Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006)

With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.

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AUSTIN, Texas—Oh dear. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. In Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, of planning to “cut and run” on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. “I just could not believe he would say that to me,” said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane. Every election cycle produces some wincers, but how do you apologize for that one?

The legislative equivalent of that remark is the detainee bill now being passed by Congress. Beloveds, this is so much worse than even that pathetic deal reached last Thursday between the White House and Republican Sens. John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The White House has since reinserted a number of “technical fixes” that were the point of the putative “compromise.” It leaves the president with the power to decide who is an enemy combatant.

This bill is not a national security issue—this is about torturing helpless human beings without any proof they are our enemies. Perhaps this could be considered if we knew the administration would use the power with enormous care and thoughtfulness. But of the over 700 prisoners sent to Gitmo, only 10 have ever been formally charged with anything. Among other things, this bill is a CYA for torture of the innocent that has already taken place.

Death by torture by Americans was first reported in 2003 in a New York Times article by Carlotta Gall. The military had announced the prisoner died of a heart attack, but when Gall saw the death certificate, written in English and issued by the military, it said the cause of death was homicide. The “heart attack” came after he had been beaten so often on this legs that they had “basically been pulpified,” according to the coroner.

The story of why and how it took the Times so long to print this information is in the current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. The press in general has been late and slow in reporting torture, so very few Americans have any idea how far it has spread. As is often true in hierarchical, top-down institutions, the orders get passed on in what I call the downward communications exaggeration spiral.

For example, on a newspaper, a top editor may remark casually, “Let’s give the new mayor a chance to see what he can do before we start attacking him.”

This gets passed on as “Don’t touch the mayor unless he really screws up.”

And it ultimately arrives at the reporter level as “We can’t say anything negative about the mayor.”

The version of the detainee bill now in the Senate not only undoes much of the McCain-Warner-Graham work, but it is actually much worse than the administration’s first proposal. In one change, the original compromise language said a suspect had the right to “examine and respond to” all evidence used against him. The three senators said the clause was necessary to avoid secret trials. The bill has now dropped the word “examine” and left only “respond to.”

In another change, a clause said that evidence obtained outside the United States could be admitted in court even if it had been gathered without a search warrant. But the bill now drops the words “outside the United States,” which means prosecutors can ignore American legal standards on warrants.

The bill also expands the definition of an unlawful enemy combatant to cover anyone who has “has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” Quick, define “purposefully and materially.” One person has already been charged with aiding terrorists because he sold a satellite TV package that includes the Hezbollah network.

The bill simply removes a suspect’s right to challenge his detention in court. This is a rule of law that goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215. That pretty much leaves the barn door open.

As Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, wrote, an intelligence service free to torture soon “degenerates into a playground for sadists.” But not unbridled sadism—you will be relieved that the compromise took out the words permitting interrogation involving “severe pain” and substituted “serious pain,” which is defined as “bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain.”

In July 2003, George Bush said in a speech: “The United States is committed to worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes, whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.”

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary—these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.

I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

By Molly Ivins

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding

http://www.bl.uk/treasures/magnacarta/magna.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

http://www.thewe.cc/contents/more/archive2005/july/war_2005_july_images_1.html

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/document/nca_vol1/chap_07.htm

Congressional Pedophilia

Involvement of Bush Republicans in pedophilia and child prostitution back in news. Yesterday, ABC News reported that it obtained e-mails sent from Florida Republican Representative Mark Foley's private AOL account to a 16-year old former male congressional page in which the congressman requested the teen to provide his age, a photo of himself, and what he wanted for his birthday. The former page, believing Foley's e-mails to be "sick," provided copies to congressional staff members. In one e-mail, Foley wrote, "did you have fun at your conference?…what do you want for your birthday coming up?…what stuff do you like to do?" In another, Foley asked, ""how are you weathering the hurricane?…are you safe?…send me an email pic of you as well…" Foley has been a strong supporter of George W. Bush.

Foley: asked 16 year old male congressional page who he did not know for his photo and what he wanted for his birthday.

The scandal breaking around Foley comes as new questions are being raised about a story that rocked Washington in 1989. The Washington Times broke a major story about a top GOP lobbyist, registered lobbyist for Japan, and former ABC news reporter in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War named Craig Spence who was hosting huge parties for "U.S. military officers, businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides, media representatives and other professionals" and arranging liaisons between these power brokers and underage male teen prostitutes. Among Spence's close friends was Japanese nuclear scientist Motoo Shiina, a Liberal Democratic Party politician who was later suspected of passing defense secrets to the Soviet Union.

The Washington Times led off the exposure of the teen prostitution ring with this above-the-fold front page headline on June 29, 1989: "Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush." The July 7, 1989 edition of the Washington Times reported, "Administration officials continued yesterday to stonewall reporters on the growing federal 'call boy' investigation, apparently hoping the scandal will fade before President Bush is asked his view of a late-night White House tour that reportedly included two male prostitutes. Nebraska Republican State Senator John DeCamp later said that many of the young prostitutes were procured from the Boy's Town orphanage near Omaha.

Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, who heads the Secret Service, reluctantly conceded yesterday at the White House that the agency is looking into the July 3, 1988, tour - one of several arranged by a Secret Service officer for lobbyist Craig J. Spence." The report continued, "White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater and several of his deputies have said repeatedly that they do not know if Mr. Bush considered it appropriate for male prostitutes to be touring the White House at 1 a.m. Yesterday, while talking informally to several reporters at the White House, Mr. Fitzwater parried one question this way: "What are they saying, that you should have sexual-preference checks on people that come into the White House?"

New details emerge about 1989 Bush I White House teen prostitute scandal: teens entered private quarters of the White House while George W. Bush was occasionally residing there while acting as his father's hatchet man in the White House.

The Washington Times also stated, "White House officials have said that the midnight tours such as those arranged for Mr. Spence do not threaten the First Family's security because they are allowed only in office areas and not the residence." In fact, according to the Times, then First Lady Barbara Bush brushed aside the story of the teen prostitutes entering the White House for midnight tours, saying, "There haven't been a lot of stories in our house about it . . . I'm not into all of this," adding it was "good" that The Washington Post wasn't following The Times' story. However, WMR has learned that Spence was close to a number of Washington Post journalists as well as others working for The New York Times, CBS News, and ABC News. Spence was arrested in New York City for gun and cocaine possession and in November 1989 was found dead in a Boston hotel, fully clothed in a black tuxedo and white bow tie reportedly from a suicide. There were no signs of injury to Spence's body.

And, although Fitzwater and Mrs. Bush claimed Spence's male prostitutes never entered the private quarters of the White House, WMR has learned otherwise. WMR was told by one of the chief investigators on this story that one of the teen prostitutes said that he noticed damage to the underside of a cornice (a special molding along the top of a wall) in one of the bedrooms in the private quarters of ithe White House during one of his overnight stays. The Lincoln Bedroom and the Rose Guest Room are both located within the more secure confines of the private quarters on the second floor of the White House. The prostitute's story about a damaged cornice in a corner bedroom of the private quarters was later confirmed by a White House source. Moreover, the damage to the cornice could have only be seen by someone who was lying on their back on the bed.

Damage to underside of White House bedroom cornice could have only been seen by someone lying on their back on the bed.

On the 9.11 trail

One of Mohamed Atta's closest associates in Florida before the 9/11 attack today carries a chest on his yacht filled with several million dollars in new bills, automatic weapons, passports from a half-dozen nations, and works for a major international Mobster.

Wolfgang Bohringer, a German pilot, identified by Atta’s one-time girlfriend Amanda Keller as one of Mohamed Atta’s closest associates in Florida during the run-up to the 9.11 attack, and one of the handful of people the terrorist ringleader called “my brother,” recently resurfaced on a tiny island in the South Pacific, in the Republic of Kiribati.

There he announced his intention to set up a flight school on Fanning Island, almost a thousand miles south of Hawaii and one of the most remote places on Earth. Bohringer plans to teach pilots how to fly DC3’s, the 70-year old aviation workhorse frequently used in weapons and drug smuggling.

The island has no electricity, and a population of barely one hundred souls. While it hardly seems an ideal place for a flight school, the remote location and lack of official scrutiny may make it ideal for something.

Bohringer, accompanied by a woman he reportedly met over the Internet named Ana Maria Uhr, almost immediately aroused suspicion, after he announced plans for a flight school training what local citizens suspected would be an assortment of smugglers and mercenaries to fly DC3’s.

Alarmed local residents contacted The MadCowMorningNews about the German pilot, offering new details which prompted us to take a closer look at him as a possible link to the elusive global network which British Prime Minister Tony Blair, two weeks after 9/11, said had assisted the terrorist hijackers.

