February 9, 2002
Media compilation #47: The Great Demonizer Should First Look at Himself
Dear journalist
There has been a flurry of reactions from around the world as to the dangerous ultra hawkish war path favoured by the current US administration. There is a growing uneasiness as to where this is leading us all to. How could it be otherwise when the arms merchants and oil oligarchs own the White House...
Hoping this compilation will help put the larger picture in sharper focus...
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
http://www.cybernaute.com/earthconcert2000
P.S. John Pilger's "Colder War" below is a MUST read! (as time permits)
All TRUTH passes through 3 stages: It is 1) ridiculed; 2) violently opposed; 3) accepted as self evident.
CONTENTS
1. The Colder War
2. Government Gangsterism at Work
3. Laughing in the Face of Evil
4. Axis Mania Grips World
5. ENRON + Afghanistan + 911 OR THE OTHER WAY AROUND!
6. Medical Surveillance Plan Unveiled in the U.S.
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
An Orgy of Defense Spending: Bush's 'Axis of Evil' Rhetoric Fabricates a Need
http://commondreams.org/views02/0205-02.htm
Why the panic to throw billions more at the military when even the Pentagon brass have told us it is not needed? (...) Bush is now resorting to the tried and true "evil empire" rhetorical strategy, grouping the disparate regimes of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil." This alleged axis then becomes the rationale for a grossly expanded military budget, the idea being that the United States must be prepared to fight a conventional war on three fronts. However, no such axis exists. North Korea is a tottering relic of a state whose nuclear operation was about to be bought off under the skilled leadership of the South Korean government when Bush jettisoned the deal. Iraq and Iran have been implacable foes for 25 years, and both were despised by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. (...) His astonishing budget makes sense only if we are planning to use our mighty military in a pseudo-religious quest to create a super-dominant Pax Americana. Bizarre as that sounds, it may be the real framework for Bush's proposed spending orgy. CLIP
Bush Counts On War Without End
http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm (click on "Walkom: War Without End" under Terror/War)
George Bush and the Oiligarch
http://www.visiontv.ca/pf_main.htm
SHOCKWAVES FROM BUSH SPEECH RIPPLE AROUND WORLD
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/02/03/26191.html
THE EAST: ON THE MORAL LEPROSY OF THE WHITE HOUSE
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/02/04/26205.html
Terror Acts by Baghdad Have Waned, U.S. Aides Say
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/06/international/middleeast/06INTE.html
The Central Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade.
GAO V. Cheney Is Big-Time Stalling
http://www.truthout.com/02.02C.Dean.GAO.htm
The Vice President Can Win Only If We Have Another Bush v. Gore -like Ruling
Another Enron-White House Connection
http://www.truthout.com/02.02E.Enron.WH.htm
Is This a Democracy, or What?
http://www.truthout.com/02.02B.jvb.Democracy.htm
Pentagon Official From Enron in Hot Seat
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=17528
Questions Raised About Army Secretary White and Possible Conflicts of Interest
AlterNet has launched a special "EnronGate" page:
http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=30
Featuring:
TOP TEN THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ENRON
Enron's meltdown is more than a lone business scandal, it's an indictment of our entire financial and political system. This smart, simple Enron primer explains why.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
* The Collapse of Enron: A Timeline of Events
* "Enronomics" at a Glance
* What Has Enron Gotten for Its Campaign Contributions?
Plus, a roster of incisive and controversial articles, to be continually updated as the scandal unfolds, starting with:
ENRON IS ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=30
The Bush crowd was not simply duped by Enron and its partners-in-fraud. In fact, the White House deliberately created a friendly climate for such scoundrels.
ENRON WILL FORCE DUBYA'S RESIGNATION - Michael Moore
http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=30
Because he allowed Enron to rip a huge hole in our political system and in so many people's lives, it is time for George W. Bush to resign.
