD Eberhart [27] Eberhart told the Commission that the “newest NORAD time line [delivered to Commission staff on February 23,2004] was likely the result of his ‘standing order’ to correct the record of events whenever possible.” 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with CINCNORAD Eberhart [28] Matthew Everett, The Actions and Inactions of the Commander in Charge of the U.S. Air Defense Failure on 9/11, Shoestring 911, June 18, 2010, http://shoestring911...ons-of-comma... [29] See memorandum from 9/11 Commission Team 8 re: DOD Document Production, dated October 29, 2003 [30] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Transcript of twelfth public hearing, June 17,2004, http://govinfo.libra...mission_Hear... [31] Transcript of Hearing Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, August 16 and 17, 2004, http://www.gpo.gov/f...08shrg24495.htm [32] A NORAD Exercises Hijack Summary, released by the 9/11 Commission, lists 28 exercise events involving hijackings between October 1998 and September 10, 2001. This does not include the Amalgam Virgo exercises, http://www.scribd.co...-Hijack-Summary [33] Matthew Everett, NORAD Exercise a Year Before 9/11 Simulated a Pilot Trying to Crash a Plane into a New York Skyscraper–The UN Headquarters, Shoestring 911, July 27, 2010, http://shoestring911...r-before-911... [34] SEADS Concept Proposal: Amalgam Virgo 01, accessed at www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/AmalgumVirgo.pdf [35] 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with Colonel Robert Marr, prepared by Geoffrey Brown,, January 23, 2004 [36] SEADS Concept Proposal: Amalgam Virgo 01 [37] Daniel Hopsicker, Will secret deal bring old management back to Venice Airport FBO?, Mad Cow Morning News, January 5, 2010, http://www.madcowprod.com/01052010.htm [38] 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with Ken Merchant and Paul Goddard, prepared by Geoffrey Brown,, March 4, 2004 [39] 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with Ken Merchant and Paul Goddard [40] History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline, Context of ’9:05 am (and After) September 11, 2001: Flight 77 Reappears on Radar, but Flight Controllers Do Not Notice’, http://www.historyco...m=a905reappears [41] 9/11 Commission, Memorandum for the Record: Interview with Ken Merchant and Paul Goddard [42] History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline, Profile: Twin Star, http://www.historyco...ity=twin_star_1 [43] For example, see 9/11 Commission “DOD Document Request No. 18.” [44] Transcript of 9/11 Commission Hearing of May 23, 2003, http://govinfo.libra...ission_Heari... [45] Joe Dejka, Inside StratCom on September 11 Offutt exercise took real-life twist, The Omaha World-Herald, February 27, 2002 [46] Mark H. Gaffney, Why Did the World’s Most Advanced Electronics Warfare Plane Circle Over The White House on 9/11?, The Journal of 9/11 Studies, July 2007. See also the update several months later: http://www.journalof...t2007Letter.pdf [47] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Thomas H. Kean, Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission Report, Notes to Chapter 1, footnote 116 [48] Vigilant Guardian 01-02 planning document, http://www.scribd.co...r-Entire-Con... [49] Vigilant Guardian 01-02 planning document [50] Matthew Everett, ‘Real-World or Exercise’: Did the U.S. Military Mistake the 9/11 Attacks for a Training Scenario?, Shoestring 911, March 22, 2012, http://shoestring911...cise-did-us-... [51] Matthew Everett, ‘Real-World or Exercise’ [52] Matthew Everett, ‘Real-World or Exercise’ [53] Vigilant Guardian 01-02 planning document [54] Matthew Everett, ‘Let’s Get Rid of This Goddamn Sim’: How NORAD Radar Screens Displayed False Tracks All Through the 9/11 Attacks, Shoestring 911, August 12, 2010, http://shoestring911...is-goddamn-s... [55] Matthew Everett, On 9/11, the U.S. Military Was Preparing for a Simulated Nuclear War, Shoestring 911, November 23, 2011, http://shoestring911...-was-prepari... [56] Matthew Everett, The Repeatedly Delayed Responses of the Pentagon Command Center on 9/11, Shoestring 911, November 7, 2010, http://shoestring911...-responses-o... [57] Matthew Everett, ‘Let’s Get Rid of This Goddamn Sim’ [58] Matthew Everett, On 9/11, the U.S. Military Was Preparing for a Simulated Nuclear War [59] NORAD and USNORTHCOM Public Affairs, NORAD and USNORTHCOM honour 9/11 heroes, October. 15, 2012, http://www.rcaf-arc....ng.asp?id=13272 [60] See Bloomberg Businessweek profile for Ralph Eberhart. He has been a director at Triumph Group (military aviation), Jacobs Engineering (Oil & gas services), VSE Corp.(DOD equipment support), Rockwell Collins (military aviation), The Spectrum Group (Homeland security), Eid Passport (Homeland security),Standard Aero Holdings (military aviation), ObjectVideo (Homeland Security), and ICx Technologies (Homeland security).

Shock: NYTimes Shuts Environmental Desk – Global Warming Meme Going Extinct? Posted on January 14, 2013 by chris The Daily Bell It’s Death of Little Nell time again in the field of climate “science.” The New York Times – aka Pravda – has announced the closure of its Environment Desk. Rumours that the entire environment team, headed by Andy Revkin, have volunteered to be recycled into compost and spread on the lawn of the new billion dollar home Al Gore bought with the proceeds of his sale of Current TV to Middle Eastern oil interests are as yet unconfirmed. – UK Telegraph Dominant Social Theme: A tragedy of unparalleled proportions has befallen the environment. It is getting harder and harder to save the world … Free-Market Analysis: The irascible and brilliant James Delingpole has just posted an article over at the UKTelegraph announcing the closure of the New York Times‘s environmental desk. Big news, indeed … It is an article that lampoons its subject even while declaring victory. Delingpole, in fact, deserves this moment. A novelist and a determined opponent of the power elite‘s global warming propaganda, he has been at the forefront of mainstream debunkery of “warmist” nonsense. Lately, with the advent of what we call the Internet Reformation, the predigested sophism of outlets such as the New York Times has become less and less appetizing. As fewer turn to the Times for news and information, the publication has languished, and so have its fiefdoms like the Boston Globe. The continual struggle for money has taken its toll on the Times‘s resources. And now it has apparently resulted in the shutdown of a desk supporting one of the power elite’s key dominant social themes. Here’s how Delingpole puts it: It’s very, very sad and that all over the Arctic baby polar bears are weeping bitter tears of regret. A spokesman for the New York Times, quoted in the Guardian, has reaffirmed the paper’s commitment to environmental issues. “We devote a lot of resources to it, now more than ever. We have not lost any desire for environmental coverage. This is purely a structural matter.” Absolutely. It’s what newspapers always do when they’re committed to a particular field: close down the entire department responsible for covering it. But it’s still not going to stop some mean-minded cynics sniping and casting aspersions, I’ll bet. Why, some of them will be pointing out the eerie coincidence with the Met Office recent tacit admission that “global warming” isn’t anywhere near what that their dodgy models predicted it would be. And also with NASA‘s recent admission that solar variation has a much more significant on terrestrial climate than it has hitherto been prepared to acknowledge. If you didn’t know better, you’d almost get the impression that AGW theory has been so crushingly falsified that hard-headed newspaper executives, even ones at papers as painfully right-on as the New York Times, just aren’t prepared to fund its promulgation any more. What this means for similarly overstaffed environment desks at other left-wing newspapers one can scarcely begin to imagine. Might it be that we never again read a piece by Leo Hickman entitled “How Do You Tell Your Five Year Old Son That His World Is About To Explode In A Blazing Fireball Because Of Man’s Selfishness And Greed And Refusal To Change His Lifestyle?” Ah, we could continue to quote, but you’ll have to take a digital trek over to the Telegraph to read the rest. From our perspective, the news itself trumps even the cleverest of articles (and Delingpole is quite clever). We don’t want to read too much into this closing, of course. The New York Times is a newspaper and shutting down whole news desks may or may not be a reflection of larger elite priorities. In fact, we can’t see the top elites giving up on the global warming meme, as it is necessary to so many other promotions. It will generally be a good deal harder to take over the world if one cannot insist that people be subject to invasive inspections and rationing in order to combat a global warming-induced universal drought. But speaking from a purely speculative standpoint, we’ve noticed that far more resources seem to be put into the so-called war on terror these days. The French, for instance, have just started a whole new war in Mali. Is it possible that the elites have made a tactical decision to de-emphasize global warming while raising up the profile of the “war on terror”? Whether or not this is the case, the ongoing demise of the global warming (climate change) meme is significant, from our perspective. As foremost promoters of the Internet Reformation – the idea that ‘Net-based technology is playing havoc with elite plans for global domination – this announcement by the Times further confirms our argument that the elites are not a monolithic entity pre-ordained to triumph. Conclusion: The elites are a collection of (inbred) enormously wealthy human beings. They are not gods. They, too, stumble and fail. The spread of this new Reformation is making their lives a good deal more difficult, in our humble view. The ramifications, as we often point out, are immense. http://thedailybell.com/28576/Shock-NYTimes-Shuts-Environmental-Desk–Global-Warming-Meme-Going-Extinct