Mohamed Atta & the 'Pirate of Prague'
During the same period Wolfgang Bohringer was hanging out with Mohamed Atta, Bohringer was the personal pilot of a notorious Czech Mobster named Victor Kozeny, who is known as the ‘Pirate of Prague.'
Kozeny owns a private island in the Bahamas, travels on an Irish passport, and is currently fighting extradition to the U.S. on charges of massive financial fraud and allegedly paying multi-million dollar bribes to government officials in the Republic of Azerbaijan in an effort to take-over that oil-rich country’s State Oil Company.

After defrauding thousands of people around the world while traveling on an Irish passport, including the chairman of the Northern Ireland peace talks, Senator George Mitchell, Kozeny sought refuge in the Bahamas.

Bohringer had opened a flight school in Naples, Florida in 1996, illegal for a foreigner. But he hadn't gotten in any trouble with the FAA.

Perhaps his association as the personal pilot for a major Eastern European Mafia figure named Victor Kozeny had helped. Kozeny is the subject of investigations by the FBI and US Customs, and was recently charged in the U.S. with stealing $182 million dollars by the Manhattan District Attorney.

Bohringer moved to Atlanta to began a position as corporate pilot in February 1, 2001, according to his online bio, for a software company called HBOC. No doubt it is just a coincidence, or dashed bad luck, but Bohringer's new employer was involved in a major accounting scandal which cost shareholders $9 billion of lost value in a single day.

A Czech Mobster with an Irish Passport in the Bahamas

“HBOC was found to be a mob bust-out,” a financial analyst emailed us.

Kozeny, we were shocked to discover, had at some point in the mid-90's controlled one-third of the entire Czechoslovakian economy. "Kozeny bought factories and 'rides' on pipelines, meaning they crossed land he owned and paid big for the privilege."

With his ill-gotten gains, Kozeny tried to buy off top officials in the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan to gain control of that country's state-owned oil company. One man already convicted in the scheme, Hans Bodmer, belonged to a network of Russian oligarchs, one of whom, Pyotr Aven, has been accused by a Russian corruption task force of being engaged in drug trafficking.

Kozeny's partners in the Azeri scheme included a managing director of Hank Greenburg's American Insurance Group (AIG). Greenberg was forced to step down amid the Eliot Spitzer probe, a scandal, it is rumored, which involved a major Bush family and associates' international money-laundering operation that has spanned more than a generation and has been used to illegally fund US elections since the Nixon era.

AIG was founded from Asia Life/CV Starr, a Shanghai-based international import/export and insurance firm founded in 1919 by Cornelius V. Starr, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative in Southeast Asia during World War II. Clinton antagonist Kenneth Starr is his nephew.

Currently Kozeny is awaiting extradition to the U.S. from the Bahamas. A prosecutor there revealed in court that Kozeny possesses an astonishing number of passports, including six from Ireland alone. "He appears to be able to produce foreign passports at will," stated the prosecutor.

The Atlanta Connection?

Atta and Al Shehhi flew or drove to Atlanta on several occasions during the month of February 2001. To meet with Wolfgang? On two of those visits, Atta rented a plane, the first with a pilot, the second unescorted, and visited an area of Tennessee where he observed a dam, and several nuclear fuel production facilities.

On his yacht, the “Argos,” Bohringer was carrying a chest filled with “stacks of brand new hundred dollar bills, more money that I have ever seen in my life,” wrote one local resident.

Like his former boss, Bohringer is no slouch in the passport department...Aboard Wolfgang's yacht were passports from a half-dozen nations, and a cache of firearms, including a Glock. He claimed to be an arms dealer, and acknowledged his involvement with Eastern European Mobsters. Bohringer also reportedly admitted knowing Mohamed Atta, but stating to several islanders that another German pilot in Naples, Rex Gasteiger, was to blame for linking him to 9/11.

Soon several residents quietly reported surprisingly-deep suspicions to local authorities. "To me Wolfgang is carrying dirty money, lots of it,” wrote one.

"If he can gets a flight school going it does not take a stretch of the imagination to see he would sell it to some else who sells it to someone else and Honolulu gets vaporized. He seems to know the money tree and could be working to set things up for others to do so and so has been funded to do so.”

Locals on Fanning Island sent us the pictures of Wolfgang in this story.

Worried about "the 9/11 thing"

"A month before Wolfgang left with his boat he met Ana on the internet. He sent tickets and credit card for her to meet him in Paris. He would take her as crew on a round the world trip. First stop Hawaii. But when they were a day out of Hawaii he informed her they were sailing to another island and not stopping at Hawaii."

“My friend crewed with them to Samoa, and on the trip he found Wolfgang liked having his picture taken,” one local resident wrote us.

On the trip Ana confided she was really worried about Wolfgang. He seemed to running from something. So she told him what she’d read about him on the internet about the 9/11 thing."

"Wolfgang alleviated my concerns with simple explanations about an unhappy business partnership with the guy who bought his flight school,” the resident wrote. “But, it was clear he hated Jews. He told some very bad jokes about ovens, Jews, bread, and blacks."

We compared the new pictures with what Amanda Keller had told us about Wolfgang. She called Bohringer “The Iceman,” she said, because of his resemblance to a character in the movie “Top Gun,” the rival to Tom Cruise played by Val Kilmer. And indeed, the resemblance is remarkably close.

Keller also said Wolfgang won a lottery to get his green card. The locals on Fanning Island report that Bohringer told them that story too. So clearly Amanda Keller had known Bohringer.

Her testimony has once again proven correct, as it also was when she told of helping Atta move from Deep Creek, part of the recently-incorporated town of North Port. Documents made public after the Moussaoui trial show Atta was sending faxes from a Postal Express in Deep Creek on March 11, 2001, at exactly the time Amanda Keller says he was there.

Fibbers Bureau of Investigation

The Moussaoui trial produced the largest trove of government documents about the hijackers' South Florida movements. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press was instrumental in the release of many of those court documents. The FBI fought them every step of the way.

Now we know why. The documents prove they’ve been lying.

“Him (Atta)and Wolfgang drove around in the red convertible a lot,” she said. “Their favorite place to eat was Hooters in Sarasota. They got kicked out of Hooters for grabbing their boobs.”

“He spoke German with Wolfgang, who was in his thirties. Wolfgang was with Mohamed when he came by the nursing home to see me one time. Mohamed called certain people—Arabic people—‘my brother.’ And I was wondering how he had so many family members. Like gang members do, ‘this is my brother,’” she said.

“But not all Arabs. So it wasn’t like just anyone Muslim was his brother. He called Wolfgang and Juergen ‘my brother,’ too. He and Wolfgang were very tight, they went everywhere together. When he came into the picture they were together all the time.”

Turn left at the Maldives

The story of Wolfgang’s life to date is studded, according to people we spoke with who knew him, with activities considerably out of the ordinary. While sailing around the world on a 47-foot yacht, for example, instead of crossing the Indian Ocean from the coast of Africa on a direct line, he took a “detour” to Bombay, where he met his wife Sujita.

He was one of the first of the ‘German element’ to arrive in Florida, in 1996, when he opened a flight school in Naples. Prior to arriving in Naples he was associated with an organization called “The Flying Club of Munich,” in Augsburg, Germany.

In Spring 2002, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Like Rudi Dekkers, Wolfgang was notorious in aviation circles for bad behavior. We found records of his scrapes in the files of airport authorities in Florida, including a letter sent by a former employee soliciting to offer private flight instruction at his Wolf Aero, Bohringer's flight school, without authority and in violation of FAA rules was in the airport records in Naples.

“Wolfgang showed up from Munich in the mid-1990’s and immediately began operating a flight school illegally,” stated Naples flight instructor Marcus Huber, a flight instructor in Naples. “He’s half Swiss, half German.”

A "Hall Pass" from the FAA

Like Rudi Dekkers, Wolfgang also seems to have had a “hall pass” from federal authorities, which embittered other foreign flight trainers not similarly well-connected.

“When Wolfgang applied for an E-2 Visa, he made up a fake company, a cleaning service,” Huber told us. “Sometimes it makes me mad that a criminal gets preference.”

In the wake of the Sept 11 disaster, U.S. officials repeatedly promised explanations. But it was left to British Prime Minister Tony Blair to sketch out the Cliff notes version of the case against Bin Laden. He said, "Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization with ties to a global network."

Almost five years after Tony Blair first told the world that a “global network” provided assistance to the terrorist hijackers while they were in the U.S., what is happening on a tiny island in the South Pacific may point towards the international organization in question.

"You have a network of people who obtain certain information and... sell it to whomever would be the highest bidder," explained Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator, who was muzzled by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who went to the Supreme Court to ensure her silence about... something.

