Phi Beta Iota: Cynthia McKinney has integrity, and is committed to transparency and truth. Most of what the public is viewing and reading about Libya is a manufactured lie. What NATO is doing in attacking Tripoli is illegal, immoral, and a war crime by any standard. As we have previously shown, this is about oil, water, and gold (the paper gold market is about to crash, Libya has a great deal of real gold that has not been tainted with titanium by the New York banks).
Below the line is a lengthy post from Cynthia McKinney in Tripoli, with many links and some photographs.
In 1990 new proteins were engineered into the American food supply. Other countries don't allow it. Walmart, Kraft and Pepsi actually formulate different food for export. America has highest cancer rates in the world.
Robyn O'Brien gives us information and patterns she has assembled and synthesized about how our food “industry” makes us sick (allergies, cancer, etc., etc.), raises our health care costs, weakens our global competitiveness, etc. and what we can do about it.
Phi Beta Iota: Industry–which operates on public incorporation commissions–lacks integrity because the government lacks integrity, as does the media in a corporate state. We have had a failure of integrity across the entire US system of systems (see Paradigms of Failure).
In a whirlwind conclusion to the prosecution of former National Security Agency official Thomas A. Drake, Mr. Drake agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “exceeding authorized use of a computer.”
Prosecutors were unable to sustain any of the felony counts against Mr. Drake that were contained in last year’s ten-count indictment, including charges of unauthorized retention of classified material under the Espionage Act of 1917.
A copy of the June 9, 2011 plea agreement is here.
Mr. Drake had been suspected of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the press, though he was not specifically charged with that offense, and he denied committing it.
Much of the case was conducted behind closed doors and off the public record, so many intriguing aspects of its ultimate resolution remain obscure for the time being. But it seems clear that the Obama Administration misjudged the merits of its case against Drake, pursuing minor infractions with disproportionate zeal.
Meanwhile, Mr. Drake’s legal team, public defenders James Wyda and Deborah L. Boardman, did a superb job of defending their client in a challenging legal environment. Drake’s supporters at the Government Accountability Project managed to win a remarkable degree of public sympathy and support for a supposed felon.
Speaking of disproportionate zeal, I wrote last Monday that there was “no possibility” of avoiding trial on June 13. Consider this a correction.
Phi Beta Iota: We are very pleased that Mr. Drake, who is on record about being uncompromising with the truth, has in essence–with some serious help from legal professionals with integrity–buried the unethical Department of Justice and National Security Agency attempt to intimidate, railroad, and destroy one of the few senior executives with the balls to challenge the incestuous pathologically mis-managed mess we call an “intelligence” community. As Congressman Ron Paul puts it, “lying is not patriotic.” We all swear an oath to support the Constitution, and from where we sit, Mr. Drake upheld his oath, and senior officials at Justice and NSA violated their oaths of office–not surprisingly, but reprehensible never-the-less. “Integrity” is the most frequently searched for term on this web site, and rightly so: without integrity, intelligence is not achievable.
But as US action around the world aimed at eliminating the recently won right to self-determination for the peoples of Asia and Africa under the guise of “Western democracy” fighting “totalitarian communism”, which left a trail of millions murdered by the US and its allies (starting with Korea and moving to the Congo, to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and from Guatemala to Brazil to Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Chile, to Southern Africa and the Middle East), the cruel US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade have hardly changed this anti-democratic trend. Yet two important victories are always touted by supporters of US foreign policy on the democratic front: namely, the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing “democratisation” of Eastern Europe, and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. The US hopes that its policies in both places will guide it to achieve similar ends for those uprisings of the Arab world that it cannot crush.
Joseph Massad is Associate Professor for Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.
This blaster is intended to bring two very important reports and a short third report to your attention. The three should be thought about together.
1 is an essay by Robert ParryConsortium News. It is an excellent summary of the last 10 years of perpetual war and the debacle wrought by the Neoconmen. It also explains why these wars are now un-winnable and how President Obama has walked merrily into the Aftrap and is being set up as the fall guy to the Neconmen's debacle. (My essay, which appeared in the Jan-Feb issue of Challenge, explaining the domestic politics underpinning the Pentagon's need for perpetual war can be found here.)
2 is a more narrowly focused but deeply disturbing essay in Counterpunch by Gareth Porter, who reports on a recent book by Saleem Shahzad, the distinguished Pakistani journalist whose body was found outside Islamabad last week. As Porter explains, Shahzad has laid out how Al Qaeda, especially Dr. Ayman Zawahiri (the brains of the outfit), laid out a strategy that played President Bush (and his fellow travellers) like like a violin. Porter describes how the name of the game has been to dupe the cowboys in America to overreact to generate blowback in the Muslim word. He explains why Zawahiri wants the US mucking around in Afghanistan. But Belogolova's report does raise a valid concern. If Shahzad is right in his assessment of Zawahiri, the good Dr must be laughing his rocks off … because from his perspective, Afghanistan may turn out to be the gift that keeps on giving.