The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 8, No. 1/2 (Winter/Summer 2012) The Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic “democracy” in Egypt as part of the New World Order TAKIS FOTOPOULOS Abstract The aim of this article is to show that the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt (as well as in Tunisia before it) has been engineered by the transnational elite, with the help of the local elites and the US-dependent local armies, since the previous client autocratic regimes were politically bankrupt and clearly incapable of imposing the “economic restructuring” required by neoliberal globalization without the occurrence of serious social turbulence. The Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power will secure the integration of the countries concerned into the New World Order of neoliberal globalization and representative “democracy” in a new form of more sophisticated client regime based on Islamic “democratization,” whereby all the rituals and paraphernalia of “democracy” are present. The first part of this article deals with the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power and attempts to explain why it was chosen as the main instrument of the New World Order in the Middle East. The second part puts forward the case that the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power represents a new form of “democratic” client regime in the Middle East, in place of the autocratic client regimes which had been dominant in the area since the end of the Second World War. Go to Part II:Towards a New Form of a Client Regime PART I: THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD’S RISE TO POWER The “democratic” rise to power of the Islamists http://www.inclusive...hood_part1.ht ################################################################################# British Creation: Muslim Brotherhood - UK's Love Affair With Radical Islam - al Nursa Mercenary Interview - Radicalized Outside of Syria - 95 Percent Are Foreign Mercenaries In Syria Monday, December 17, 2012 By Mark Curtis Global Research, July 07, 2010 Guardian 5 July, 2010 UK’s collusion with radical Islam: Bin Laden, the Taliban, Zawahiri: Britain’s Done Business With Them All Five years after the 7/7 bombings in London see below http://www.abeldange...erhood-uks.html

Made in Britain: The toxic lead used in fuel sold to world's poorest Source: Independent A British company convicted of bribing foreign officials to maintain sales of a poisonous lead fuel additive is continuing to sell the chemical abroad to unstable countries, despite mounting evidence that it is responsible for long- term damage to human health and may be linked to violent crime. Environmental groups today called on the Government to ban Innospec Ltd, which claims to be the world's only producer of tetraethyl lead (TEL), from further exports of the substance. TEL is banned from use on Britain's roads but remains legal in six impoverished nations. The company, which is American owned but maintains much of its manufacturing in the UK, had intended to stop production and sales of TEL at the end of 2012 but has now set a new deadline of the end of this year to halt all dealings in the chemical, from which it has generated large profits. It recently told shareholders it would seek to "maximise the cash flow" from its declining sales of TEL. The revelations come amid amid renewed focus on the long-term effects of lead pollution following scientific research suggesting an extraordinary correlation between environment between deposits of the heavy metal in the environment, due to leaded fuel and paint, and levels of violent crime in cities. The US magazine Mother Jones this week highlighted studies which show an apparent link between the rise in leaded petrol use until the 1970s and a spike in violence, with a 20-year gap reflecting the time for children damaged by the metal – including negative effects on the nervous system and IQ – to reach adulthood. Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/made-in-britain-the-toxic-lead-used-in-fuel-sold-to-worlds-poorest-8449967.html =========================================== =========================================== BBC NEWS | Health | Lead linked to male infertility news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2721669.stmCached Feb 6, 2003 – Men who are exposed to high levels of lead may be at increased risk of becoming infertile, a study suggests.

Big Oil, Big Ketchup and "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez" Wednesday, 09 January 2013 l President Hugo Chavez shows reporter Greg Palast the sword of Simon Bolivar seen in portrait in background. Miraflores Palace, Caracas, 2006. (Photo: Richard Rowley) Greg Palast reviews the extraordinary career of Venezuelan President and Robin Hood figure Hugo Chavez, how he has cheated kidnap and assassination and may yet cheat death by maintaining his accomplishments. Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: It's the oil. And it's the Koch Brothers - and it's the ketchup. [As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a free download here. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, it was filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available.] Reverend Pat Robertson said, Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush's State Department. Despite Bush's providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we'll get there), Hugo remained in office, re-elected and wildly popular. But why the Bush regime's hate, hate, hate of the president of Venezuela? Reverend Pat wasn't coy about the answer: It's the oil. This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil. A really big pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela holds a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia. If we didn't kill Chavez, we'd have to do an "Iraq" on his nation. So the Reverend suggests, We don't need another $200 billion war.... It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with. Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush's attacks: Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton. So what happened to change Clinton's hugs-and-kisses policy to Bush's shoot-to-kill? Here's the answer you won't find in The New York Times: Just after Bush's inauguration in 2001, Chavez's congress voted in a new "Law of Hydrocarbons." Henceforward, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70 percent of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela. Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel. But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezuela's prior government into giving them 84 percent of the sales price, a cut to 70 percent was "no bueno." Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty - just 1 percent - on "heavy" crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they'd now have to pay 16.6 percent. Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil. On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of Fedecamaras, the nation's chamber of commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela - giving a whole new meaning to the term, "corporate takeover." US Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed "president" and the leaders of the coup d'état. Bush's White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, "democratically elected," but, he added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not by just the majority of voters." I see. With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the presidential palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona - the Pretend President from Exxon - returned his captive, Chavez, back to his desk within 48 hours. (How? Get The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, the film that expands on my reports for BBC Television. It's free for the next few days here, thanks to the generosity of donors to our foundation.) Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. It's what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela's 1% to violence. In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed down the hill to the "ranchos," the slums above Caracas, where shacks, once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes of cinder blocks and cement. "He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of course." She was disgusted by "them," the 80 percent of Venezuelans who are negro e indio (black and Indian) - and poor. Chavez, himself negro e indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela's history, shifted the oil wealth from the privileged class that called themselves "Spanish," to the dark-skinned masses. While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into Arturo Quiran, a local merchant seaman, and no big fan of Chavez. But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me, Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The 'oil boom' we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn't see it. But then came Hugo Chavez and now the poor in his neighborhood, "get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also," he said. "People who never knew how to write, now know how to sign their own papers." Chavez's Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who told me, "We are no longer an oil colony," went further - too much further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite. Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions - and unused land by the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of plantation owners squatted. Chavez's congress passed a law in 2001 requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program long promised by Venezuela's politicians at the urging of John F. Kennedy as part of his "Alliance for Progress." Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn't like that one bit. In retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin and fired all the workers. Chavez seized the Heinz plant and put the workers back on the job. Chavez didn't realize that he'd just squeezed the tomatoes of America's powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz' husband, Sen. John Kerry (now, Obama's nominee for US Secretary of State). Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn't give a damn. Chavez could survive the ketchup coup, the Exxon "presidency," even his taking back a piece of the windfall of oil company profits, but he dangerously tried the patience of America's least-forgiving billionaires: the Koch Brothers. How? Well, that's another story for another day. [Watch this space. Or read about it in the book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. Elected presidents who annoy Big Oil have ended up in exile - or coffins: Mossadegh of Iran after he nationalized BP's fields (1953), Elchibey, president of Azerbaijan, after he refused demands of BP for his Caspian fields (1993), President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador after he terminated Occidental's drilling concession (2005). "It's a chess game, Mr. Palast," Chavez told me. He was showing me a very long and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator. "And I am," Chavez said, "a very good chess player." In the film The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight bets his life on a game of chess with the Grim Reaper. Death cheats, of course, and takes the knight. No mortal can indefinitely outplay Death who, this week, Chavez must know, will checkmate the new Bolivar of Venezuela. But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster plays a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the "ranchos." The 1% of Venezuela, planning on Chavez's death to return them the power and riches they couldn't win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro. Chavez sent Maduro to meet me in my downtown New York office back in 2004. In our run-down detective digs on Second Avenue, Maduro and I traded information on assassination plots and oil policy. Greg Palast (on left) and investigations team meets with Venezuelan Vice-President Nicolas Maduro (on right), New York, 2004. (Photo: Richard Rowley) Even then, Chavez was carefully preparing for the day when Venezuela's negros e indios would lose their king - but still stay in the game. Class war on a chessboard. Even in death, I wouldn't bet against Hugo Chavez. POSTED IN FAIR USE

Jonsson material last post http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=9159&st=0&p=92262&hl=jonssonentry92262 ========= old post INFORMATION ONLY, no attack T. Folsom Posted 16 June 2004 - 11:42 PM T. Folsom aka Burton W. Folsom is connected with the Center for the American Idea that per website " ..a program of the Free Enterprise Institute."The Free Enterprise Institute receives funding from the William B. Moss foundation & the Philip R. Jonsson Foundation (PRJF). The PRJF was created by the mother and father of Philip R. Jonsson. So, who is the father of Philip R. Jonsson ??? John Erik Jonsson is the answer to the above question. When the SS prepared a document of 17 people who assisted with JFK visit- 3 names were withheld Robert Strauss, Eugene Locke and J. Erik Jonsson. Locke was mob connected and his law partner Purnell sat on the GSW board and was a director AH Belo. Locke/Purnell offices held the meeting for parade route. Of note, PD Scott has connected GSW and AH Belo employees to the assassination. As an example GSW, in a roundabout fashion provided the lawyers/managers for Ruby/Marina. GSW was a Murchison/Rockefeller investment. Jonsson was one of the founders of Texas Instruments. From the book Thy Will Be Done" when the Rockefellers wanted someting done behind the scenes they would employ Texas Instruments." Jonsson sat on the board of Equitable Life Assurance Society with David Rockefeller. Texas Instruments bigwigs Berkner and Haggerty were connected to several Rockefeller foundations. David (per bio I read) was closer to the CIA than even brother Nelson. The Rockefeller's had large $$ plans for Brazil . A few months after the assassination the president of Brazil (who JFK favored) was overthrown and Rockefeller investment in Brazil soared. One of the Asia Society's founders was David Rockefeller. The Asia Society had developed a gigantic plan for the development of SE Asia. JFK's plan to withdraw out of Vietnam would have stopped cold these plans. Readers of PROBE magazine will recall that JFK was going to investigate FreePort Sulfur ,that may have been stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax payers money (thats in 1950s-60s money). The Rockefeller family was a large part of FreePort Sulfur. Jonsson became mayor of Dallas = to continue the Earl Cabell coverup ?? THANKS NO ATTACK, just facts THANKS STEVE GAAL Edited by answerknowI, 19 June 2004 - 01:54 AM.