War on terror loses its way (January 17, 2002)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/comment/story/0,11447,634957,00.html
As George Bush's anti-terrorism campaign expands its aims, it is in danger of obscuring the original quest for justice. (...) The US air force has continued a heavy, daily bombardment in the area around Zawar, despite growing protests from villagers and expressions of concern from ministers belonging to Hamid Karzai's interim government in Kabul.
Sept. 11 Activist Kit - What YOU can do (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED TO INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS!!)
Journalists and academics worldwide have put massive effort into this Activist Kit freely given worldwide. Please honour this work by USING THIS WELL, and encouraging all you know to use it well and then pass it on, and on.
Huge data documents at: http://www.11september.20m.com/activist_kit.htm
GROUND ZERO AT THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12331
TWO WORLD FORUMS: IDEOLOGY VS. PRAGMATISM?
http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=21
Of the two world forums that happened this weekend, the Economic one was deemed "practical" and the Social one "idealogical." But a closer look shows the economic elites to be ideologues, and the social entreprenuers to be realistic pragmatists.
From: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=11574035&method=full&siteid=50143
The Colder War
John Pilger
January 29, 2002
LAST week, the US government announced that it was building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379billion, of which $50billion will pay for its "war on terrorism". There will be special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for "military operations" -- invasions of other countries.
Of all the extraordinary news since September 11, this is the most alarming. It is time to break our silence.
That is to say, it is time for other governments to break their silence, especially the Blair government, whose complicity in the American rampage in Afghanistan has not denied its understanding of the Bush administration's true plans and ambitions.
The recent statements of British Ministers about the "vindication" of the "outstanding success" in Afghanistan would be comical if the price of their "success" had not been paid with the lives of more than 5,000 innocent Afghani civilians and the failure to catch Osama bin Laden and anyone else of importance in the al-Qaeda network.
The Pentagon's release of deliberately provocative pictures of prisoners at Camp X-Ray on Cuba was meant to conceal this failure from the American public, who are being conditioned, along with the rest of us, to accept a permanent war footing similar to the paranoia that sustained and prolonged the Cold War.
The threat of "terrorism", some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare. The parallels are striking.
IN AMERICA in the 1950s, the Red Scare was used to justify the growth of war industries, the suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissenters.
That is happening now.
Above all, the American industrial-complex has a new enemy with which to justify its gargantuan appetite for public resources -- the new military budget is enough to end all primary causes of poverty in the world.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, says he has told the Pentagon to "think the unthinkable".
Vice President Dick Cheney, the voice of Bush, has said the US is considering military or other action against "40 to 50 countries" and warns that the new war may last 50 years or more.
A Bush adviser, Richard Perle, explained. "(There will be) no stages," he said.
"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there ... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
Their words evoke George Orwell's great prophetic work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism.
The next American attack is likely to be against Somalia, a deeply impoverished country in the Horn of Africa. Washington claims there are al-Qaeda terrorist cells there.
This is almost certainly a fiction spread by Somalia's overbearing neighbour, Ethiopia, in order to ingratiate itself with Washington. Certainly, there are vast oil fields off the coast of Somalia. For the Americans, there is the added attraction of "settling a score".
In 1993, in the last days of George Bush Senior's presidency, 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia after the US Marines had invaded to "restore hope", as they put it. A current Hollywood movie, Black Hawk Down, glamorises and lies about this episode. It leaves out the fact that the invading Americans left behind between 7,000 and 10,000 Somalis killed.
Like the victims of American bombing in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Cambodia, and Vietnam and many other stricken countries, the Somalis are unpeople, whose deaths have no political and media value in the West.
WHEN Bush Junior's heroic marines return in their Black Hawk gunships, loaded with technology, looking for "terrorists", their victims will once again be nameless. We can then expect the release of Black Hawk Down II.
Breaking our silence means not allowing the history of our lifetimes to be written this way, with lies and the blood of innocent people. To understand the lie of what Blair/Straw/Hoon call the "outstanding success" in Afghanistan, read the work of the original author of "Total War", a man called Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's National Security Adviser and is still a powerful force in Washington.
Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilise" the Soviet Union.
The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means "student").
Young zealots were sent to the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al-Qaeda were taught "sabotage skills" -- terrorism. Others were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated Twin Towers.
In Pakistan, they were directed by British MI6 officers and trained by the SAS. The result, quipped Brzezinski, was "a few stirred up Muslims" -- meaning the Taliban.
At that time, the late 1970s, the American goal was to overthrow Afghanistan's first progressive, secular government, which had granted equal rights to women, established health care and literacy programmes and set out to break feudalism. When the Taliban seized power in 1996, they hanged the former president from a lamp-post in Kabul.
His body was still a public spectacle when Clinton administration officials and oil company executives were entertaining Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas. The Wall Street Journal declared: "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources."
NO AMERICAN newspaper dares suggest that the prisoners in Camp X-Ray are the product of this policy, nor that it was one of the factors that led to the attacks of September 11. Nor do they ask: who were the real winners of September 11?
The day the Wall Street stock market opened after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the few companies showing increased value were the giant military contractors Alliant Tech Systems, Northrop Gruman, Raytheon (a contributor to New Labour) and Lockheed Martin. As the US military's biggest supplier, Lockheed Martin's share value rose by a staggering 30 per cent.
Within six weeks of September 11, the company (with its main plant in Texas, George Bush's home state) had secured the biggest military order in history: a $200billion contract to develop a new fighter aircraft. The greatest taboo of all, which Orwell would surely recognise, is the record of the United States as a terrorist state and haven for terrorists.
This truth is virtually unknown by the American public and makes a mockery of Bush's (and Blair's) statements about "tracking down terrorists wherever they are". They don't have to look far.
Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush, has given refuge to terrorists who, like the September 11 gang, have hijacked aircraft and boats with guns and knives. Most have never had criminal charges brought against them.
Why? All of them are anti-Castro Cubans. Former Guatemalan Defence Minister Gramajo Morales, who was accused of "devising and directing an indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians", including the torture of an American nun and the massacre of eight people from one family, studied at Harvard University on a US government scholarship.
During the 1980s, thousands of people were murdered by death squads connected to the army of El Salvador, whose former chief now lives comfortably in Florida. The former Haitian dictator, General Prosper Avril, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US government, and granted political asylum.
A leading member of the Chilean military during the reign of General Pinochet, whose special responsibility was executions and torture, lives in Miami. THE Iranian general who ran Iran's notorious prisons, is a wealthy exile in the US. One of Pol Pot's senior henchmen, who enticed Cambodian exiles back to their certain death, lives in Mount Vernon, New York.
What all these people have in common, apart from their history of terrorism, is that they either worked directly for the US government or carried out the dirty work of US policies.
The al-Qaeda training camps are kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, its graduates include almost half the cabinet ministers of the genocidal regimes in Guatemala, two-thirds of the El Salvadorean army officers who committed, according to the United Nations, the worst atrocities of that country's civil war, and the head of Pinochet's secret police, who ran Chile's concentration camps.
There is terrible irony at work here. The humane response of people all over the world to the terrorism of September 11 has long been hijacked by those running a rapacious great power with a history of terrorism second to none. Global supremacy, not the defeat of terrorism, is the goal; only the politically blind believe otherwise.
The "widening gap between the world's "haves" and "have nots"', says a remarkably candid document of the US Space Command, presents "new challenges" to the world's superpower and which can only be met by "Full Spectrum Dominance" -- dominance of land, sea, air and space.
More from John Pilger at http://pilger.carlton.com
From: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12318
Government Gangsterism at Work
Ted Rall, AlterNet
January 31, 2002
Unbridled legal hypocrisy is a recurring theme of the ideologically-impoverished Bush imperium. When it suits their immediate aims, the Bushies wield the law like a club. As soon as the law proves inconvenient, however, they chuck it out the window like a gum wrapper.