"There are certain points where you have your drug-related activities combined with money laundering and information laundering, converging with your terrorist activities... Post-9/11 intelligence 'failures' include the willful quashing by the Government of investigations tracing these criminal networks."

Why no push to find the Germans?

Atta's German buddy Bohringer works for a global network. Did it assist Atta and the terrorist hijackers? Was there a connection between the larger organization, or network, behind gangster financier Victor Kozeny, and that of the terrorists in Florida plotting to kill Americans on the 11th of September in 2001?

Amanda Keller was not the only eyewitness quoted mentioning Atta’s German associates. Atta’s landlord for a brief week told reporters about a wild 3-day weekend Amanda and Atta spent in Key West, along with another girl named Linda.

“The two girls were introduced to two men from Germany that they said were Mohamed’s friends,” Tony LaConca told the Charlotte Sun-Herald.

When we first learned that all of Atta’s associates in Florida had not been Arab, we were understandably eager to learn more about the terrorist ringleaders’ two German friends.

Sun-Herald reporter Elaine Allen-Emrich had apparently felt the same way...
"The FBI in Tampa would neither confirm nor deny that any agents were interviewing people in the North Port area,” she reported.

“Asked for more information about Atta’s wild weekend, an FBI spokesperson identified only as ‘Pam’ said, “We recommend that you check in with CNN for current information. Any press statements can be found on televised stations like CNN.”

We went looking for ourselves. The results are in “Welcome to TERRORLAND.

We didn’t feel like “checking in with CNN.”

The Baby Boomer Border Invasion

The visitor crossing from Tijuana to San Diego these days is immediately slapped in the face by a huge billboard screaming, "Stop the Border Invasion!" Sponsored by the rabidly anti-immigrant vigilante group, the Minutemen, the same truculent slogan reportedly insults the public at other border crossings in Arizona and Texas.

The Minutemen, once caricatured in the press as gun-toting clowns, are now haughty celebrities of grassroots conservatism, dominating AM hate radio as well as the even more hysterical ether of the right-wing blogosphere. In heartland as well as in border states, Republican candidates vie desperately for their endorsement. With the electorate alienated by the dual catastrophes of Baghdad and New Orleans, the Brown Peril has suddenly become the Republican deus ex machina for retaining control of Congress in the November elections.

A faltering GOP hegemony, too long sustained by the scraps of 9/11 and the imaginary weaponry of Saddam Hussein, now has a new urgency in its appeal to the suburbs. Not since Kofi Annan conspired to send his black helicopters to terrorize Wyoming, has such a clear-and-present danger threatened the Republic as the sinister armies of would-be busboys and gardeners gathered at the Rio Grande.

To listen to some of these demagogues, one would assume that the Twin Towers had been blown up by followers of the Virgin of Guadalupe or that Spanish had recently been decreed the official language of Connecticut. Having failed to scourge the world of evil by invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Republicans, supported by some Democrats, now propose that we invade ourselves: sending the Marines and Green Berets, along with the National Guard, into the hostile deserts of California and New Mexico where national sovereignty is supposedly under siege.

As in the past, nativism today is bigotry as surreal caricature, reality stood on its head. The ultimate irony, however, is that there really is something that might be called a "border invasion," but the Minutemen's billboards are on the wrong side of the freeway.

The Baby Boomers Head South

What few people -- at least, outside of Mexico -- have bothered to notice is that while all the nannies, cooks, and maids have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate Republicans, the Gringo hordes have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.

Yes, in former California Governor Pete Wilson's immortal words, "They just keep coming." Over the last decade, the U.S. State Department estimates that the number of Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (or one-quarter of all U.S. expatriates). Remittances from the United States to Mexico have risen dramatically from $9 billion to $14.5 billion in just two years. Though initially interpreted as representing a huge spike in illegal workers (who send parts of their salaries across the border to family), it turns out to be mainly money sent by Americans to themselves in order to finance Mexican homes and retirements.

Although some of them are certainly naturalized U.S. citizens returning to towns and villages of their birth after lifetimes of toil al otro lado, the director-general of FONATUR, the official agency for tourism development in Mexico, recently characterized the typical investors in that country's real estate as American "baby boomers who have paid off in good part their initial mortgage and are coming into inheritance money."

Indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal, "The land rush is occurring at the beginning of a demographic tidal wave. With more than 70 million American baby boomers expected to retire in the next two decades... some experts predict a vast migration to warmer -- and cheaper -- climates. Often such buyers purchase a property 10 to 15 years before retirement, use it as a vacation home, and then eventually move there for most of the year. Developers increasingly are taking advantage of the trend, building gated communities, condominiums, and golf courses."

The extraordinary rise in U.S. Sunbelt property values gives gringos immense economic leverage. Shrewd baby-boomers are not simply feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly speculating in Mexican resort property, sending up property values to the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into slums or forced to emigrate north, only increasing the "invasion" charges. As in Galway, Corsica, or, for that matter, Montana, the global second-home boom is making life in beautiful, natural settings unaffordable for their traditional residents.

Some expatriates are experimenting with exotic places such as the Riviera Maya or Tulum in Quintana Roo, but more prefer such well-established havens as San Miguel de Allende and Puerto Vallarta. Here the norteamericanos make themselves at home in more ways than one.

An English-language paper in Puerto Vallarta, for instance, recently applauded the imminent arrival of a new shopping mall that will include Hooters, Burger King, Subway, Chili's and Starbucks. Only Dunkin' Donuts (con salsa?), the paper complained, was still missing.

The gringo footprint is largest (and brings the most significant geopolitical consequences) in Baja California, the 1,000-mile long desert appendage to the gridlocked state-nation governed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Indeed, Baja real-estate websites ooze almost as much hyperbole as those devoted to stalking the phantom menace of illegal immigrants -- just in a far more upbeat tone when it comes to the question of immigrant invasions.

In essence, Alta (Upper) California is beginning to overflow into Baja, an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable social marginalization and ecological devastation in Mexico's last true frontier region. All the contradictions of post-industrial California -- runaway land inflation in the coastal zone, sprawling suburban development in interior valleys and deserts, freeway congestion and lack of mass transit, and the astronomical growth of motorized recreation -- dictate the invasion of the gorgeous "empty" peninsula to the south. To use a term from a bad but not irrelevant past, Baja is Anglo California's Lebensraum.

Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation have already occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has exported hundreds of its sweatshops and toxic industries to the maquiladora zones of Tijuana and Mexicali. The Pacific Maritime Association, representing the West Coast's major shipping companies, has joined forces with Korean and Japanese corporations to explore the construction of a vast new container port at Punta Colonel, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which would undercut the power of longshore unionism in San Pedro and San Francisco.

Secondly, tens of thousands of gringo retirees and winter-residents are now clustered at both ends of the peninsula. Along the northwest coast from Tijuana to Ensenada, a recent advertisement for a real-estate conference at UCLA boasts that "there are presently over 57 real-estate developments... with over 11,000 homes/condos with an inventory value of over $3 billion... all of them geared for the U.S. market."

Meanwhile, at the tropical end of Baja, a gilded gringo enclave has emerged in the twenty-mile strip between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de Cabo. Los Cabos is part of that global archipelago of real-estate hot spots where continuous double-digit increases in property values suck in speculative capital from all over the world. Ordinary gringos can participate in this glamorous Los Cabos real-estate casino through the purchase and resale of fractional time-shares in condominiums and beach homes.

Although Western Canadian and Arizona speculators have taken large bites out of Baja's southern cape, Los Cabos -- at least judging from the registration of private planes at the local airport -- has essentially become a resort suburb of Orange County, the home of the most vehement Minutemen chapters. (Many wealthy Southern Californians evidently see no contradiction between fuming over the "alien invasion" with one's conservative friends at the Newport Marina one day, and flying down to Cabos the next for some sea-kayaking or celebrity golf.)

Manifest Destiny, the Sequel?

The next step in the late-colonization of Baja is the "Escalera Nautica," a $3 billion "ladder" of marinas and coastal resorts being developed by FONATUR that will open up pristine sections of both Mexican coasts to the yacht club set.

Meanwhile, The Truman Show has arrived in the picturesque little city of Loreto on the Gulf side of the peninsula. There, FONATUR has joined forces with an Arizona company and "New Urbanist" architects from Florida to develop the Villages of Loreto Bay: 6,000 homes for expatriates in colonial-Mexico motif on the Sea of Cortez.

The $3 billion Loreto project boasts that it will be the last word in Green design, exploiting solar power and restricting automobile usage. Yet, at the same time, it will balloon Loreto's population from its current 15,000 to more than 100,000 in a decade, with the social and environmental consequences of a sort that can already be seen in the slum peripheries of Cancun and other mega-resorts.

