MAY LOVE PREVAIL ON EARTH
July 13, 2004
Veracity Series #10: Is Democracy Doomed? Why Would Megakillers Care Anyway?
Hello everyone
I feel terrible to have to bring to your attention in the middle of summer - a time of leisurely enjoyment of life and of the beauties of nature - the matters covered in this compilation. The fact I never made such an admission to you before is a telling sign of just how powerfully difficult to fathom are the subjects considered below, especially the item #9 on the depleted uranium which I just finished reading as I prepare to send this compilation out - and which saddens me deeply and makes me nearly despair about our future, at least in this 3rd dimension... which is probably why shifting to the next dimension is the only way for life to continue onward in the future on this practically doomed planet.
Wrecking the genetic foundation of life - forever! - is the deadly legacy the Pentagon and their political henchmen are leaving us - forever! - and I hardly see how, save for a true cosmic miracle, we can be spared the ignominious sufferings and slow painful decay our planet is falling into...
Forever! To our time-scale anyway!...
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
P.S. This will be my only compilation for this week.
Free subscription to such compilations by sending a blank email to earthrainbownetwork-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
This compilation is archived http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/Archives2004/Veracity10.htm
"The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy. Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government's own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout. (...) Nearly 700,000 American Gulf War Veterans returned to the US from a war that lasted just a few weeks. Today more than 240,000 of those soldiers are on permanent medical disability, and over 11,000 are dead. In a US Government study on post-Gulf War babies born to 251 veterans, 67 per cent of the babies were reported to have serious illnesses or serious birth defects. They were born without eyes, ears, had missing organs, fused fingers, thyroid or other malfunctions. Depleted uranium in the semen of the soldiers internally contaminated their wives. Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time. Women in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are afraid now to have babies, and when they do give birth, instead of asking if it is a girl or a boy, they ask "is it normal?"."
- Leuren Moret -- Taken from "Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War" below - a MUST nightmarish read!
"None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
- Johann Goethe
"The FCC Act of 1934 says the electronic media must be responsible to the people or it can’t operate. Now the media monopolies have created a situation where there is less of a democratic discussion than ever before. I experience this as a candidate because the themes I raise challenge the status quo. I don’t get the coverage the other candidates do. The other day I talked about the media role in taking us into Iraq, and about their accountability. But the problem is we can’t put a face on the media, personify it. It’s amorphous. So for that reason, it’s more vulnerable, but it’s also more difficult to pin it down. It’s a paradox. Your point is well taken, about demanding accountability. The media is responsible in large part for the situation in Iraq. If the media had done its homework, Bush wouldn’t have had the confidence to proceed. The media helped to build the Cold War. The media was a spear-carrier for the government. Eisenhower talked about the military-industrial complex, but now its military-industrial-media complex, and their airwaves become marketing tools for war."
- Dennis Kucinich -- Taken from http://www.newtimes.org/issue/0402/kucinich.html
Recommended by Patty-Lynne Herlevi pherlevi@yahoo.com>
Worthy of Your Attention
The New Pearl Harbor - by David Ray Griffin
http://www.thinkingpeace.com/Lib/lib104.html
Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 -- "That 9/11 has become a defining moment in our history cannot be gainsaid. But its exact significance is an exceedingly contentious question notwithstanding the seeming clarity of prevailing accounts. David Ray Griffin deconstructs those accounts with a host of unresolved puzzles strongly suggestive of some sort of culpable complicity by US officials in the event. His book presents an incontrovertible argument of the need for a genuinely full and independent investigation of that infamous day. "--Douglas Sturm, Presidential Professor of Religion and Political Science, Emeritus, Bucknell University (...) "Was the U.S.'s failure to defend itself against the attacks on Sept. 11 a comedy of errors or a brilliant, if cynical, plot by highly placed government officials, or something else? We'll never know as long as the administration stonewalls efforts to get information. But such relatively reliable information as is now available is assembled in this book, so that citizens can come to more informed judgments about the nature and functioning of our government. This is a must read for all who want to get past the conspiracy of silence and mystification that surrounds these events. "-- John B. Cobb, Jr., Professor of Theology, Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University -- Recommended by "David Lorimer" dl@scimednet.org> who wrote: "Wonder if you have seen David Ray Griffin's 'The New Pearl Harbor' (SUNY Press) - it's essential reading on 9/11." Much more details at http://www.google.ca/search?q=The+New+Pearl+Harbor&ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
CONTENTS
1. Saint Francis message
2. The grieving parents who might yet bring Bush down
3. Petition to save the Alaska Wildlife Preserve
4. Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger
5. Bush Coordinating War on Terror With Election
6. U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack
7. Kerry-Edwards: Democrats finalize their pro-war, millionaires’ ticket
8. Against "Anybody But Bush:" An Open Letter to Progressives
9. Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War
10. VeriChip: RFID Microchip Implants for Humans
See also:
The Process Did It (July 13, 2004)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts55.html
(...) The only open question is whether President Bush was an active participant in the disinformation or was deceived like the American public. If he knowingly participated in the deception, he must be impeached. If he was deceived by his own appointees, why hasn’t he fired them? Bush’s reelection would signify that the American people lack the competence or character for self-rule. The report from the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence proves once again that government lacks the moral integrity to conduct an investigation. The senators did not bring responsibility to any individuals for a gratuitous invasion that has generated hatred of, and insecurity for, Americans for decades to come. Instead, the senators’ report held accountable that which cannot be held accountable: "the process." November will tell us whether there is any moral integrity left in the electorate or whether nothing remains but partisan politics – my party right or wrong.