We've seen this schizy lurching between law-and-order conservatism and anarchic retro-Tricky Dicky Nixonism ever since November 2000, when the same campaign that sued under Florida's election laws to stop that state's ballot recount resorted to hired thugs and back-room deals when it became obvious that they were going to lose.
Born illegitimately of intimidation, this administration is waging its New War on Terror with the same graceless style. Before September 11, it used international organizations and legal strictures to impose economic sanctions on Afghanistan. As the Trade Center towers burned and Bush's polls soared, the last vestige of respect for law disappeared. Bush dropped bombs without declaring war, without bothering to formally request that the Taliban extradite Osama bin Laden, and without presenting a smidgen of proof that either the Afghan government or bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks on New York and Washington. "You're either with us or against us," Bush said, but "us" meant "me."
During the last few months, at least 6,000 people have vanished off the streets of the United States. Kidnapped by government agents, they have no idea when -- or if -- they will be released from prison. The Bushies say these people overstayed their visas, that they have links to Al Qaeda, that they don't wash their hands after using the toilet, that America is safer because they're behind bars.
Is any of this true? Who knows? Since they haven't been granted access to lawyers or allowed to call their families, no one can talk to them. Bush says they have no rights because they're not American citizens.
Keep that in mind the next time you travel abroad.
The Bush police state doesn't coddle our own citizens, either. John Walker Lindh, an American with the bad taste to join the Taliban and the bad luck to get caught, was held for weeks without even being told that his parents had hired him an attorney. You may or may not give a damn about Walker, but he's an American citizen accused of serious federal crimes. The fact that he's been denied legal counsel, that Attorney General John Ashcroft's outrageous statements have made it impossible for him to get a fair trial, and that Bush was seriously considering subjecting him to one of his kangaroo-court military tribunals, tells you everything Americans need to know about our leaders' respect for the law.
Don't deign to look down on Burma or North Korea; when it comes to human rights, you live in a rogue state. Exhibit A: The Taliban and accused Al Qaeda prisoners of war now being held in pens in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Despite European criticism of the conditions under which they are being held, Dick Cheney insists that "nobody should feel defensive or unhappy about the quality of treatment they've received." Maybe so. But if our government has nothing to be ashamed of, why can't reporters, lawyers or family members get inside to visit them?
Even more troubling is the administration's assertion that these men are "unlawful combatants" not entitled to the decent living conditions and other protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. When Nazi Germany executed captured soldiers of the French Resistance, using the argument Bush now cites, the world was appalled. The Taliban prisoners' status is far more clear than the maquis -- the Afghans were fighting to defend their own nation's government from an invasion force. The Taliban, who controlled 95 percent of Afghanistan, were recognized as its government by three U.S.-aligned nations. If the Talibs aren't prisoners of war, who are?
Fortunately, the Geneva Conventions addresses the current situation. In the event of a dispute over the status of prisoners, the agreement stipulates that "such prisoners shall enjoy the protection of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal." But, protests Cheney: "These are the worst of a very bad lot. They are very dangerous...These are bad people...They may well have information about future terrorist attacks against the United States. We need that information. We need to be able to interrogate them and extract from them whatever information they have."
In other words, our Vice President wants to torture our prisoners, which justifies our making an end-run around one of the most important international agreements ever made.
"The debate is not actually whether these people are prisoners of war," an anonymous State Department official told The New York Times January 28. "They are not. The debate is why they are not prisoners of war." Cheney summed up the Bush position the next day: "They are not P.O.W.s. They will not be determined to be P.O.W.s."
To hear these guys tell it, the Geneva Conventions exist solely to protect the safety and dignity of American servicemen when they fall into enemy hands. When we capture foreigners in combat, on the other hand, we simply claim that they're "unlawful combatants." Unfortunately for future American P.O.W.s -- er, detainees -- the rest of the world is listening closely.