One of the irresistible attractions of Baja is that it has preserved a primordial wildness that has disappeared elsewhere in the West. Local residents, including a very eloquent indigenous environmental movement, cherish this incomparable landscape as they do the survival of an egalitarian ethos in the peninsula's small towns and fishing villages.

Thanks to the silent invasion of the baby-boomers from the north, however, much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could be swept away in the next generation. One of the world's most magnificent wild coastlines could be turned into generic tourist sprawl, waiting for Dunkin' Donuts to open. Locals, accordingly, have every reason to fear that today's mega-resorts and mock-colonial suburbs, like FONATUR's entire tourism-centered strategy of regional development, are merely the latest Trojan horses of Manifest Destiny.

Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of Planet of Slums (Verso 2006), and, with Justin Chacon Akers, No One is Illegal (Haymarket 2006). His history of the car bomb, Buda Wagons, will be published by Verso early next year.

By Mike Davis, Tomdispatch.com

Source: www.alternet.org

Bad medicine (Part Two)

Bad medicine (Part Two)

They say "Everything's all right"
They say "Better days are near"
They tell us "These are the good times"
They don't live around here - Warren Zevon

Back to Skinwalker Ranch. And let's jump right into it.

Perhaps the strangest and most provocative aspect to the story is that of the "orange structure" which often appeared low in the ranch's western sky and was allegedly viewed by all members of the Gorman family on dozens of occasions. (The family name is actually Sherman, but they're pseudonymously identified in Colm Kelleher and George Knapp's Hunt for the Skinwalker). It was nearly perfectly round, though it appeared flattened rather than spherical. (It's appearance changed according to the angle at which it was viewed. On one occasion of its appearance Tom Gorman, the father, was driving off of the property, and approached it from the side. As he did, it seemed to thin until it was undetectable, as if it were two-dimensional. Though even that doesn't do justice to the strangeness, since it could not be seen from the opposite direction.)

When he observed it through binoculars long after the sun had set, Tom claimed he could see, in the middle of the orange mass, "another sky." A blue sky, while the ranch's sky was black. Kelleher and Knapp write that "Tom felt like it could have been a tear or a rent in the sky about a mile away, and through the rent he could see a different world or perhaps a different time.... For Gorman, this was a rare glimpse into what might actually be happening on his property."

On two nights particular while Tom observed the orange structure its "other sky" was not visible; its centre instead had the appearance of multiple layers of an onion that receded from him. As he watched, he saw a "fast-moving black object that was silhouetted perfectly against the bright orange background." It was moving rapidly through the centre of the structure and soon exited, silently, into the Utah night sky, where Gorman soon lost sight of it.

This almost beggars credulity, and so it should. But such extraordinary sights are not unknown in the American west. A family of ranchers named Bradshaw had a two-year brush with high weirdness near Sedona, Arizona in the early 90s, including encounters with glowing orbs, poltergiests, cattle mutilations and strange humanoids. They also claimed to witness a similar "structure" in the sky that appeared to serve as a gateway between different realities. (The Bradshaw's story is told in a book entitled Merging Dimensions: The Opening Portals of Sedona.)

A similar uncanny event was reported to have occured the night of August 25, 1997, after the ranch had purchased by Robert Bigelow. A pair of researchers withBigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science, identified as "Jim" and "Mike" in Hunt for the Skinwalker, were sitting silently on the edge of a bluff in the middle of the night, monitoring a pasture. At one point Jim climbed down into the field to meditate, as he had found that meditation sometimes "activated the phenomenon." A couple of hours later atop the bluff, at about 2:30 a.m., Jim's eye caught a faint, yellow light on a track through the field, about 150 feet bellow. As he watched it brighten, he gestured to Mike. They both watched, and it grew bigger as well as brigher. Jim took out his camera and Mike his night-vision binoculars. The light appeared positioned above the ground, rather than situated upon it. Mike whispered, "It's a tunnel. Not just a light."

And then: "Jesus Christ - something's in the tunnel! Oh, my God. There is a black creature climbing out. I see his head. It has no face. It's on the ground. Oh my God, it walked away." Mike reported it to be huge - maybe six feet tall and 400 pounds. Shortly thereafter, the yellow circle dimmed, shrunk and vanished.

After 15 minutes and no further sighting, the pair climbed down to the track. At the spot where the "tunnel" had appeared, there remained only the strong, pungent smell of sulfur. Jim's film showed the smudge of yellow light, but nothing more.

On four different occasions NIDS asked a number of well-respected remote viewers, most of whom had been employed by "Project Stargate," to independently engage in blind targetting of the ranch. That is, they were given no information about what they were to be looking at, or expectations about what they might find. They were given a random coordinate and asked to describe events associated with it. One, identified only in Hunt for the Skinwalker as "one of the most uncannily accurate remote viewers alive today" (a frequent description of Joseph McMoneagle), produced a "near exact" sketch of the ranch, identifying features, as well as a spot in the southwest corner of the property which he said harboured a "disturbing" energy. In a later test, another viewer was asked to provide impressions of a daytime calf mutilation. According to Kelleher and Knapp, he sensed that a robotic drone had carried it out, and that it might have been of "interdimensional origin." He also added that the drone "had some connection" to the US military. Other viewers also suggested some inexplicable military involvement with a foreign and frightening Other. They had impressions of uniformed men in dark sunglasses and naval tatoos, and inhuman entities speaking an unknown language.

Consistently and independently, the remote viewers expressed feelings of "dread, nervousness, darkness and death" associated with their blind targetting of the property.

Pointedly, the phenomenon became more fleeting after NIDS began its investigation. There were observations of paranormal events - orbs, cattle mutilations, weird entities - but they did not have the frequency noted by the Gormans, and over the years of investigation the weirdness essentially dried up. Kelleher and Knapp make an interesting observation, one I've made here previously about the nature of similar encounters with the weird:

Was there something now missing from the engagement? Perhaps it was the level of emotion that the Gorman family had provided in spades but was missing from the scientific team. The stress level in the family was unbelievably high. It was palpable. The Gormans did not interact with the phenomenon because they wanted to; they simply had no choice. In contrast, the NIDS scientific personnel were there by choice. They carried with them an attitude of cool detachment. There was almost an aggressiveness in the pursuit of the phenomenon that may have psychologically turned the tables, assuming of course that a consciousness was involved.

It seems nearly a maxim that weirdness of this high order seeks out those who don't expect it and are therefore less prepared to cope with it. Again, it's the "garmonbozia" principle: fear is a favourite delicacy at the feast of intense human emotions.

And what can we make of the suggestion of military involvement. The Gorman family and area residents noted strange mechanical noises and hums from beneath the ground. The same has been said of Dulce and other sites, supporting for some the claims of a vast network of underground military-alien bases. (I've written previously why I consider that to be disinformation.) Yet the indigenous peoples of the region tell of having heard the same noises underfoot for generations, since before there was a United States. So what is it? If there's something down there, it's been there a long time.

There does appear to be a thread in need of untangling which connects the US military, high weirdness and Native American tradition and land, particularly sacred sites. The San Luis Valley of Colorado for instance, where Maurice Strong and his then wife built their "Valley Of the Refuge Of World Truths," is a holy place for many indigenous nations, including the Navajo. There's Indio's Cabazon Indian Reservation, notorious for Casolaro's Octopus and now also the trial of Richard Hamlin. (Hamlin's father-in-law Sidney Siemer, whom he accuses of ritually abusing his wife Susan, "freely admits" having worked there in the 1980s during the time of Wackenhut and PROMIS. Before she recanted her testimony, Susan claimed to remember her father subjecting her to mind control torture in an Indio warehouse.)

Dread, nervousness, darkness and death. That's some pretty heady stuff to tap into. The skinwalker ranch makes a fine spooky story, but if it and stories like it describe genuine phenomena then we should be more than spooked. We should be alert as well. Because maybe it also informs our estimate of the situation. Maybe it can help us understand who is trying to tap into what, and why.

Coup leaders urge Thai soldiers to smile

BANGKOK, Thailand - Military coup leaders in Thailand - often called the "Land of Smiles" - apparently don't want to ruin that image. They've ordered soldiers to smile. Army radio broadcasts are reminding soldiers to be friendly and courteous, especially to children and anyone who wants to take pictures with them.

Since Tuesday's overthrow of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, tanks and soldiers have been stationed at strategic points around Bangkok, becoming a must-have photograph for many Thais and tourists.

"People have shown overwhelming support for the soldiers," the army radio station said Saturday. "The soldiers should promote a positive image and continue smiling and be polite."

It was unclear if soldiers were also ordered to let civilians hold their M-16s, which some Thais and foreigners did as they posed for photographs that were published in local newspapers Saturday.