related Ecuador. $88 million CIA plot to assassinate President Correa before February elections By News Bulletin. Axis of Logic Commentary RT News. Axis of Logic Tuesday, Jan 8, 2013 Editor's Comment: For any who may have doubts about Washington's desire to eliminate President Rafael Correa, consider his consistent defiance of the U.S. since he was first elected President of Ecuador in 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in economics, having been educated in Ecuador, Belgium and the United States and has earned his credentials as a stalwart revolutionary, standing against US imperialism in Ecuador and all of Latin America. Among the many reasons he is so hated by the US government are: Correa's unflinching support of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias and the Bolivarian Revolution; his stand against the so-called "war on drugs" run by the US in Colombia; his robust response and condemnation of the Colombian government when it carried out the cross-border missile attack on a FARC military camp inside Ecuador on March 1, 2008; his closing of the US Manta Air Base in Ecuador in September, 2009; his $19 Billion law suit against petroleum giant Chevron for polluting the indigenous lands of Ecuador culminating earlier this year; his nationalization of Ecuador's oil and gas reserves, notably the Amistad oilfield, U.S. Noble Energy Company's Energy Development Company in 2011, placing them under the state oil company, Petroecuador, and the Electricity Corporation of Ecuador (Celec). Correa's plan to nationalize the country's banana export industry his granting of political asylum to Julian Assange in 2012 when the US tried to engineer bogus rape charges against Assange for extradition from England to Sweden and from there to the U.S. where he would have been imprisoned and possibly been executed for revealing U.S. state secrets through Wikileaks. and most recently his passing of a law to raise taxes on the bankers & financial sector before the February election to help raise the standard of living for the poor. In fact, Guillermo Lasso, an entrenched banker from Guayaquil will be the foremost opposition candidate running against him in the presidential elections next month (February 17) In addition to Correa's assault on US imperialism, President Correa was the target of a September 30, 2010 assassination attempt by a band of corrupt Ecuadoran police. There can be little doubt that those police who have now been prosecuted and imprisoned were backed by the CIA with the objective overthrowing the government. President Rafael Correa would be a fool to disregard Chilean journalist Patricio Mery's report of an $88 million CIA plot to assassinate him before next month's elections. - Les Blough, Editor Axis of Logic Ecuadorian president warns of possible 'CIA attack' before elections RT News Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has said the CIA may try to kill him prior to upcoming elections. Citing reports of a plot to “destabilize the region,” Correa said the threats were “credible,” given the history of US involvement in Latin America. Patricio Mery Bell, Chilean Journalist Correa alluded to reports by Chilean journalist Patricio Mery Bell, who allegedly passed on information to the Ecuadorian government that President Correa’s life was “under threat” by a CIA plot. “There are many cases of [the CIA] interfering” in Latin American affairs, Correa said during a campaign tour in the coastal province of Guayas. “These are credible [reports] because this has happened before in Latin America.” The head of the US diplomatic mission in Quito, Adam Nann, responded to Bell's claims by saying that Washington “would never get involved” in Ecuador's electoral process. Although Correa conceded that he believed the statements of the US ambassador, he warned that agencies such as the CIA often follow their own agenda and maintain links with organizations representing the extreme right in the countries in which they operate. Bell first voiced his concerns for the safety of President Correa three months ago when he released a report claiming the CIA sought to “destabilize” Ecuador. He said that the threat to Correa’s life would be at its height from January 15 and onwards, as Correa applies to run for another presidential term. “We will have to be three times more vigilant with President Correa,” Bell said in an interview with publication El Ciudadano. Bell maintained that although he was not a staunch supporter of Correa, it was his duty as a Latin American citizen to warn of the alleged $88-million CIA plot to destabilize the Ecuadorian government. The journalist believes that this money will be divided amongst extremist anarchist, leftist and hardline conservative groups, in the hopes of discrediting Correas. Bell claimed in his report that the main motives behind the CIA plot were the closing of the US Manta military base, hailed as a victory for Ecuadorian national sovereignty, and the granting of asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. President Correa is often described as echoing the policies of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, especially in anti-US rhetoric. The 49-year-old economist has reduced poverty and increased stability and the overall standard of living in Ecuador during his presidency, winning popularity amongst the country’s poorest as well as the educated middle class. Correa will run for reelection against six other candidates when campaigning begins on January 15. Ecuadorians will vote for the next president and vice president on Sunday, February 17. Source: RT News

Geophysical Service Inc. (often abbreviated GSI) was founded by John Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott in 1930 for the purpose of using refraction and reflection seismology to explore for petroleum deposits. It became one of the most successful seismic exploration contractors in the industry for many years. On December 6, 1941, the company was purchased by McDermott, Cecil Howard Green, J. Erik Jonsson, and H.B. Peacock. During World War II, the company produced submarine detection devices. PART OF THIS COMPANY BECAME THE BASIS FOR Texas Instruments. ================== It wouldnt be a crazy speculation that TEXAS INSTRUMENTS had ONI connections. Per unpublished Dallas Conspiracy,Jonsson was removed from SS report on parade Route meeting.

Government Health Care Kills More Brits Than Guns Kill Americans December 29, 2012 By Daniel Greenfield In 2011, 8,583 Americans were killedwith firearms. Meanwhile in the UK, the National Health Service is killing 1,000 people a month or 12,000 a year. We’re not talking natural or inevitable deaths, but preventable deaths that were caused by an overburdened and poorly managed health care system. The study found that something went wrong with the care of 13 per cent of the patients who died in hospitals. An error only led to a death in 5.2 per cent of these cases, which was the equivalent to nearly 12,000 preventable deaths in hospitals in England every year. 13 percent and 5 percent of deaths are far higher numbers than anything you will find among gun owners. And here’s what that looks like. The Office for National Statistics figures also showed that 43 people who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospitals; there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals 21,696 hospital patients and 1,100 care home residents were suffering from the blood poisoning when they died. In July, an inquest heard that a young man who died of dehydration at a leading hospital rang 999 for police because he was so thirsty. And some of this is actually Murder for Pay Figures disclosed to a newspaper shows that in some cases, hospitals have been set targets that between a third and two thirds of all the deaths should be on the LCP pathway. It was estimated that at least £30 miillion in extra money from taxpayers had been handed to hospitals over the last three years to achieve the goals LCP, which involves patients being sedated and most being denied nutrition and fluids by tube, is thought to be used in more than 100,000 cases a year. Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust revealed through a Freedom of Information request that in the financial year ending in March, the percentage of patients who died on the pathway was “43% against a target of 35%”. Over the year it received £308,000 for achieving “goals involving the Liverpool Care Pathway”. Perhaps instead of calling for gun control, we should be calling for gov health control before this nightmare comes here.