Millions flee South Asia floods (July 12, 2004)
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/07/12/southasia.floods.reut/index.html
Boys run through the floodwaters in Baihata, India.RELATEDGallery: Flooding in South Asia YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS Asia Flood Activate or Create your own Manage alerts | What is this? GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) -- Overflowing rivers, snakebites and landslides have killed dozens of people in South Asia and forced millions from their homes in the worst monsoon flooding in years, officials said Monday. More than 5 million people were marooned or left homeless in low-lying parts of eastern India, Bangladesh and Nepal as river waters flooded huge swathes of land.Thousands were stuck on rooftops, waiting for military helicopters to rescue them or provide food.The chief minister of India's northeastern Assam state, where 2 million have been made homeless, appealed for international aid, saying the state was battling the worst floods in recent years. CLIP
Climate warning from the deep (July 12, 2004)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/3879841.stm
Strange things are happening in the North Sea. Cod stocks are slumping faster than over-fishing can account for, and Mediterranean species like red mullet are migrating north. Several sea birds are also in trouble. Kittiwake numbers are falling fast and guillemots are struggling to breed.And, earlier this summer, hundreds of fulmar (a relative of the albatross)corpses washed up on the Norfolk coast, having apparently starved to death. Scientists suspect these events are linked and they are trying to work out how. Nothing is certain yet, but some believe a dramatic change in North Sea plankton is responsible. And, what is more, they blame global warming. Global changes Plankton are microscopic free-floating marine organisms. Globally they are of vital importance. CLIP
Doom and Gloom by 2100 (July 2004 issue)
http://tinyurl.com/29bav
Unleashed viruses, environmental disaster, gray goo--astronomer Sir Martin Rees calculates that civilization has only a 50-50 chance of making it to the 22nd century
Systematic Slaughter Unfolds in Sudan (10 July 2004)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071204K.shtml
(...) In April, when the world marked 10 years since the 1994 slaughter that killed at least 500,000 in Rwanda, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that a new genocide could unfold in Sudan. Since then, U.N. officials have shied away from such politically loaded terms, saying Janjaweed fighters appear to include members of some of the same three main ethnic groups targeted in the raids. U.N. officials estimate that between 15,000 and 30,000 people have been killed. But some analysts put the figure much higher. Many victims were left where they fell, their families too frightened to stop to bury them. While men are often shot on sight, women are being abducted and raped, refugees say. Sakina Mohammed Idris, a 19-year-old student, said she was grabbed from her boarding school and taken with 41 other women and girls on a 21-day forced march through the desert. "On the way, they would rape the girls and steal cattle," said the young woman, who was among the estimated 12,000 people living in makeshift shelters at Zam Zam camp, near the North Darfur town Al-Fasher. When the men tired of the girls, they were released. "They spoiled me three times," Idris said sadly. U.N. agencies have struggled to raise new funds for a country already plagued by a two-decade civil war and major famine in 1998. They have secured only about a third of the $349.5 million they need to respond to the crisis on both sides of the border. Humanitarian workers are only helping 80 of the more than 130 concentrations of displaced people identified in Darfur. More will be cut off when the rainy season makes many roads impassible. Following overlapping visits by Annan and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, el-Bashir has promised to send 6,000 soldiers and police to Darfur to disarm the Janjaweed and other armed groups. But rebel leaders accuse the government of merely integrating Janjaweed fighters into local police and defense forces. U.N. leaders say success in containing the violence and averting more deaths will depend on continued international pressure and vigilance. "This is going to be a crisis for years to come," Egeland said. "We are afraid that when the secretary-general is gone ... this crisis will be forgotten."