Many Thais have described this as the friendliest coup the country has ever seen. Thailand has a history of violent military coups, and the last one in 1991 ended with at least 50 pro-democracy demonstrators gunned down in Bangkok.

Source: Associated Press

Bad medicine (Part One)

Bad medicine (Part One)

There's a lion in the road, there's a demon escaped,
There's a million dreams gone, there's a landscape being raped. - Bob Dylan

This has been no holiday week for me - far from it - and between work and familyI haven't had the time to post without getting sloppy about it. But I want at least to introduce a subject to which I mean to return early in the new year.

The subject's still taking shape for me, which is fine, because it's partly about shapeshifting. And that isn't to say it's about Reptoid Shapeshifters from Outer Space, because it isn't, except maybe to reframe that instead as a dark slice of pure Americana.

Because I'm thinking, rather, about Navajo witchcraft: the "bad medicine" of, let's call them, "left-hand path" medicine men. Specifically, yee naaldooshi: the "skinwalkers."

Anthropologist Dan Benyshek of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, quoted in Colm Kelleher and George Knapp's Hunt for the Skinwalker:

Skinwalkers are purely evil in intent. I'm no expert on it, but the general view is that skinwalkers do all sorts of terrible things - they make people sick, they commit murders. They are grave robbers and necrophiliacs. They are greedy and evil people who must kill a sibling or other relative to be initiated as a skinwalker. They supposedly can turn into wereanimals and can travel in supernatural ways.

I find it interesting that the initiation fee of killing a close relative is similar to the blood price exacted for admittance into high Satanic circles, and also the generational sacrifice of one's own children to ritual bondage and mind control.

Then there's John Perkins, the National Security Agency-recruit and author of the favourite liberal limited hang-out Confessions of an Economic Hitman, who is also the author of Shapeshifting: Shamanic Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation, and leads workshops on the subject. Here's Perkins, in an interview with "Spirit of Maat":

For definitional purposes we can talk about Shapeshifting occurring on three different levels:

The first is cellular, and that is when a person of an indigenous culture shapeshifts into a plant or animal, or in our culture when a cancer grows in someone and then miraculously disappears.

The second level is personal Shapeshifting. That is when we decide to transform our personality -- and usually that means becoming more of what we most expect in ourselves. It might mean when a person honors themselves as a good writer or a better dancer or politician. It could also mean transforming an addiction.

...

During the process of writing the book Shapeshifting, I found that many people had the opinion that cellular shapeshifting, where people become jaguars and plants, was important years ago for indigenous peoples and cultures that had to escape from enemies in the forest, or hunt down buffalo and other animals -- but was not important in this day and age and probably doesn't occur anymore.

I disagree. I have seen a lot of very significant cellular Shapeshifting around the world. There are lamas in Tibet who fly across mountains and melt snow with the heat of their bodies, and shamans in the Amazon who become jaguars, and people in this country who miraculously get cured of cancers. I think cellular Shapeshifting is very important, because when we cellular Shapeshift, we realize that we really are one with everything.

Shapeshifting is not just Perkins' metaphor for adaptation and personal transformation. He believes - he claims to have witnessed - shapeshifting on a cellular level.

What am I trying to say? This is what I'm trying to say: we don't need to look to Alpha Draconis to find a culture of shapeshifting. Shapeshifting is as American as Cowboys and Indians, and even more so than Cowboys. Regardless of what we think about the subject, even if we say this cannot be so it can't be true, a living culture which holds such things both possible and essentially evil is indiginous to the United States, and in particular to the western lands which have seen so much bad medicine of late, from Los Almos to Jack Parsons and UFOs. And then there's the New Age shamanism of the NSA's Perkins.

Doug Hickman, a New Mexico educator, says in The Hunt for the Skinwalker that "the Navajo skinwalkers use mind control to make their victims do things to hurt themselves and even end their lives." Again, we've seen this before. Survivors of covert ritual abuse/mind control programs often need to have self-destruct alters reintegrated into their core personalities so they do not harm or kill themselves once the programming has been detected. I find such similarities more interesting, and possibly more important, than speculation as to whether human-to-animal shapeshifting is literally possible.

There's a ranch in Utah said by a local tribe to be "in the path of the skinwalker." After an embarrassment of weirdness terrorized its new owners in the mid-1990s - UFOs, boxy "chupas", cattle mutilations, orbs, anomalous entities and more (their first day, the family was visited by an oversized wolf that attacked a calf and could not be killed or even brought down by a point-blank barrage, whose tracks simply ended in the mud) - the property was purchased by a mysterious Las Vegas multimillionaire named Robert Bigelow, rumoured to have CIA ties. "Another rumor has it that the death of his son several years ago brought about his passionate interest in the paranormal." I'll have more to say about Bigelow and Skinwalker Ranch in Part Two.

TRIAL BY JURY IN DANGER OF EXTINCTION

“The trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State, where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.” - US Constitution Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 3

One of the most important constitutional rights is the right to a fair and open trial. The Sixth Amendment guarantee is apparently a personal right of the defendant, which he may in some circumstances waive in conjunction with the prosecution and the court, but it is the defendant's decision.

Because this right is so fundamental in the United States, the US Supreme Court in the past has had little occasion to deal with the right. It is a right so fundamental that it is protected against state deprivation by the due process clause, but it is not so absolute that reasonable regulation designed to forestall prejudice from publicity and disorderly trials is foreclosed.

Yet there are those working within our nation's legal system who wish to change the process by which civil liberties are protected for someone accused of a criminal offense or faced with civil litigation. The most serious but little known trend is the reduction in use of the jury trial.

A respected jurist, Hugh Bownes, recently wrote, "There are several good arguments for [eliminating juries]. [In] doing so, it saves time, saves money and a judge is better equipped by training and experience to cope with the nuances and complications of complex issues. Any judge will attest to that. Yet to understand whether trial by jury should be eliminated in complex civil cases, we first have to look at what the purpose of a civil trial is and the function of the jury in it."

While Bownes advocates elimination of juries in civil cases, it is this tinkering with our judicial process that should disturb all clear-thinking Americans. It is but another first step in the march to creating an imperial judiciary. What may appear expedient in a civil trial may seduce the lawyers in black robes to advocate non-jury trials for criminal cases in the very near future.

If Americans accept as the law that which a judge states, then they have accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and have surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen’s safeguard of liberty.

For instance, in the State of Oregon, the Oregon Judicial Department's Future of the Courts Committee is quoted as saying in their “Justice 2020 The New Oregon Trail,” "The state courts have worked to reduce inappropriate uses of jury trials."

Of course, the Oregon Judicial Department qualifies this statement by saying they are committed to preserving the defendant's right to a trial by a jury of his/her peers, but they are also committed to "reducing the public's reliance on jury trials to resolve disputes" by the year 2020.

“To some Americans, this may seem reasonable. It may sound reasonable until one considers human nature and the potential for corruption of the court process if removed from the hands of citizens and placed into the hands of black-robed attorneys and so-called justice practitioners,” says one attorney who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Quite simply, it is far more difficult to bribe, blackmail or coerce 12 members of a jury than it is to bribe, blackmail or coerce one judge. And the jury process to a certain extent prevents the political back-scratching so common in the two other branches of government,” he said.

Also, in most jurisdictions, judgeships are political entities relying on the same political foibles that exist in electing mayors, governors, senators and other federal, state and local officials. Defendants should not have to worry that the man who sits in judgment over them is a "conservative" or "liberal" or "libertarian." To be sure, jury members have political biases, but they are not professional politicians with their own agendas.

In Oregon, the Justice Department encourages the use of what it calls Alternative Dispute Resolution. Most disturbing is the fact that the Oregon Bar Association endorses the acceleration in the use of ADR. In fact, one goal is the integration of ADR methods and techniques in criminal cases. They also advocate the elimination of what they call "outmoded, redundant or unnecessary court functions."

Now, it's obvious they aren't looking to eliminate the judges, defense attorneys or prosecutors. The courts will still require bailiffs, protection officers, court reporters and administrators. So who do you suspect they seek to eliminate? Could it be the jury?

In the case of Oregon, the state government is in the process of "educating" the public in the need for "multi-door justice systems," which includes alternatives to jury trials. The strategy appears to be: denigrate juries as being ineffective and obsolete, while at the same time trumpet the praises of a system that relies on the judgment and conduct of "justice professionals."

The elimination of jury trials will not be accomplished in one felled-swoop. In several states it's being accomplished piecemeal. Arizona has just joined a small but growing list of states that have taken away the right to jury trial in DUI cases, even though DUI charges may lead to incarceration and other penalties.