Global News Blog CS MONITOR Former FBI Agent Robert Levinson still missing in Iran Today marks the third anniversary of the disappearance of former FBI agent Robert Levinson on Kish Island in Iran. By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / March 9, 2010 US Daniel Levinson shows a picture of his father, former FBI agent Robert Levinson, during a press conference with his mother Christine at the Swiss embassy in Tehran, Iran, 22 December 2007. Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images/ Boston The US State Department marked the third anniversary of the disappearance of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent turned private investigator, from Kish Island in Iran by appealing to the authorities in Tehran to cooperate with the efforts of the US and his wife, Christine, to locate him. Recent posts "In December 2007, Mrs. Levinson first met with Iranian officials who expressed a willingness to share information about their investigation into her husband’s disappearance with the family," the State Department said in a press release. "We ask that Iran stand behind its commitment to provide full details about their authorities’ investigation." The State Department also marked the anniversary by calling on "Iran to resolve the cases of the five American citizens who are unjustly detained in Iran: <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/1109/whats-behind-irans-espionage-charge-against-us-hikers" target="_self">Joshua Fattal, Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, Kian Tajbakhsh, and Reza Taghavi." Mr. Levinson, who served 27 years as an FBI agent and also worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration, disappeared from Kish Island, a free trade zone and smuggling center where Iran's typically strict visa requirements are not enforced, while investigating a cigarette smuggling ring for a private client. He has seven children and two grandchildren. The US has said in the past that despite promises of full cooperation from Iran that it believes the country has information about Levinson's disappearance that it isn't sharing. "Over the past three years, my family has desperately has desperately reached out to you as much as possible," his daughter, Sarah, wrote in an open letter to the US and Iranian governments on a website the family maintains about Levinson's disappearance. "Unfortunately, none of our messages have brought us any closer to finding our father and bringing him home." The family in the past has said Levinson expected to spend only a day on Kish Island. Shortly after his disappearance, Iran's state-run Press TV carried an article that said Levinson had been taken into Iranian custody on March 9, 2007, and predicted he would be freed within a "matter of days." In a statement on the family website this past December, Mrs. Levinson said she and her relatives "respectfully ask for clarification" about the Press TV article and called for Iranian government help in securing his return home as a "humanitarian gesture." In 2007, the Financial Times quoted Dawud Salahuddin – a man wanted by the FBI and connected to Press TV – as saying he'd shared a hotel room with Levinson on March 8. Mr. Salahuddin said he was detained by Iranian authorities himself that day and upon his release the next day Levinson was gone. "I don't think he is missing, but don't want to point my finger at anyone," he said. "Some people know exactly where he is ... he came only to see me." In September 2009, the Times of London reported that Salahuddin had worked for three years as a senior editor at Press TV under the alias Hassan Abdulrahman. The paper also said that he was an African-American who was originally called David Belfield before converting to Islam in 1969 and changing his name to Dawud Salahuddin. Abdulrahman, as he's now called, is wanted by the FBI for the murder of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former aide to the Shah who was murdered at his home in Maryland in 1980. The paper, which said it reached Abdulrahman by telephone at his home in Iran, said he admitted to the murder and showed no remorse. “I don’t regret that, no,” he said.

Studies have also suggested that BPA is linked to other health hazards including increased cancer incidence and premature puberty in children (1). Unfortunately, because of its usefulness, BPA remains as a component in plastic manufacturing. This is especially true in third world countries, where the use of BPA makes plastics production fast and efficient. Thankfully, measures are being taken to curb BPA use. Canada has recently named it a “toxic chemical” and does not allow its use in manufacturing (1). Although its use is being mediated, the vigilant consumer would do well to take heed of labels and ingredient lists to make sure that they are not accidentally consuming this detrimental compound. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Scientist: Top Selling Weed Killer – Monsanto’s Roundup – Linked to Infertility http://beforeitsnews.com/health/2013/01/scientist-top-selling-weed-killer-monsantos-roundup-linked-to-infertility-2465144.html Source: Lisa Garber, Natural Society Monsanto has made a pretty penny over the last several decades thanks to its top-selling herbicide, Roundup, and cash crops genetically modified to withstand heavy doses of the chemical, such as Roundup Ready corn, soy, and cotton. Meanwhile, Roundup’s key ingredient glyphosate has ravaged the earth, our food chain, and our bodies, and is even causing infertility among the masses. Its effects haven’t gone unnoticed. Purdue University professor emeritus Dr. Don Huber addressed the dangers of glyphosate to American and European officials in 2011. His concerns centered on an electron microscopic pathogen which “appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings.” In a letter to US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Huber added that preliminary experiments have reproduced the pathogen’s link to miscarriages. Vilsack purportedly received Huber’s letter and, despite the available mountain of evidence just one click away, encouraged of Huber “submission of any data or studies in support of his concerns.” Apparently, none of the scientific, published evidence of glyphosate-induced infertility, sterility, birth defects, Parkinson’s, obesity, superweeds, and water pollution were convincing enough to keep the USDA from snuggling down next to Monsanto on a bed of dirty money just 11 days later. Despite Huber’s explicit pleas to delay deregulation of Roundup Ready crops—which would be, in his words, “a calamity”—the USDA went through with deregulation. This was neither the first nor would it be the last hand members of the government would join with dirty industries to the detriment of their own citizenry. Reuters reports on the myriad concerns raised by numerous members of the scientific and medical community, yet it is only in 2015 that the Environmental Protection Agency promises results for their research into the possible dangers of glyphosate and what, if any, role government should play in it. Seeing as the government has been front and center in support of Monsanto’s environmentally disastrous antics, we hope to see matched enthusiasm in remedial measures for the environment and its people.

PAGE 5 of article ========================== The inherent advantage of bigger banks – the permanent, ongoing bailout they are still receiving from the government – has led to a host of gruesome consequences. All the big banks have paid back their TARP loans, while more than 300 smaller firms are still struggling to repay their bailout debts. Even worse, the big banks, instead of breaking down into manageable parts and becoming more efficient, have grown even bigger and more unmanageable, making the economy far more concentrated and dangerous than it was before. America's six largest banks – Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley – now have a combined 14,420 subsidiaries, making them so big as to be effectively beyond regulation. A recent study by the Kansas City Fed found that it would take 70,000 examiners to inspect such trillion-dollar banks with the same level of attention normally given to a community bank. "The complexity is so overwhelming that no regulator can follow it well enough to regulate the way we need to," says Sen. Brown, who is drafting a bill to break up the megabanks. Worst of all, the Implicit Guarantee has led to a dangerous shift in banking behavior. With an apparently endless stream of free or almost-free money available to banks – coupled with a well-founded feeling among bankers that the government will back them up if anything goes wrong – banks have made a dramatic move into riskier and more speculative investments, including everything from high-risk corporate bonds to mortgage­backed securities to payday loans, the sleaziest and most disreputable end of the financial system. In 2011, banks increased their investments in junk-rated companies by 74 percent, and began systematically easing their lending standards in search of more high-yield customers to lend to. This is a virtual repeat of the financial crisis, in which a wave of greed caused bankers to recklessly chase yield everywhere, to the point where lowering lending standards became the norm. Now the government, with its Implicit Guarantee, is causing exactly the same behavior – meaning the bailouts have brought us right back to where we started. "Government intervention," says Klaus Schaeck, an expert on bailouts who has served as a World Bank consultant, "has definitely resulted in increased risk." And while the economy still mostly sucks overall, there's never been a better time to be a Too Big to Fail bank. Wells Fargo reported a third-quarter profit of nearly $5 billion last year, while JP Morgan Chase pocketed $5.3 billion – roughly double what both banks earned in the third quarter of 2006, at the height of the mortgage bubble. As the driver of their success, both banks cite strong performance in – you guessed it – the mortgage market. So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now. Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success. This article is from the January 17th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone. Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104#ixzz2Hb4iCmsD Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Too some the tale of USA Latin American relations is one of beneficence ..... I do not. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://bsnews.info/_Propaganda.html find Thierry Meyssan credible. BS news IMHO is more reliable than MSM. ########### Nicolas Sarkozy relies above all on 4 men : Claude Guéant, secretary general of the Elysée Palace, the former right hand of Charles Pasqua. ===== Pasqua was both a Corsican bandit and a former resistant. He married the daughter of a Canadian bootlegger who made fortune during the prohibition and he directed the Ricard company who, after commercialising absinthe, a forbidden alcohol, won respectability by converting to the sales of another alcohol based on liquorice (anisette). The company continued however to serve as a cover for all sorts of traffics connected to the New York Italian American family of the Genovese (and) that of Lucky Luciano. It is therefore not surprising that Pasqua called on Étienne Léandri (Ambassador of Luciano) to recruit the hands that constituted the Gaullist militia. ===== 1947 In its first year of existence, the CIA continues U.S. intelligence community's anti-communist drive. Agency operatives help the Mafia seize total power in Sicily and it sends money to heroin-smuggling Corsican mobsters in Marseille to assist in their battle with Communist unions for control of the city's docks. By 1951, Luciano and the Corsicans have pooled their resources, giving rise to the notorious 'French Connection' which would dominate the world heroin trade until the early 1970s. The CIA also recruits members of organized crime gangs in Japan to help ensure that the country stays in the non-communist world. Several years later, the Japanese Yakuza emerges as a major source of methamphetamine in Hawaii. ###################### beneficence .....drink deep the kool-aid Bolivia, Ecuador Accuse U.S. Of CIA Destabilization Plots Bolivia slams US over 'irrefutable evidence' of meddling http://www.globalresearch.ca/bolivia-ecuador-accuse-u-s-of-destabilization-plots/5318120