3 is Olga Belogolova's report on a new Senate study in the 8 June issue of National Journal …. She tells the reader that the Senate report suggests we can not even leave Afghanistan without collapsing the economy. This is kind of thinking can be used as yet another pretext for signing up to Zawahiri's script of the U.S. staying in Afghanistan forever, enraging the Muslim world — and in the near term for scaring Obama into not withdrawing significant forces in July as he has promised to do. I am not so sure this concern over the economic effects of reducing aid is that important. If so much of the aid money goes into the swamp of corruption, a large part of the collapse may be related to corruption. Is eliminating the honey pot stoking corruption that bad for the Afghan people (or the Americans for that matter)? Will Afghanistan really collapse? Who knows? But I doubt it.
The real subject of these essays, however is the sorry state of the United States and its political elites who are either working for the benefit of other countries (i.e., see Parry's discussion of the Neoconmen and Israel) or are brain dead strategists in Versailles on the Potomac, who, as we used to say in the Pentagon, “went for the cape — right off the cliff.” An now the numbskulls who got the United States into these messes are suggesting we must stay the course. Which brings us back to the Colonel's lament in my last blaster.
Chuck Spinney
La Ciotat, France
Phi Beta Iota: Integrity might be lost at the top, but it is the failure of integrity among all ranks that enables the corruption at the top to persist. We swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the chain of command, but all of our officers, with few exceptions, appear at this time to be in violation of their oath to the Constitution.
There is something very strange going on in covert medical samplings of cattle, using helicopters and big portable labs. A very expensive operation, all over the western states. There is a very good chance that “Mad Cow” disease was caused by bio-chemical experiments that went out of control and went on to cause the Alzheimere's plague. One book that focuses on the proliferation of kuru mutations in the US, and that has established a solid argument for Alzheimers being a “man-made” disease, is Dr. Colm A. Kellerher's Brain Trust.
Separately there are now growing concerns that the H1N1 vaccination program–and other programs before it but with emphasis on innoculating the poor in the southern hemisphere–have been a form of planned eugenics. Below is one discussion recommended by top authors following this area.
Tainted nightmare
Dr. Sarah Stone, Pharm-D, Jim Stone, Freelance Journalist, Russ Clarke, Editor
“The H1N1 vaccination program, when put into the same frame as the engineered virus to go with it, appears to be a clear effort to divide humanity into two groups; those who have lost their intellect, health and sexuality via a tainted vaccination, and those who have not and are therefore superior.”
I met the story about the swine flu with great skepticism; it played like a story line in a B movie – Students go abroad for spring break. Students get the virus. Students bring it home. Worldwide pandemic starts. The story line was unbelievable, and I knew from day one that there was either no virus at all, and that it was just a “wag the dog”, or that a manufactured outbreak was intentionally released and underway.
Unfortunately the latter was true, and now we have an entirely new bug on our hands. It has never been seen before, and virologists have been quoted saying “where the hell it got all these genes from we don't know.” Extensive analysis of the virus has revealed genes from the original 1918 flu, the avian flu, and two new H3N2 viruses from Eurasia. All evidence points to the fact that the swine flu is indeed a genetically engineered virus.
This article is the result of a team effort intended to explore what the motive for releasing it may be, to warn you in advance of things to come.
Phi Beta Iota: What seems to clear to us, right up to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, is that elements of the US Government and elements of the European and East Coast elites, are “out of control.” Money has been directed at both bio-chemical experimentation on humans and animals and Earth experimentation (HAARP), and there is an arrogance among the elements in control–and an ignorance and lack of integrity among the US Government elements–that is enabling potentially catastrophic situations for humanity. The media is failing to observe and report the current medical sampling across the US west, and in the context of a government that cannot be trusted to tell the truth, one has to wonder if the Arizona fires are actually a massive decontamination of dead or euthenized diseased animals. The trust is gone. Only truth will get it back.
It is now 1:10 in the afternoon and as the daily life in Tripoli unfolds that includes teachers, staff, and children at school, shopkeepers working in their businesses, streetsweepers sweeping the streets, people moving to and fro in the cars, on bicycles, and on foot, Tripoli has thus far since around 11:00 up to now, received at least 29 bombs.
Interestingly, the efforts of the Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, and others to portray Libya claims on the bombings as “absurd” are patently false and are merely efforts to defend in the court of public opinion, the indefensible bombing of civilians going about their lives in a heavily populated area. The Washington Post headlined “Libya government fails to prove claims of NATO casualties” and the Los Angeles Times headline blared, “Libya officials put a spin on a conflict.” These bombs and missiles are not falling in empty spaces: people are all over Tripoli going about their lives just as in any other major metropolitan city of about two million people.
Meanwhile, NATO has a spin machine of its own: NATO says it is making “significant progress” in protecting Libyan civilians. “What we did target was the military intelligence headquarters in downtown Tripoli,” the alliance said. I am currently with a delegation of former MP's and professors from France who are here in Tripoli on a fact-finding mission. The program for today was to visit the camps of internally displaced persons in this part of the country. However, we are not able to complete our program while Tripoli is under attack. I will do my best to visit some of the areas bombed today when/if this attack lets up.
What were you doing today between 1:00 and now? The people of Tripoli endure the trauma of repeated bombings in their immediate environment.