Legal scholar Lawrence Taylor sees this as a frightening trend. "First, it puts the fate of DUI defendants in the hands of politically elected judges. Given the PR power of groups like MADD, you can bet that will mean the further erosion of the rights of suspected DUI-DWI suspects. Second, it saves the criminal justice system a ton of money, which means virtually every jurisdiction in the state will likely scrap jury trials for drunk driving cases."

However, Jim Kouri, a vice president with the 14,000-member National Association of Chiefs of Police sees things in a different light.

"With all the violence occurring due to courtroom injustices, such as "deadbeat dad" cases or domestic violence, there is fear among judges that they are in physical danger. If they can conduct a closed session with only court employees in the courtroom and the suspect in his jail cell participating in his trial by judge, the danger to the judge is reduced," said Kouri, a 30-year law enforcement and security veteran.

In direct violation of the US Constitution, the US Supreme Court recently ruled that you don't have to be given a jury trial if you face less than six months in prison. And if you have a dispute with the IRS, EPA or any of a dozen other regulatory agencies, your case will usually be heard by an administrative law judge employed by the same agency you are disputing. Judges routinely deny the traditional right of jurors to judge the law, as well as the facts of a case, and vote their conscience.

Thomas Jefferson considered the jury trial "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.''

If Americans allow those in power to bypass trial by jury, that concept -- in fact, all of our Bill of Rights -- will be in danger of extinction.

Footnotes:

1. Future of the Courts Committee
2. Arizona Removes Juries from DUI Cases
3. Doing Away with Juries

by Jim Kouri

Source: www.newswithviews.com

Secret Rumsfield Meeting to Implement North American Union

Byron J. Richards, CCN

There he stood, a man with a captive audience of fellow anti-American neo-cons bent on one world government. His mission: to lay out the military and security integration of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The date: September 13, 2006. The place: Banff Springs Hotel, Alberta, Canada. The forum: a secret meeting of the powerful elite, a meeting that all of a sudden become not so secret. The man: Donald Rumsfield, point puppet for the Bush administration’s planned integration known as the North American Union. This is serious government collusion behind the backs of the citizens of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It is government for the elite, not government representing the people.

The story was first leaked to Canadian freedom fighters. It did not make it into the mainstream Canadian press, but did appear in the local media. Our Canadian friends have supplied a complete list of attendees as well as the meeting agenda. This secret meeting came to my attention courtesy of John Hammell, president of the International Advocates for Health Freedom. Mr. Hammell has been following the planned North American Union very closely, especially as it relates to the destruction of health freedom in America. He is actively helping our Congressional leaders see the light and needs your support. Urgent action is needed by American citizens to stop this illegal shadow government.

NewsWithViews authors have been warning readers of this insidious plan to undermine our nation’s sovereignty for some time, including recent articles by Patrick Wood and Tom DeWeese. Americans need to make this the most important issue in the coming elections.

The Elite Control of Healthcare and Health Options

The public health agenda is typically driven by secretive “national security” plans that, in the current political climate, are governed by the military, Big Pharma, the Department of Homeland Security and the FDA. As I explain in Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA’s Betrayal of America, these seemingly different branches of government and industry are seamlessly blended into one operational unit for the benefit of the elite. Public health has almost nothing to do with your personal health. In fact, totalitarian governments place the control of your health options at the top of their list.

Any North American Union will have military, political, economic, social, and healthcare strategies for implementation. The secret meeting held in Canada this past week brings to light just how seriously and quickly the Bush administration is moving on this issue. It also underscores the importance of a needed Congressional inquiry into the illegal collusion by the FDA and related agencies in Canada and Mexico known as the Trilateral Cooperation Charter.

The FDA, along with Canadian and Mexican health agency partners, has taken a blood oath to keep their activities secret. The FDA did not post this secretive Confidentiality Commitment on their website, apparently Canadian law made them post it. Why would the FDA omit letting Americans know that they are bound to secrecy? What rights do these government organizations have to conspire and plot behind the backs of citizens? They claim their agenda is to stamp our heath fraud—is it really???

Fraud is Now in the Eyes of the Beholder

The FDA tells us that the top priority of this collaboration is enforcement action on fraudulent weight loss products, especially those promoted on the internet.

The FDA plans to trample the rights of American citizens with their campaign. The FDA, Canada, and Mexico plan to define fraud in violation of United States law. Their definition: “The false, deceptive, or misleading promotion, advertisement, distribution, sale, possession for sale, or offering for sale of products or provision of services, intended for human use, that are represented as being safe and/or effective to diagnose, prevent, cure, treat, or mitigate disease (or other conditions), to rehabilitate patients or to provide a beneficial effect on health.”

The FDA is circumventing existing U.S. law known as DSHEA, which gives Americans access to many health options and information on how they work in the body. It is redefining U.S. law as fraud. Especially dangerous is the statement “to provide a beneficial effect on health.” Hundreds of different nutrients provide dramatic beneficial effects on health. Everyone knows that, especially the FDA and Big Pharma. Under the FDA definition of fraud, if the FDA has the opinion that a statement is misleading (and they always negate supplements no matter what evidence is shown to them) then they will brand a product as fraudulent and remove it from the market. This could easily be a highly effective nutritional supplement, a real threat to Big Pharma.

This is nothing but an effort to stamp out all competition to Big Pharma, which of course owns the FDA, a majority of the members of Congress, and the White House (it plans to own any administration that is elected). Big Pharma has billions tied up in weight loss drug development, drugs that will never work because they have dramatic and serious side effects.

As a clinical nutritionist I have helped thousands of people safely and effectively lose weight. I have formulated through my company, Wellness Resources, various products that when used in conjunction with diet and exercise have major beneficial effects on health, including products that assist healthy weight loss. Many other nutritional companies make excellent weight loss products. As the leading nutritional expert on the fat-hormone leptin, I know from first hand experience that individuals have many safe and effective natural options to lose weight and improve metabolism. I see it all the time. Hundreds of thousands of Americans know this to be true and can testify to notable improvements.

The government, especially the FDA, is actually a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. The FDA condones massive adulteration of our food supply to protect the profits of multinational agribusiness and junk food producers at the expense of human health, which are actually a major cause of obesity. Metabolism of our children is seriously damaged by government condoned chemicals. How can the FDA possibly define disease or judge fraud when they are actively causing disease and promoting real fraud?

There is no question that nutritional supplementation offers hope to undo the massive damage our government has done, help restore energy production in the human body, and help repair the human body to get some level of functional health back. The truth is nutritional supplements have a major ability to prevent many diseases and the science to back up the claims.

The FDA is doing everything in its power to prevent Americans from knowing how to get well, under the false guise of consumer protection or consumer safety. Nothing could be a greater health fraud than the FDA claiming to be an agency that cares about consumer safety. Americans are sick and tired of being poisoned to death by billions of dollars of truly fraudulent drugs by an agency that is now bent on becoming a drug company and by the highly toxic food supply condoned by the same agency.

United States courts have routinely ruled against the FDA’s perverse interpretation of DSHEA. To sidestep U.S. law, the FDA is now going into secret arrangements with Canada and Mexico to create a set of regional laws that they will seek to implement into the United States as part of the “harmonization” process of the North American Union and eventual world-wide harmonization through other regional trade agreements and Codex. Thus, cleaning up the filth at the FDA is a front line battle in preventing the North American Union.

Source: Truth in Wellness

THE INSANE HELL OF FRACTIONAL-RESERVE BANKING

THE INSANE HELL OF FRACTIONAL-RESERVE BANKING
by The Mogambo Guru

Justice Litle of Outstanding Investments makes the bullish case for gold
when he writes, "In oil terms, gold is the one investment that's still
very cheap. Historically, gold averaged a cost on par with 15 barrels of
oil. Right now, it takes just over eight barrels of oil to buy an ounce of
gold."

The good news is that powerful medications I am gobbling by the handful
are now speeding to wherever in the hell they go, and are starting to take
effect. Hopefully, we will not have a full-blown Mogambo Episode Of
Outrage And Vengeance (MEOOAV). Indeed, my spirits are buoyed by the
sweet, secure, satisfying knowledge that gold will protect my wealth. And
if you don't think so, and you are not putting money into gold and silver
and the shares of gold and silver mining companies (and oil, lest I forget
to mention it), then I know that you were not a good student in school. To
be fair, neither was I, as my whole day seemed to be filled with beating
up guys smaller than I and getting beat up by guys who were bigger. And to
tell you the truth, that seemed to be a full-time job in itself, on top of
the strain of being raised by mere Earthling parents.

And I am also cheered by the "Elliott Wave Gold Update VIII" by Alf Field,
which contains the immortal observation that "people who generally buy and
hold gold do so because they understand the concept that it is the
ultimate store of wealth and that gold provides protection against the
inevitable demise of our existing world wide fiat currency system."