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come http://www.rollingst...ailout-20130104 Read more: http://www.rollingst...4#ixzz2HOsYkpKL By Matt Taibbi January 4, 2013 4:25 PM ET Illustration by Victor Juhasz It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right? Wrong. It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn. How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn't the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. "It is," says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, "the ultimate bait-and-switch." The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it. THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT Today what few remember about the bailouts is that we had to approve them. It wasn't like Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on). Much as with a declaration of war, a similarly extreme and expensive commitment of public resources, Paulson needed at least a film of congressional approval. And much like the Iraq War resolution, which was only secured after George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City, the bailouts were pushed through Congress with a series of threats and promises that ranged from the merely ridiculous to the outright deceptive. At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill – at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008 – Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy would collapse "within 24 hours." To be fair, Paulson started out by trying to tell the truth in his own ham-headed, narcissistic way. His first TARP proposal was a three-page absurdity pulled straight from a Beavis and Butt-Head episode – it was basically Paulson saying, "Can you, like, give me some money?" Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. "We need $700 billion," they told Brown, "and we need it in three days." What's more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without review "by any court of law or any administrative agency." The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it. For an all-too-rare moment during the Bush administration, something resembling sanity prevailed in Washington. So Paulson came up with a more convincing lie. On paper, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was simple: Treasury would buy $700 billion of troubled mortgages from the banks and then modify them to help struggling homeowners. Section 109 of the act, in fact, specifically empowered the Treasury secretary to "facilitate loan modifications to prevent avoidable foreclosures." With that promise on the table, wary Democrats finally approved the bailout on October 3rd, 2008. "That provision," says Barofsky, "is what got the bill passed." But within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP. Congress was furious. "We've been lied to," fumed Rep. David Scott, a Democrat from Georgia. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, raged at transparently douchey TARP administrator (and Goldman banker) Neel Kashkari, calling him a "chump" for the banks. And the anger was bipartisan: Republican senators David Vitter of Louisiana and James Inhofe of Oklahoma were so mad about the unilateral changes and lack of oversight that they sponsored a bill in January 2009 to cancel the remaining $350 billion of TARP. So what did bailout officials do? They put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it past Congress a second time. That process began almost exactly four years ago – on January 12th and 15th, 2009 – when Larry Summers, the senior economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a pair of letters to Congress. The pudgy, stubby­fingered former World Bank economist, who had been forced out as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science, begged legislators to reject Vitter's bill and leave TARP alone. In the letters, Summers laid out a five-point plan in which the bailout was pitched as a kind of giant populist program to help ordinary Americans. Obama, Summers vowed, would use the money to stimulate bank lending to put people back to work. He even went so far as to say that banks would be denied funding unless they agreed to "increase lending above baseline levels." He promised that "tough and transparent conditions" would be imposed on bailout recipients, who would not be allowed to use bailout funds toward "enriching shareholders or executives." As in the original TARP bill, he pledged that bailout money would be used to aid homeowners in foreclosure. And lastly, he promised that the bailouts would be temporary – with a "plan for exit of government intervention" implemented "as quickly as possible." The reassurances worked. Once again, TARP survived in Congress – and once again, the bailouts were greenlighted with the aid of Democrats who fell for the old "it'll help ordinary people" sales pitch. "I feel like they've given me a lot of commitment on the housing front," explained Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat from Alaska. But in the end, almost nothing Summers promised actually materialized. A small slice of TARP was earmarked for foreclosure relief, but the resultant aid programs for homeowners turned out to be riddled with problems, for the perfectly logical reason that none of the bailout's architects gave a xxxx about them. They were drawn up practically overnight and rushed out the door for purely political reasons – to trick Congress into handing over tons of instant cash for Wall Street, with no strings attached. "Without those assurances, the level of opposition would have remained the same," says Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a leading progressive who voted against TARP. The promise of housing aid, in particular, turned out to be a "paper tiger." (SEE SITE FOR MORE)