After September 11, many Americans wondered aloud why other citizens of the world hate us so much. What kind of things could we, or our government, have done that would explain such fury?
Here's one example.
Ted Rall's new book, a graphic travelogue about his recent coverage of the Afghan war titled "To Afghanistan and Back," will be published in April.
Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2002
Laughing in the Face of Evil
Here's an amusing Wednesday item from InstaPundit.com:
"Reuters has become the Onion:" That's what the reader who sent me this link wrote. The link is to a Reuters story that begins: "LONDON (Reuters)--Iran, Iraq and North Korea on Wednesday rejected an accusation by President Bush that they form an 'axis of evil'." The responses sound a bit like something out of The Onion too.
It gets better. The Associated Press reports from Tehran that "Iran is honored to be the target of attack by the United States":
"There are some satans in the world, but America indeed is the great Satan," [supreme leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei said, speaking at his residence to participants who had concluded a conference in support of the Palestinian uprising a day earlier.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran is honored to be the target of wrath and anger of the most hated Satan in the world," state television quoted him saying.
Somehow we have the image of President Bush at an awards dinner, standing on the dais and declaring: "I'd like to thank all the little satans who help me get where I am today." The North Korean Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, put out a statement (you may have to scroll down to find it) that could have been written by a Democratic Party operative--if the Democrats weren't standing behind the president on the war:
The U.S. is in the grip of a serious economic recession that could hardly be seen in the days of the Democratic Party administration, there were large-scale attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the U.S. Department of Defence building in Washington and large scandals related to the administration have been brought to light.
This is entirely attributable to the unilateral and self-opinionated foreign policy, political immaturity and moral leprosy of the Bush administration.
Herein lie answers to questions as to why the modern terrorism is focussed on the U.S. alone and why it has become serious while Bush is in office.
The reality goes to clearly prove that the root cause of all misfortune is the reckless strong-arm policy of the Bush administration.
The English-language edition of the German paper Die Welt has a guide to the Web sites of axis members (links are at the bottom of the page). What about other potential U.S. adversaries that didn't make the axis' cut? Consider this report:
Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil," Libya, China, and Syria today announced they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil," which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of his State of the Union address. . . .
Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil.
"They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
This is an actual satire, from SatireWire.com. Not so easy to tell the difference, is it?
A First Step Against Iraq
America has agreed to restore congressionally mandated funding to the Iraqi National Congress, the BBC reports. The money had been withheld because of accounting irregularities.
Axis Mania Grips World (3 Feb 2002)
"In Speech, Bush Calls Iraq, Iran and North Korea 'Axis of Evil"
-- N.Y. Times, 1/30/02
ANGERED BY SNUBBING, LIBYA, CHINA and SYRIA FORM "AXIS OF JUST AS EVIL"
Cuba, Sudan, Serbia Form Axis of Somewhat Evil; Other Nations Start Own Clubs
Beijing -- Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil," Libya, China, and Syria today announced they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil," which they said would be way eviler than "that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of" in his State of the Union address.
Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. "Right. They are Just as Evil... in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. "Everybody knows we're the best evils... best at being evil... we're the best."
Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil. "They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"An Axis can't have more than three countries," explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So you can only have three. And a secret handshake. Ours is wicked cool."
THE AXIS PANDEMIC
International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered.
Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what became a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan, and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much Evil Really As Just Generally Disagreeable.
With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics.
Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Be Allowed to Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick. "That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do," said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.
While wondering if the other nations of the world weren't perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axes, although he rejected the establishment of the Axis of Countries Whose Names End in "Guay," accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chadguay denied the charges.
Israel, meanwhile, insisted it didn't want to join any Axis, but privately, world leaders said that's only because no one asked them.
Date: Sun, 03 Feb 2002
From: American Patriot Friends Network <APFN@apfn.org>
Subject: ENRON + Afghanistan + 911 OR THE OTHER WAY AROUND!