And if you were wondering why gold and silver have had such big declines
recently, Bill Murphy, of LemetropoleCafé.com, elucidates. "One of my
fears was, because of the desperation of those in power in Washington
ahead of the coming elections, that they might bomb gold. It seems that
was the plan."

And apparently the other central banks are in on the plan, as the
ever-affable Chuck Butler, president of EverBank World Markets, reports
that he saw a Reuters news item that, "Portugal's central bank sold 15
tons of gold in July and 20 tons in August." He follows this up with the
perfect example of central bank stupidity when he writes, "You might
recall that central banks all signed an agreement about six years ago that
allows them to sell 'X amount of gold each year. Most central banks have
stopped selling gold as the price rose." Hahaha! They sell when it is
cheap, and they stop selling when they could get more money per ounce!
Hahahaha! This is too, too rich! Thanks, Chuck!

And since everybody seems to have a plan, the Big Mogambo Plan (BMP) is to
take advantage of this, and buy more gold and silver at these artificially
low prices, capitalizing on the corruption and stupidity of the government
when this criminal manipulation scheme goes bust, as it must, because that
is always the fate of these kinds of lowlife government corruption.

But on the other hand, thanks to all the stress, my nerves are sharp to
the point of almost snapping, and the reflexes in my trigger-finger are
like greased lightning. The least little thing, and "Blam blam blam!"
bullets are suddenly everywhere, although I then have to sit through
another hysterical-but-boring "gun safety" lecture from the wife and kids,
who aren't even armed, so how in the hell can they know anything about gun
safety to lecture me like that?

And besides, I take my cue from the police, like last week around here
when some weirdo in a car allegedly smacked his weirdo girlfriend (also in
the car) upside the head, and (so they say) threatened her with a gun. Bad
enough.

But what happened next is the lesson in economics. At last count, from
what I could see on the TV, traffic was snarled for miles, for the entire
afternoon, as at least 30 policemen and nine squad cars surrounded this
car, now stopped on the side of the highway, plus at least five SWAT team
members in full commando armor and with two vehicles of their own, and AN
ARMORED FREAKING CAR! Were you asking where all that government spending
went? There is a bunch of it, right there, dude! The decades-long bubble
in the size of government produced, as bubbles always do, grotesque
mal-investments and distortions in the economy. This is merely one of
them. An ugly, fascist one at that.

And it is not just America where this kind of idiocy runs rampant, as we
learn from Bloomberg.com, "Venezuelan vehicle sales rose to a record in
August as President Hugo Chavez used surging oil revenue to increase
government spending."

I note with a mix of relief and horror that the governments may be getting
a discount for cash to buy all of this police equipment, plus the regular
upgrades and new technologies, like CD players in their armored cars, and
that is perhaps why the Fed literally printed up another $4,979 million in
actual cash last week, which I round off to $5 billion, bringing total
dollars of Cash in Circulation to $798.573 billion.

I know what you are thinking. That sharp Mogambo-honed brain (SMHB) of
yours is saying, "Hmmm! I am perplexed by the fact that there is only $798
billion in actual cash in existence, and my wonderful SMHB wonders how
that little bit of money can produce an $11 trillion economy, a national
debt of $9 trillion, consumer indebtedness that is over $30 trillion, $80
trillion in accrued federal government liabilities, $450 trillion in
derivatives, a $600 billion annual federal budget deficit, and an $800
billion trade/current account deficit. How is this possible? Or is The
Mogambo just an idiot like everyone says?"

I shall answer your questions in reverse order. Firstly, yes, I am an
idiot like everyone says. That is why my wife wears a T-shirt that has an
arrow pointing to the right that says, "I'm with stupid", and I have to
wear a T-shirt that has an arrow pointing left and saying, "I'm the stupid
one she is with". She says that it is funnier for her than it is
embarrassing for me, and so, she says with an enviable, air-tight economic
logic, the shirts maximize that kind of utility. Alas, when she's right,
she's right.

But the good news is that, being a now-identified moron, I can scratch my
fat butt anytime I want when we are at the mall, and people leave me alone
(which is mostly the whole point), and they have pity on my wife, which is
what she thinks she deserves anyway. So, it really IS a win-win situation!
Who knew?

Secondly, I smile in satisfaction at your wisdom about the monetary
insanity, and, putting the last piece of the puzzle into place, merely
remark, in typical Mogambo melodrama, "Hear me, doomed ones! It all came
from debt, which comes from Federal Reserve credit, from which springs
multiplication by fractional-reserve banking, which creates the debt and
the money, which is how money now comes into existence! And the
fractional-reserve ratio at the banks is so insane that it has financed a
debt so huge, so freaking huge, so un-payably huge, so insanely,
monstrously huge that no scale created by man can weigh it!"

Taking a question from the audience, "How ridiculous is the
fractional-reserve ratio?" I laugh derisively and say "It can only be
crudely estimated by the difference between a paltry $798 billion in cash,
and the sum total of everything else! Zillions of dollars in assets,
created by an equivalent debt! Hahaha! We're freaking doomed! Doomed!
Hahaha! Welcome to the insane hell of fractional-reserve banking!"

Apparently, both the Federal Reserve and their fellow American morons
missed the significance of the Modigliani Lifetime Income Hypothesis,
which holds that, in the particular and in the aggregate, people cannot
spend more over a lifetime than they make over a lifetime. If you try to,
through assuming debt and then cleverly dying before you have to pay it
back, then the loss incurred by creditors will be the offset to THEIR
lifetime income, proving Modigliani's original hypothesis.

If, however, you make the big mistake of taking on more debt and then NOT
dying, then you will doubtlessly notice that your future consumption will
be, by the necessity of the Modigliani's hypothesis, reduced because of
your excessive current consumption.

Maybe this is why consumer credit grew at only a 2.8% annual rate, or by
$5.5 billion, in July, slowing markedly from June. I dunno.

But nevertheless, it is the inflation in prices that makes me crazy with
fear, and sure enough, on Bloomberg.com we read, "Labor costs rose 4.9
percent in the second quarter compared with the 4 percent gain economists
expected. Productivity rose at an annual rate of 1.6 percent after a 4.3
percent pace in the previous quarter."

And if you have done your economics homework (which I doubt), then you
know that the word "inflation" refers to a growing amount of money in
existence, which only later shows up in higher prices. In that regard,
Addison Wiggin, co-author of the best selling book "Empire of Debt ",
remarks, "If we were to measure economic health by credit expansion, the
United States has the worst inflation in history."

And as far as actual price inflation is concerned,
TheInternationalForecaster.com estimates that inflation is actually
running at 10.8%!

Until next week,

The Mogambo Guru

A Pulitzer Prize, Hurricane Katrina and Journalistic Fraud

Seven at NOLA Times-Pic Win

Duranty-Blair Prize for Journalistic Infamy

by Nicholas Stix

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Did the New Orleans Times-Picayune win a Pulitzer Prize for a journalistic fraud? It sure looks that way.

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New Orleans Times-Picayune reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa; managing editors, news, Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea; and editor Jim Amoss, are the newest winners of the Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy, for their September 26, 2005 attempt to “untell” the story of the savage violence that befell New Orleans just before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29 of last year.

The previous Duranty-Blair winner was former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, who engineered what became known as the “Memogate” (aka Rathergate) hoax, shortly before the 2004 election, in an effort to swing the election toward Democrat challenger, Sen. John Kerry (MA).

The Duranty-Blair Award is named for two of the most notorious scoundrels in the history of American journalism, Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair, both of whom were New York Times reporters. (See Jayson Blair I, II, and III.)

On April 17, the “Times-Pic” won a Pulitzer Prize for a September 26, 2005 story that had immediately been discredited by the bloggers “ziel” of Your Lying Eyes and Eric Scheie at Classical Values. Two weeks later, building on their work, it was also discredited by this writer.

Thanks primarily to the new Duranty-Blair winners, one year and two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the general public knows much less about what happened in New Orleans, than it did a year ago.

The two most influential stories on post-Katrina New Orleans were both published by the Times-Picayune, the city’s only major newspaper, on September 6 and 26, respectively.

In the September 6 article, “Mayor says Katrina may have claimed more than 10,000 lives; Bodies found piled in freezer at Convention Center,” Times-Picayune reporter Brian Thevenot wrote of visiting a room at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center containing four corpses covered in sheets, and of the National Guardsmen who accompanied him.

“[Mikel] Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. ‘It's not on, but at least you can shut the door,’ said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson.”

Thevenot also quoted Brooks as saying that there was “a 7-year-old with her throat cut" in the freezer.

He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor. “There's an old woman,” he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. “I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to death,” he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair….