Oh yes the ever reliable Voltairenet site. (SOMETIMES YES SOMETIMES NO) A few problems with this story: Why has news of this only come out 3 1/2 years after the fact? The notion that Chavez would have kept silent because of payoffs from the government trying to kill him and overthrow his 'revolution' does not make any sense. (FEAR) The reported arsenal was way too extensive to have been part of simple assassination attempt but way too small to have been part of a coup. (LITTLE EXTRA always bring in some $$) Why is such an important story being reported by a mid-level official via her Twitter account? // END Colby (GEE DOSENT REFLECT WELL ON WESTERN POWERS, ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL RULES OF ALL ..... CYA) Many of the details reported here differ from those reported by more reputable sites // COLBY (GEE WASHPO/NYT ...Oswald acted alone .... if you wanta run with that go ahead) ################################################# Operation Sarkozy : how the CIA placed one of its agents at the presidency of the French Republic By Thierry Meyssan Global Research, September 04, 2008 Réseau Voltaire 4 September 2008 ======================================================= One should judge Nicolas Sarkozy according to his actions, and not according to his personality. Yet when his doings surprise even his own constituents, it is legitimate to take a detailed look at his biography and question the bonds that brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan has decided to write the truth about the French Republic’s president background. All the information included in this article is provable, except for two assertions signalled by the author who alone takes full responsibility. Tired of the overextended presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the French elected Nicolas Sarkozy counting on his energy to revitalize their country. They were hoping for a break with years of no-change and ideologies of the past. What they got instead was a break with the very principles which founded the French nation, and have been shocked by this “hyper-president”, seizing every day a new dossier, attracting towards him the right and the left wing, and tearing apart all points of reference to the point of creating a total confusion. Like children who have just made a boo-boo, the French are too busy trying to find excuses for themselves to admit the magnitude of the damages and of their naiveté, and they refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy really is, that they realize they should have known since a long time who he was. One must say the man has talents. Like a magician he tricked them. By offering them the spectacle of his private life and posing in People’s magazines, he got them to forget his political history. The aim of this article must be clearly understood. It is not to reproach M. Sarkozy his family, his friends or his professional ties, but the fact of having hidden those ties from the French who believed, wrongly, they were electing a free man. To understand how a man whom all agree today to view as an agent of the United States and of Israel was able to become the head of the Gaullist party and the president of the French Republic, we must go back in time, very very far back. We must make a long digression in the course of which we will present the protagonists who are today taking their revenge. The family secrets At the end of Second World War, the United States secret services relied on Italo-US godfather, Lucky Luciano, to control the security of American ports and prepare their disembarking in Sicily. The main contacts of Luciano — held at that time at a New York luxury prison — to the US intelligence services went notably through Frank Wisner, Sr. Later, when the “godfather” was liberated and chose to exile in Italy, they operated through his Corsican “Ambassador”, Étienne Léandri. In 1958, worried about a possible victory of the FLN in Algeria which could open the way to Soviet influence in Northern Africa, the United States decided to provoke a military coup d’Etat in France. The operation was jointly organized by the Cia’s Direction of Planning – theoretically lead by Frank Wisner, Sr. – and by NATO. But Wisner had already become senile by that time and it was his successor, Allan Dulles, who supervised the coup. Out of Algeria, French generals organized a Public Salvation Committee which pressured the Parisian civilian authorities to vote full powers to General de Gaulle without having had to use force. Yet, Charles de Gaulle was not the pawn the Anglo-Saxons had believed they could manipulate. In a first phase, he attempted to deal with the colonial contradiction by granting to the overseas territories a large autonomy within the French Union. But it was already too late to save the French empire; the colonized people didn’t believe any longer in the promises of the Metropolitan France and demanded their independence. After victorious but fierce repression against those fighting for independence, de Gaulle decided to face reality, and in a rare show of political wisdom, he granted independence to each colony. This turn about was perceived by most of those who brought him to power as a betrayal. The CIA and NATO supported then all kinds of plots to eliminate him, among which a missed coup and some 40 attempts to murder him. However, certain of his followers approved of his political evolution. Around Charles Pasqua, they created the SAC (Civic action services), a militia to protect him. Pasqua was both a Corsican bandit and a former resistant. He married the daughter of a Canadian bootlegger who made fortune during the prohibition and he directed the Ricard company who, after commercialising absinthe, a forbidden alcohol, won respectability by converting to the sales of another alcohol based on liquorice (anisette). The company continued however to serve as a cover for all sorts of traffics connected to the New York Italian American family of the Genovese (and) that of Lucky Luciano. It is therefore not surprising that Pasqua called on Étienne Léandri (Ambassador of Luciano) to recruit the hands that constituted the Gaullist militia. A third man played an important role in the formation of the SAC, the former body guard of de Gaulle, Achille Peretti, also a Corsican. Thus protected, de Gaulle designs an audacious national independence policy. Even though asserting his belonging to the Atlantic camp, he questions the Anglo-Saxon leadership. He opposes the entry of the United Kingdom into the European common market (1961 and 1967); refuses the deployment of UN helmets into Congo (1961); encourages the Latin American states to become free of US imperialism (speech of Mexico, 1964); kicks NATO out France and withdraws from the Atlantic Alliance’s integrated command (1966); he condemns Israeli expansionism during the Six Day war (1967); supports independence of Quebec (Speech of Montreal 1967), etc. Simultaneously, de Gaulle consolidated the power of France by endowing it with a military industrial-complex including a nuclear deterrent and guarantying its energy provisions. He conveniently distanced the encumbering Corsicans of his entourage by entrusting them with foreign missions. Thus, Étienne Léandri became a leader of the ELF group (today Total), while Charles Pasqua the trusted man of the Francophone heads of State in Africa. Conscious that he could not defy the Anglo-Saxons on all fronts at the same time, De Gaulle allied himself to the Rothschild family, choosing as Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, who was the fondé de pouvoir of the bank. The two men constituted an efficient tandem, the political audacity of the first never losing sight of the economic realism of the second. When De Gaulle resigned in 1969, Georges Pompidou succeeded him briefly at the Presidency before being taken out by a cancer. The historical Gaullists did not admit his leadership, however, and worried about his anglophile proclivities. They howled treason when Pompidou, supported by the General Secretary of the Élysée, Edouard Balladur, had “perfidious Albion” join the European Common Market. The making of Nicolas Sarkozy That decorum having been put into place, we can now return to our main character, Nicolas Sarkozy. Born in 1955 he is son to a Hungarian catholic nobleman, Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bosca, who sought refuge in France after fleeing the Red Army, and to Andree Mallah, a Jewish commoner from Thessalonica. After having three children (Guillaume, Nicolas and François), the couple divorced. Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bocsa remarried with an aristocrat, Christine de Ganay, with whom he had two children (Pierre Olivier and Caroline). Nicolas will not be raised by his own parents alone, but will go back and forth within this recomposed family. His mother became the secretary of De Gaulle’s bodyguard, Achille Peretti. The latter, after founding the SAC, pursued a brilliant political career. He was elected Deputy and Mayor of Neuilly sur Seine, the richest residential suburb of the capital, and later President of the National Assembly.
 Unfortunately, in 1972, Achille Peretti comes under grave accusations. In the United States, Time Magazine reveals the existence of a secret criminal organization « the Corsican Union » which controls a large part of the drug trade between Europe and America, the famous « French connection » which Hollywood popularized on the large screen. Based on parliamentary auditions and on his own investigations, Time names the name of a mafia boss, Jean Venturi, arrested a few years earlier in Canada, who is none other than Charles Pasqua’s commercial delegate at the liquor society Ricard. The names of several families headed by the “Corsican Union” are cited, among which that of the Peretti. Achille denies, but is forced to renounce to the presidency of the National Assembly, and barely escapes a “suicide”… In 1977, Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bocsa separates from his second wise, Christine de Ganay, who then gets together with the N°2 of the US State Department central administration. She marries him and settles in America with him. The world being very small, as everyone knows, her husband is none other than Frank Wisner, Jr, son of the previous. Junior’s responsibilities at the CIA are unknown, but it is clear that he plays an important role. Nicolas, who remains close to his mother in law, his half brother and his half sister, begins to turn towards the United States where he “benefits” from training programs of the State Department. During that same period, Nicolas Sarkozy adheres to the Gaullist party coming into frequent contact with Charles Pasqua, who was not only a national leader then, but also the head of the party’s Haut de Seine department section. Having finished Law School in 1982 and joined the Barr association, Nicolas Sarkozy married the niece of Achille Peretti. His best man was Charles Pasqua. As a lawyer, Sarkozy defended the interests of his mentors Corsican friends. He bought a property on the Island of Beauty, in Vico, and went as far as envisaging to make his name more “Corsican” by replacing the “y” by an “i”: Sarkozi. The next year, he was elected Mayor of Neuilly sur Seine in replacement of his uncle in law, Achille Peretti, thundered by a heart attack. However, it was not long before Nicolas Sarkozy betrayed his wife, and since 1984, he had a secret liaison with Cecilia, the wife of the most famous entertainer of French television at that time, Jacques Martin, whom he had met while celebrating their marriage, a function he exerted being mayor of Neuilly. That double life lasted five years, before the lovers decided to quit their respective couples in order to build a new home. In 1992, Nicolas was best man in the marriage of Jacques Chirac’s daughter, Claude, with an editorialist of Le Figaro. He couldn’t refrain himself from seducing Claude and having a short liaison with her, while officially living with Cecilia. The cuckold husband committed suicide by absorbing drugs. The break was brutal and without pardon between the Chirac’s and Nicolas Sarkozy. In 1993, the left lost the legislative elections. President François Mitterrand refused to resign and entered into cohabitation with a right wing Prime Minister. Jacques Chirac who ambitioned the presidency, and was thinking at that point of constituting, with Edoaurd Balladur, a couple comparable to that of De Gaulle and Pompidou, refused to be Prime minister and left his post to his “30 year long friend”, Edouard Balladur. In spite of his sulphurous past, Charles Pasqua became Interior Minister. While keeping high hand over Moroccan marijuana trade, he took advantage of his situation to legalize his other activities taking control of casinos, gambling and horse races in francophone Africa. He wove ties with Saudi Arabia and Israel and became an officer of honour to the Mossad. Nicolas Sarkozy on his part, became minister of Budget and spokesman for the government. In Washington, Frank Wisner, Jr. became the successor of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the Political Planning department of the Department of Defense. Nobody noticed at that time the ties to the spokesman of the French government. It is then that tensions similar to those which rocked the Gaullist party 30 years earlier, broke out between the historical Gaullists and the financial right wing, incarnated by Balladur. The new element was that Charles Pasqua and along with him, the young Nicolas Sarkozy, betray Jacques Chirac in order to join the Rothschild current. Mayhem breaks out. The conflict will reach a climax in 1995 when Edouard Balladur ran for president, against his former friend, Jacques Chirac, and was beaten. Foremost, following instructions from London and Washington, the Balladur government opened negotiations for membership status to the European Union and NATO to States of Central and Eastern Europe who had freed from Soviet control. Havoc reigns then in the Gaullist party where the friends of yesterday are ready to kill themselves today. To be able to finance his electoral campaign, Edouard Balladur attempts to grab the secret slush fund of the Gaullist party, hidden in the double deckered accounting of the books of the oil group ELF. The ride through the desert Through out his first mandate, Jacques Chirac keeps Nicolas Sarkozy at arms distance. The man was discrete during his ride through the desert. Discretely, however, he continued to weave ties to the financial circles. In 1996, finally succeeding to bring to conclusion an endless divorce procedure, Nicolas Sarkozy marries Cecilia. Two billionaires were their best men, Martin Bouygues and Bernard Arnaud (the richest man of the country). The final act Way before the Iraqi crisis, Frank Wisner Jr. and his colleagues at the CIA plan the destruction of the Gaullist current and the coming to power of Nicolas Sarkozy. They move in three phases: first, the elimination of the leadership of the Gaullist party and the take over of the party apparatus, then the elimination of his main right wing rival and the securing the nomination to the presidential election for the Gaullist party; finally, the elimination of any serious challenger on the left to make sure that Nicolas would win the presidential election. During years, posthumous revelations by a real estate dealer kept the media on their toes. Before dying from a terminal disease, for reasons which remain unknown, he decided to video tape his confessions and for reasons which are even more obscure, the “cassette” landed in the hands of a Socialist party leader, Dominique Strauss Kahn, who addressed it indirectly to the media. While the confessions of the real estate dealer did not lead to any juridical sanctions, they opened up the Pandora’s Box. The main victim of the series of scandals was Prime Minister Alain Juppé. To protect Chirac, he assumed alone all the penal sanctions. The removal of Juppé from the front lodges opened the way for the take by Sarkozy of the leadership of the Gaullist party. Sarkozy exploited then his position to force Jacques Chirac to take him into the government once again, in spite of their reciprocal hatred. In the end, he became Interior Minister. Mistake ! This post gave him control over the prefects and the internal intelligence apparatus which he used to gain positions of power over the large administrations. He dealt also with Corsican affairs. Prefect Claude Érignac was murdered. Even though nobody claimed it, the murder was immediately interpreted as a challenge by the independentists to the Republic. Following a long hunt, the police managed to arrest a fleeing suspect, Yvan Colonna, son of a Socialist deputy. Caring little about the presumption of innocence, Nicolas Sarkozy announced the arrest, accusing the suspect of being the assassin. The news is too important, a mere two days away from the referendum the minister has organized in Corsica to modify the status of the island. Be as it may, the electors reject the Sarkozy project, who, according to some, favoured mafia interests. While Yvan Colonna was ultimately declared guilty, he always claimed his innocence and no material proof was ever found against him. Strangely, the man preferred to remain totally silent rather than reveal what he actually knew. We reveal here that prefect Érignac was not directly killed by the nationalists, but by a paid killer, immediately exfiltrated towards Angola where he was hired to the security of the Elf group. The mobile of the crime was precisely connected to the previous functions of Érignac, responsible for the African networks at Pasqua’s cooperation ministry. As for Yvan Colonna, he is a personal friend of Nicolas Sarkozy since decades and their children have entertained social relations. A new scandal broke out then: phoney computer listings were circulating falsely accusing several personalities of hiding bank accounts in Luxembourg, at Clearstream. Among the defamed personalities: Nicolas Sarkozy, who filed a suit insinuating that he suspected his right wing rival to the presidency, Dominique de Villepin, to have organized this machination. Sarkozy didn’t hide his intention either to throw him in jail. In reality, the false listings were put in circulation by members of the French American Foundation, of which John Negroponte was the president and Frank Wisner Jr, the administrator. What the judges ignored and which we reveal here is that the listings were fabricated in London by a common office of the CIA and of MI6, Hakluyt and co, of which Frank Wisner is also an administrator. Villepin denied the accusations, but was indicted, assigned to residence and, de facto, eliminated from political life temporarily. The road is thus free on the right wing for Nicolas Sarkozy. It remained for the opposition candidacies to be neutralized. The membership fees to the Socialist party were reduced to a symbolic level in order to attract new activists. Suddenly, thousands of youth take membership cards. Among them, there were at least 10 000 new members who are in reality militants from the “Lambertist” Trotskyite party, (named after its founder Pierre Lambert). This small extreme left group historically served the CIA against the Stalinist communists during the cold war (it is the equivalent of the Social democrats/USA of Max Schatchman, who trained the US neo-conservatives). It is not the first time the “Lambertists” infiltrate the Socialist party. They introduced there two notorious CIA agents : Lionel Jospin (who became Prime minister) and Jean Christophe Cambadelis, the main advisor to Dominique Strauss Kahn. Primaries were organized inside the Socialist party to designate its candidate to the presidential election. Two personalities were competing: Laurent Fabius and Ségolène Royal. Only the first was a danger for Sarkozy. Dominique Strauss Kahn came into the race with the mission to eliminate Fabius at the last moment. Something he did with the help of the votes of the infiltrated “lambertists”, who voted not for him but for Royal. The operation is possible because Strauss Kahn is since long on the pay roll of the United States. Frenchmen ignore that he teaches at Stanford, where he was hired by the prévot Dean of the University, Condoleeza Rice. From the beginning of his term, Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleeza Rice will thank Strauss Kahn by having him elected to the leadership of the International Monetary fund. First days at the Élysée The evening of the second round of the presidential election, when polling agencies announced his probable victory, Nicolas Sarkozy gave a short speech to the nation from his general campaign quarters. Then, contrary to all custom, he didn’t celebrate with the militants of his party, but went to the Fouquet’s. The famous brasserie at the Champs-Élysées, formerly the place of rendez-vous of the “Corsican union” is today the property of Casino magnate, Dominique Desseigne. It was lent to the elected president to receive his friends and main campaign donors. Some hundred guests crowded there, the richest men of France hobnobbing with the casino bosses. The elected president then offered himself some days of well merited rest. Transported to Malta by a private Falcon 900, he relaxed on the Paloma, a 65 m yacht of his friend Vincent Bollore, a billionaire trained at the Rothschild bank.
 Finally, Nicolas Sarkozy was inaugurated president of the French Republic. The first decree he signed was not to enact an amnesty, but to authorize the casinos of his friends Desseigne and Partouche to multiply the money machines. He composed his working team and his government. Without surprise, one finds there an ominous casino owner (the minister of Youth and Sports) and the lobbyist of the casinos of his friend Desseigne (who became a spokesman of the “Gaullist party”.) Nicolas Sarkozy relies above all on 4 men : Claude Guéant, secretary general of the Elysée Palace, the former right hand of Charles Pasqua. François Pérol, under-secretary general of the Elysée, an associate manager of the Rothschild bank. Jean-David Lévitte, diplomatic advisor. Son of the former director of the Jewish Agency. French ambassador to the UN, he was removed by Chirac who judged him too close to George Bush. Alain Bauer, the man of the shadows. His name does not appear in the directories. He is in charge of the secret services. Former Grand Master of the French Great Orient (the most important Masonic organization in France) and former N°2 of the United States National Security Agency in Europe. Frank Wisner Jr. who in the meantime was named “special envoy” to President Bush for the independence of Kosovo, insisted that Bernard Kouchner be named minister of Foreign affairs with a double mission priority: the independence of Kosovo and the elimination of France’s Arab policy. Kouchner started his career by participating in the creation of a humanitarian NGO. Thanks to financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy, he took part in operations of Zbigniew Brzezinski in Afghanistan against the soviets, along sides with Oussama Ben Laden and the Karzai brothers. One finds him again in the 90’s working with Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia Herzegovina. From 1999 to 2001 he was high representatives of the UN to Kosovo. Under the rule of the youngest brother of president Hamid Karzaï, Afghanistan became the first world producer of opium poppies transformed in heroin locally and transported by the US Air force to Camp Bondsteed (Kosovo). There, the men of Hacim Thaci take charge of the drug and distribute it mainly in Europe and accessorily in the United States. The benefits are used to finance the illegal operations of the CIA. Karzai and Thaci are longstanding personal friends of Bernard Kouchner who undoubtedly ignores their criminal activities in spite of all the international reports which have been dedicated to them. To complete his government, Nicolas Sarkozy named Christine Lagarde, minister of the Economy and Finances. All her career was made in the United States where she directed the prestigious law firm Baker and McKenzie. At the Center for international and strategic studies of Dick Cheney, she copresided with Zbigniew Brzezinski a working group which supervised the privatisations in Poland. She organized also an intense lobbying effort for Lockheed Martin against French airplane producer Dassault. New escapade during the summer. Nicolas, Cecilia, their common mistress and their children went on holidays to the United States at Wolfeboro, not far from the property of President Bush. The bill was paid this time by Robert F. Agostinelli, an Italian-New Yorker investment banker, Zionist and a pure brand of neo-conservative who writes in Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee. The success of Nicolas had impact on his half brother, Pierre Olivier. Under the American name of Oliver, he was named by Frank Carlucci (formerly N°2 of the CIA after having been recruited by Frank Wisner, Sr.) Director of the new investment fund of the Carlyle Group (the common investment firm of the Bush family and Ben Laden). Having become the 5th largest business dealer in the world, he handles the main assets of the sovereign funds of Kuwait and Singapore. The popularity of the President is in a free fall in the polls. One of his communications advisors, Jacques Seguela (also consultant for political communication at the NED where he is in charge of diverse CIA operations in Western Europe and Latin America), proposes to detract the public’s attention with new “people stories”. The announcement of the divorce with Cecilia was publicised by Libération, the paper of his friend Edouard de Rothschild, to cover up the slogans of demonstrators in a day of general strike. Stronger even, the communications agent organized a meeting between the president and the former top model, Carla Bruni. Some days later, her liaison with the president became official and the media hammering covered up once again political criticism. Some weeks later, the third marriage of Nicolas occurred. This time, he chose as best men Mathilde Agostinelle (the wife of Robert) and Nicolas Bazire, a former cabinet director of Edouard Balladur who became assistant manager at the Rothschilds. When will the French use their eyes to see what they have to do ? References [1] Quand le stay-behind portait De Gaulle au pouvoir, par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 27 août 2001 [2] Quand le stay-behind voulait remplacer De Gaulle, par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 10 septembre 2001 [3] L’Énigme Pasqua, par Thierry Meyssan, Golias ed, 2000. [4] Les requins. Un réseau au cœur des affaires, par Julien Caumer, Flammarion, 1999. [5] Un relais des États-Unis en France : la French American Foundation , par Pierre Hillard, Réseau Voltaire, 19 avril 2007. [6] Les New York Intellectuals et l’invention du néo-conservatisme, par Denis Boneau, Réseau Voltaire, 26 novembre 2004. [7] Éminences grises, Roger Faligot et Rémi Kauffer, Fayard, 1992 ; « The Origin of CIA Financing of AFL Programs » in Covert Action Quaterly, n° 76, 1999. [8] Dominique Strauss-Kahn, l’homme de « Condi » au FMI, par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 5 octobre 2007. [9] Alain Bauer, de la SAIC au GOdF, Note d’information du Réseau Voltaire, 1er octobre 2000. [10] Le gouvernement kosovar et le crime organisé, par Jürgen Roth, Horizons et débats, 8 avril 2008. [11] Avec Christine Lagarde, l’industrie US entre au gouvernement français, Réseau Voltaire, 22 juin 2005. [12] L’honorable Frank Carlucci, par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 11 février 2004. [13] Les liens financiers occultes des Bush et des Ben Laden et Le Carlyle Group, une affaire d’initiés, Réseau Voltaire, 16 octobre 2001 et 9 février 2004. The information contained in this article was presented by Thierry Meyssan during the final plenary session of the Eurasian Media Forum (Kazakhstan, April 25, 2008) dealing with “Glamour in politics and the politics of glamour”. The large attention received by this speech lead the author to write this article for publication in Profile, currently the main Russian news magazine. Several non-authorized versions and translations of this piece were circulated while the Voltaire Network’s website was down. Please consider this article as the only valid one. Article in french: http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9631