ENRON = U.S. Trade and Development Agency = Oil via Afghanistan = 911
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=17711
[snip]
Natural Gas - The United States has supported trans-Caspian routes for Central Asian oil and gas as an alternative to pipelines passing though Iran. The U.S. Trade and Development Agency funded a $750,000 feasibility study conducted by Enron for a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, and another feasibility study was also completed by Unocal. On May 21, 1999 Turkey and Turkmenistan signed a 30-year agreement to ship 700 bcf/year of Turkmen gas to Turkey, with the rest exported to Europe. Georgia has proposed that trans-Caspian pipeline could also be linked to the Russian natural gas pipeline system.
[snip]
To Pakistan via Afghanistan Oil - Turkmenistan has signed a memorandum of understanding with Afghanistan and Pakistan to build a 1 million bbl/d pipeline to carry petroleum to Pakistan and world markets via Afghanistan. This eastward route, along with one to China, is one of the few alternatives to the Iranian route for exporting Central Asian oil to Asian markets. InOctober 1997, a tripartite commission comprising the Islamic State of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan was formed to start work on building this pipeline. Two competing groups, led by Bridas of Argentina and Unocal of the United States, offered to build the pipelines.
[snip]
Caspian Sea Oil and Natural Gas Export Routes (Watch this site get pulled)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/casproute.html
U.S. Trade and Development Agency - (have pulled sites in ref to Enron)
http://www.tda.gov/
Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Enron Development Corp. ˜ Prof. James Lee
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=17706
CHENEY LIED ABOUT HALLIBURTON MULTIBILLION$$ IRAQ DEALS
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=17676
EXCELLENT! ENRON STUFF-FindLaw Legal News
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=17702
From: owner-prus@cchconline.org
Subject: RELEASE: HHS Surveillance Plan Unveiled
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Thursday, January 31, 2002
Citizens' Council on Health Care 1954 University Ave. W., Suite 8 St. Paul, MN 55104 http://www.cchconline.org
CONTACT:Twila Brase, R.N., President PHONE: 651-646-8935
HHS Unveils 24/7 Plan to Track Patients
St. Paul, Minnesota-The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services today released $1.1 billion and a plan to build government health surveillance systems in every state. The stated goal: to enhance public health infrastructure for bioterrorism preparedness. The plan: government access to 'everyone's' medical record through their hospitals and doctor's offices.
"The public was never consulted about this plan. The very idea that government officials plan to get a direct line into the medical records of patients should outrage citizens. Private medical records are not public data," said Twila Brase, R.N., president of Citizens' Council on Health Care (CCHC), a health care policy organization in St. Paul, Minnesota.
State must draw up a plan to present to HHS by no later than April 15, 2002. Sixteen criteria must be part of each state plan, including:
* Timeline for development of a state-wide plan for response to a bioterrorist event, infectious disease outbreak, or other public health emergency.
* Ability to receive and evaluate urgent disease reports from all parts of the jurisdiction on a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week basis.
* Communication systems that provide a 24/7 flow of critical health information between hospital emergency departments, State and local health officials, and law enforcement.
"The HHS plan represents a greater danger to patients than bioterrorism," said Brase. "Just knowing government officials and police officers will receive patient data without patient consent will change the way patients interact with the health care system. They may not tell their doctors the whole story. They may come for care too late. They may receive the wrong diagnoses, the wrong treatment, the wrong advice."
Legislative requirements for meeting HHS criteria were built into the Model Emergency State 'Health Powers Act' released in October by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Act, now under consideration in 'all' 50 State legislatures, requires ongoing 'reporting' by health care 'providers' and 'pharmacists to the state public health department'. It also permits epidemiological research 'without' patient consent, at 'both' the state and federal level.
"This plan is 'not just about bioterrorism'. HHS officials plan to use patients for medical research 'without' their consent," said Brase. "Public health officials have long expressed a desire to 'track and tag the entire population'. They hope September 11th will make their dreams come true."