Brooks and his unit came to New Orleans not long after serving a year of combat duty in Iraq, taking on gunfire and bombs, while losing comrades with regularity. Still, the scene at the Convention Center, where they conducted an evacuation this week, left him shell-shocked.

“I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq,” said Brooks, referring to the freezer where the bulk of the bodies sat decomposing. “In Iraq, it's one-on-one. It's war. It's fair. Here, it's just crazy. It's anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping people in the streets for food and water … And this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live.”

As blogger Bonnie Wren noted in a letter she sent to Times-Picayune editors and Duranty-Blair laureates Peter Kovacs, Dan Shea, and Jim Amoss, which they chose not to publish, “This [9/6] story received widespread circulation all over the world.”

(In a featured article by Brian Thevenot in the October/November 2005 American Journalism Review, “Apocalypse in New Orleans,” he repeated his most dramatic stories.)

Hereafter, for brevity’s sake, hereafter I will refer simply to “9/6” and to “9/26,” respectively.

On 9/6, the only story Thevenot related from National Guardsmen who did not claim to have first-hand knowledge of its truth, was the following:

One of the bodies, they said, was a girl they estimated to be 5 years old. Though they could not confirm it, they had heard she was gang-raped.

Note that the Guardsmen were quite sure that they had the five-year-old’s corpse.

Realizing after 9/6 that they had violated the taboo against presenting black folks behaving badly, especially after blacks across the country had voiced outrage at the media for referring to black looters as, um, “looters,” and/or because Times-Picayune editors and staffers remembered, ‘Hey, we’ve got to live here,’ the newspaper reversed course, and “untold” the huge story it had broken.

Unlike Superman, however, the folks at the Times-Pic could not reverse time by flying against the Earth’s axis more rapidly than the speed of light, so they had to be more creative.

In case the reader has come to believe that 9/6 was indeed a phony story, and thus would tend to believe a story debunking it, I ask him to keep in mind the following points: Thevenot and the Times Picayune did not retract or correct his 9/6 story; and as I will demonstrate, through my own research and the help of many other journalists, 9/26 was itself a fraudulent story.

Discredited from the Get-Go

In 9/26, entitled, “Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated; Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated; 6 bodies found at Dome; 4 at Convention Center,” Times-Picayune reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa claimed to have followed up on, and disproved, the most dramatic stories, including Thevenot’s 9/6 story.

The initial criticisms of Thevenot & Co. were:

1. That 9/6 had been altered (Scheie; unfortunately, the Times-Pic is not archived in the “Wayback Machine”);

2. That 9/26 claims that “rumors” had asserted that there were over 200 corpses at the Superdome, were a straw-man argument intended, by counterposing them to extremely low “true” body counts, to discredit all stories of mayhem (ziel at Your Lying Eyes);

3. That following 9/6, but prior to 9/26, the story’s most dramatic charges “of dead children in the Convention Center” had been denounced by police Superintendent Compass as “vicious rumors,” but the Times-Picayune had never printed a correction; and in a related but richer vein,

4. The 9/26 charges that the most dramatic stories about the convention center were “exaggerations” and rumor-mongering would mean that Thevenot and the Times-Picayune had been guilty of “exaggerations” and rumor-mongering.

Regarding the first criticism, Eric Scheie cited gruesome material that he claimed was in the original 9/6, but no longer is in its Web version.

In the matter of the second criticism, the 9/26 team (and in a separate, December/January American Journalism Review article, by Thevenot alone, who claimed to be debunking claims of 300 corpses warehoused at one school) claimed to be responding to “rumors” spread by the national and foreign media that had determined most people’s impressions about post-Katrina anarchy. However, I wasn’t aware of any such media rumors at the time, and it is only in Thevenot’s December/January AJR article that he cites one specific national or foreign media report, a September 5, 2005 article in London’s Financial Times, that he says spoke of hundreds of corpses warehoused in a school in St. Bernard Parish. Again, I do not recall hearing echoes of that article at the time.

As “ziel” pointed out at Your Lying Eyes, Thevenot & Co. conjured up incredibly exaggerated reports of murder victims that were supposedly in circulation earlier, as straw men to discredit all reports of anarchic violence, even though no one else can recall hearing such reports at the time.

As for the third and fourth criticisms, respectively, on September 26, in “WHO'S COMPLAINING ABOUT WHOSE EXAGGERATIONS?,” Scheie wrote, in response to 9/26,

Usually when someone tries to avoid responsibility for assigning blame to others, I'm not terribly impressed, unless it appears that the person trying to shift blame helped create the problem. And I'm wondering what's going on with the Times Picayune's Brian Thevenot, who's taking a hard line in condemning earlier gruesome reports of crime which he now says were untrue….

[Scheie then quotes a long passage from 9/26]

“….

[9/26] “Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence…. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.”

[Scheie:] The above is certainly good news by any standard. But what's troubling to me is that some of the bad news was reported by Thevenot himself. By implication, he's now saying that his own story, which I was unfortunate enough to link before in the assumption that it was accurate, was either lying or exaggerated….

[Schneie:] I'm a bit baffled by [9/26]. It's one thing to correct your own story, but the earlier one appears to have been pulled, without a retraction or correction ever being issued. Instead, the reporter who wrote it seems to be attacking bad reporting -- and completely failing to point out that his own story played a key role.

The Four Faces of Brian

Let me sum up the World According to Thevenot (& Co., in the case of 9/26).

1. In 9/6: Every atrocity imaginable occurred in the convention center;

(Ditto, in the October/November AJR article, which Thevenot surely wrote prior to 9/26);

2. In 9/26, Thevenot, Russell, Duncan and Filosa all claim that “rumors” were responsible for the beliefs around the world about savagery in post-Katrina New Orleans, and strongly suggest that there was in fact no savagery at all at the convention center, Superdome, or anywhere else in post-Katrina New Orleans. Nowhere do they admit to having caused the beliefs in question;

3. On October 3, Thevenot apparently lies to Eric Scheie, when he asserts that he has retracted 9/6;

4. In Thevenot’s December/January AJR article, he asserts that 9/26 was a “correction” of 9/6, suggests that the National Guardsmen quoted in 9/6 lies, but doesn’t want to be harsh on them, and again suggests that massive looting, desperation, and abysmal sanitary conditions notwithstanding, there was no problem with post-Katrina violence.

One expects such pathological dissembling and the constant production of new stories which contradict previously told ones from criminals, junkies, drunks and politicians. Thevenot and his editor and reporter accomplices could count on few civilians (non-journalists and non-academics) reading all of the various stories cited here; that judges on the Pulitzer committee, would cover for them, is scary.

“Corrections” and “retractions” are formal acts undertaken by newspapers, when they have been shown to have botched a story. They are typically brief, and appear on page two in the paper version, and are typically added to the Web version of the original story online. In extreme cases, an editor will assign a different reporter to redo the original story from scratch, in a story that will be billed as a correction. In the latter case, as occurred in July 2003, when New York Times reporter Lynette Holloway dramatically botched a music business story with huge financial and legal implications, the newspaper will also fire the reporter who screwed up, or as in Holloway’s case, permit her to resign. In the most dramatic case, in May 2003, in the wake of the Jayson Blair fabrication/plagiarism scandal, the New York Times published an over 14,000-word correction.

If the Times-Picayune provided a correction or retraction of 9/6, neither I nor its other critics managed to find it. Likewise, I could find no correction or retraction in the December-January American Journalism Review of Brian Thevenot’s October-November AJR story on post-Katrina New Orleans.

In this series I will show not only that there was massive violence in New Orleans in Katrina’s wake, but that pre-Katrina New Orleans was such a violent city, that had reporters merely cut and paste, and re-published pre-Katrina news stories with the dates changed, readers across America and the world, would have had the same reaction that they had to the supposedly “exaggerated” post-Katrina stories.

The sort of peaceful – if filthy and desperate – post-Katrina conditions that Thevenot, Russell, Duncan and Filosa asserted in 9/26 were the case, and that Thevenot asserted were the case in the December/January AJR, had not existed in The Big Easy for at least 20 years.

The Pulitzer Prize for Deception?

In the best-case scenario, Brian Thevenot won a Pulitzer Prize for a story he co-wrote, which discredited and at the same covered up a story he had previously botched. In the worst-case scenario, Thevenot and Gordon Russell shared a Pulitzer Prize for a story that was fraudulent in and of itself, and that charged Thevenot’s previous story with being either a botch, in which he was made a fool of by liars, or spread a pack of his own lies.

In either case – cover-up or outright fraud – Thevenot, Russell, and the Times-Pic won a Pulitzer for dishonest reporting.

Nicholas Stix
A Different Drummer