COINCIDENCE ?? The Five Dancing Israelis Arrested On 9-11 http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/fiveisraelis.html Police Seize Rental Truck With TNT Traces http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,52681,00.html http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/arrested_israelis2.html AFP PODCAST: 9/11 Cop Who Arrested Dancing Israelis Speaks http://americanfreepress.net/?p=974

<a href="http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a090401zimamerican#a090401zimamerican" title="View in context">September 4, 2001: Israeli Company Moves Out of WTC The Zim-American Israeli Shipping Co. moves their North American headquarters from the 16th floor of the WTC to Norfolk, Virginia, one week before the 9/11 attacks. The Israeli government owns 49 percent of the company. [Virginian-Pilot, 9/4/2001] Zim announced the move and its date six months earlier. [Virginian-Pilot, 4/3/2001] More than 200 workers had just been moved out; about ten are still in the building making final moving arrangements on 9/11, but escape. [Jerusalem Post, 9/13/2001; Journal of Commerce, 10/18/2001] The move leaves only one Israeli company, ClearForest, with 18 employees, in the WTC on 9/11. The four or five employees in the building at the time manage to escape. [Jerusalem Post, 9/13/2001] One year later, a Zim ship is impounded while attempting to ship Israeli military equipment to Iran; it is speculated that this is done with the knowledge of Israel. [Agence France-Presse, 3/29/2002 ================= August 28, 2002: Germans Seize US/Israeli Weapons Bound for Iran German authorities seize a boat in the port of Hamburg containing a shipment of rubber parts—allegedly bound for Iran—that could be used to make tracks for tanks and US-made M-113 armored personnel carriers. The seized boat, the Zim Anvers, is owned by the Zim-American Israeli Shipping Company. An Israeli company, PAD, headed by Avihai Weinstein, 34, had been issued a German export license for the shipment. The license specifies Thailand as its final destination, but according to German customs, the shipment is really destined for Iran. According to the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, it was to be transferred in Hamburg to an Iranian cargo ship headed to the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. Weinstein claims he had no knowledge of the shipment’s actual destination. Raphael Eitan, an adviser on terrorism for several Israeli governments between 1978 and 1985, tells public radio the next day that it would have been impossible for Weinstein “not to know what the final destination of the shipment was. In this type of affair, there is no innocent contract. He knew the shipment was headed to Iran,” he says. Tehran denies any involvement with the boat. [Agence France-Presse, 3/29/2002]

The Fires' Severity How Intense and Extensive Were the Twin Towers' Fires? The plane crashes resulted in significant fires in both Towers, at least for the first few minutes after the crashes. The fires in the North Tower were considerably more extensive than than those in the South Tower. As time progressed the fires in at least the South Tower appeared to diminish greatly in severity. This was probably due to most of the jet fuel being exhausted within a few minutes of the impacts. Since kerosene (jet fuel) has a low boiling point and a low flash point, most of it would have evaporated and caught fire quickly. LINK The Fires at Their Most Severe How severe were the fires at their greatest extents? Fires in the North Tower covered extensive regions, at least near the perimeter walls, of about three floors. Fires in the South Tower also extended over about three floors, but were more localized to one side of the building. The fires were not hot enough to produce significant window breakage in either Tower. Window breakage is a common occurrence in large office fires, particularly when temperatures exceed 600° C. The flames mostly remained within the buildings. Significant emergence of flames from the buildings, another common feature of large office fires, was only observed in a limited region of the North Tower. The fires did not spread significantly beyond the impact region. With the exception of a region of fire about 10 floors above the crash zone in the North Tower, the fires remained around the impact zones. The fires did not cause parts of the building to glow. At temperatures above 700° C, steel glows red hot, a feature that is visible in daylight. LINK The Fires' Progression Over Time Most photographs of the South Tower show relatively dark smoke, and in much less quantity than from the North Tower. See photographs. Given that the vast majority of the volatile jet fuel was consumed inside five minutes of each crash, the fires subsequently dwindled, limited to the fuels of conventional office fires. The fires in both Towers diminished steadily until the South Tower's collapse. Seconds before, the remaining pockets of fire were visible only to the firefighters and victims in the crash zone. A thin veil of black smoke enveloped the Tower's top. In the wake of the South Tower's fall new areas of fire appeared in the North Tower. This summary is supported by simple observations of the extent and brightness of the flames and the color and quantity of smoke, using the available photographic and video evidence. Visible flames diminished greatly over time. Significant emergence of flames from the building is only seen in a region of the North Tower 10 stories above the impact zone. South Tower: Virtually no flames were visible at the time of its collapse. North Tower: Flames were visible in several areas at the time of its collapse. A region of flames on the 105th floor is seen after the South Tower collapse. [*]The smoke darkened over time. While the fires in both Towers emitted light gray smoke during the first few minutes following the impacts, the color of the smoke became darker. South Tower: Smoke from the fires was black by the time it collapsed. At that time it was only a small fraction of the volume of the smoke from the North Tower. North Tower: Smoke from the fires had become much darker by the time the South Tower was struck, 17 minutes after the fires were ignited. The smoke was nearly black when the South Tower collapsed. Thereafter the smoke appears to have lightened and emerged from the building at an accelerated rate. After the fall of the South Tower, the North Tower continued to produce prodigious quantities of smoke, and showed regions of active fires. See photographs. Dark smoke implies the presence of soot, which is composed of uncombusted hydrocarbons. Soot is produced when a fire is oxygen-starved, or has just been extinguished. Soot also has a high thermal capacity and may act to rob a fire of heat by carrying it away. Evidence of fires within the buildings' cores is scant. NIST found only two core column specimens in a condition allowing paint-analysis inferences about temperatures reached, and those temperatures were below 250°C. It can be assumed that most of the fires were near the perimeters of the Towers where broken windows around the crash zone allowed them a supply of air. The cores were an average distance of about 70 feet from the nearest walls, and had much less flammable material than the surrounding offices. The impact gash in the North Tower provided a line of sight to the core. Available photographs and videos show the gash as consistently dark, showing no signs of fire in the building's core. <a href=" http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/fires/severity.html#witnesses" style="text-decoration: none">LINK Eyewitness Reports Dozens of people were observed to jump from floors of the North Tower above the impact zone. They may have jumped to escape painful deaths from inhalation of toxic smoke, or to escape unbearable heat. Note, however, that temperatures unbearable to a human, such as 100° C, are insignificant to the survivability of structural materials. At least 18 survivors evacuated from above the crash zone of the South Tower through a stairwell that passed through the crash zone, and many more would have were it not for confusion in the evacuation process. None of the survivors reported great heat around the crash zone. An audiotape of firefighter communications revealed that firefighters had reached the 78th floor sky lobby of the South Tower and were enacting a plan to evacuate people and put out the "two pockets of fire" they found, just before the Tower was destroyed.

Saturday, January 5, 2013 Bisphenol A (BPA) Harms Human Fertility Harvard Study Concludes Activist Post As human fertility continues to decline at alarming rates around the world, scientists have been trying to pinpoint the cause. A new study may provide the illusive reason why so many are experiencing damaged fertility. Scientists from Harvard claim they have discovered the "mechanism by which the chemical compound Bisphenol A, commonly used in the plastics industry, damages human eggs and can harm female fertility." Due to Bisphenol A's (BPA) negative reproductive effects on animals, the scientists decided to test whether human eggs would also be damaged when exposed to BPA. The results of the Harvard study supported by the National Institutes of Health in the United States and by the Environmental Health Fund in Israel were conclusive. The results showed that after 30 hours of exposure to Bisphenol A, a greater number of eggs did not mature or began to degenerate. Examination of the chromosomes in the egg showed damage that made proper maturation impossible. In the group of eggs that were exposed to 20 nanograms per milliliter of Bisphenol A, which is 10 times the average concentration revealed by urine tests of healthy subjects, the rate of eggs that matured and could be used for fertilization was 52 percent, compared to 59 percent in the control group. In another group of eggs, which were exposed to a quantity of Bisphenol A 100 times the norm, usable eggs declined to 42 percent. When the concentration of the substance was 10,000 times the norm, only 19 percent of the eggs matured. (<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/study-chemical-commonly-found-in-plastics-could-harm-fertility.premium-1.491803">Source) “The assumption is that the granulosa cells that surround the egg already contain a basic minuscule amount of Bisphenol A, and we found that continued exposure to concentrations of the substance can harm the supply of eggs and the process of their maturation and female fertility,” said Dr. Ronit Machtinger, a gynecologist who headed the study. “At present the significance of the findings is that long-term exposure to Bisphenol A, even in a low concentration, has possible effects on fertility and should be avoided, for example, by not heating up food in plastic containers in the microwave,” she recommended. However, Bisphenol A is not just found in plastics. Significant amounts of BPA can be found in canned goods like soups, tomatoes and soft drinks. It is also found in white dental fillings and nearly all paper receipts that can transferred by touch. This is not the first study to show that Bisphenol A harms human fertility. In September 2011, a study published in the Journal of Human Reproduction showed that women with high concentrations of BPA trying to conceive children through in vitro fertilization had 24% fewer eggs than women with less BPA present. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is fully aware of the damaging effects of BPA, but to date has only banned baby bottles and sippy cups containing the chemical

Nicolas Sarkozy ordered the assassination of Hugo Chavez The Venezuelan Minister of Correctional Services, Iris Varela, has announced on her Twitter account the expulsion of a French citizen known as Frédéric Laurent Bouquet, December 29, 2012 Mr. Bouquet (photo) had been arrested in Caracas on June 18, 2009, with three Dominican nationals in possession of an arsenal. In the apartment he had acquired, forensic police seized 500 grams of C4 explosives, 14 assault rifles including 5 with telescopic lenses, 5 with laser sighting and one with a silencer, special cables, 11 electronic detonators, 19,721 cartridges of different calibers, 3 machine guns, 4 hand guns of different calibers, 11 radios, 3 walkie talkies and a radio base, five 12-gauge shotguns, 2 bulletproof vests, 7 military uniforms, 8 grenades, one gas mask, one combat knife and 9 bottles of gunpowder. During his trial, Mr. Bouquet admitted he had been trained in Israel and was an agent of French military intelligence service (DGSE). He admitted planning an attack to assassinate Constitutional President Hugo Chavez. Mr. Bouquet had been sentenced to four years in prison for "illegal possession of weapons." He served his sentence. He was taken from his cell by Ordinance No. 096-12 of trial judge Yulismar Jaime, then was expelled for "undermining national security" under Article 39 paragraph 4 of the Migration and Foreigners Act. Venezuelan authorities had so far refrained from communicating on this subject. The facts were confirmed by the spokesman of the Quai d’Orsay, Philippe Lalliot. The French Embassy in Caracas declined to comment. From our investigation we can conclude that: (1) President Nicolas Sarkozy had ordered the assassination of his counterpart Hugo Chavez; (2) the operation was a fiasco; (3) France granted substantial compensation to stifle this matter during Mr Sarkozy’s term in office.