Saddam's Party Given Power in New Iraq Government (July 11, 2004)
http://www.iraq.net/displayarticle4686.html
It is a political party that presided over some of the most heinous war crimes of the modern age including the gassing of more than 5,000 innocent Kurds, institutionalised torture, murder and rape. Now the party that acted as the wheels of the repressive regime that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq is being invited into the fold, as the US has allowed the former dictator's Ba'ath party to join the country's new assembly. (...) Last week the Saudi newspaper Asharq al Awsat commented: "It seems that the most prominent achievement of the Anglo-Saxon occupation of Iraq has been to liberate the Ba’ath party from Saddam Hussein more than to liberate Iraq itself from Saddam Hussein."
Anger in Samarra over US Military's Tactics
http://www.iraq.net/displayarticle4676.html
SAMARRA (July 10, 2004) - Anger is building up in this northern Iraqi city against what residents see as an indiscriminate and heavy handed US military approach in dealing with the entrenched insurgency here. The frail and bandaged body of Ali Aziz, 12, lies on a hospital bed surrounded by his tearful parents and relatives. "Is this the democracy they have come to offer us?" asks his father Aziz Yahya, 50, telling AFP that Ali suffered severe burns and shrapnel cuts when a missile landed in their home Thursday. (...) Four Iraqi civilians, including a senior Sunni Muslim cleric, were killed and 33 wounded when missiles rained down on a mosque and nearby homes in the central Al-Mutasem neighborhood, also known locally as the Al-Bubaz. Samarra's latest bloodshed started when a car bomb, coupled with a mortar attack, hit the local headquarters of the Iraqi National Guard, killing five US soldiers and two Iraqi guardsmen, and wounded 18 soldiers. CLIP
Legal Consequences Of The Construction Of A Wall In The Occupied Palestinian Territory
http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/imwp/imwpframe.htm
Israeli Isolation (10 July 2004)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071204H.shtml
In the last ten days, Ariel Sharon's government has registered two major legal defeats. On June 30, the Israeli Supreme Court, without questioning the legitimacy of the "wall of separation" constructed along the West Bank, ordered that its course be modified. By "separating the - Palestinian - inhabitants from their lands," the court wrote, the army "violates their rights according to international humanitarian law." This reference to international humanitarian law was a first for the court. Friday, July 9, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recommended that "an end be put to the illegal situation resulting from the wall's construction." The Court demands that Israel - which points out that its security has increased since construction of the wall - dismantle 200 km of existing wall that enclose hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It demands that Israel indemnify those whose property has been "destroyed" in order to erect this wall. CLIP
UN Will Rebuild Homes Destroyed by Israel
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F7F01F8D-FCF8-4A22-B20A-B189C6B39794.htm
(July 11, 2004) -- Last May, a three-day Israeli military operation along the Gaza-Egypt border resulted in the demolition of 100 homes, leaving some 1000 Palestinian civilians homeless. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees is to rebuild homes for some of the 15,000 people made homeless by an Israeli policy of home demolitions. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reached an agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and another UN agency to build 700 homes for Palestinians left homeless because of direct Israeli action in Rafah, Southern Gaza. (...) The agency said in June it needed nearly $45m to build homes for 9000 Palestinian refugees made homeless since 2000 by Israeli army raids in Rafah. Areas of Rafah were in complete ruin after Israeli operations Israel says the number of Palestinian homes destroyed by its army and the number of people made homeless is far lower than the figures reported by UNWRA. It says its forces only destroy buildings used by resistance fighters to hide weapons-smuggling tunnels or as "gunmen's nests" to launch attacks against Israeli forces. But UNWRA statistics dispute Israeli claims and point to more than 22,000 homeless Palestinians due to Israeli occupation army operations in Gaza since the start of the Palestinian intifada almost four years ago. Palestinians say home demolitions are a form of collective punishment. CLIP
Republican Leadership Hijacks U.S. House To Defeat Sanders‚ USA PATRIOT Act Amendment
http://bernie.house.gov
A New World of Oil - Surprised in October? (July 11)
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=5863
(...) Perhaps more significant, the Saudi statement speaks volumes about the true state of supply/demand in the oil market. The kingdom's actions may in fact constitute an implicit fait accompli, an acceptance of their inability to increase production substantially beyond current levels, bringing the days of peak oil production ominously closer. The latter point is especially germane to those who continue to harbor thoughts of a return to cheap oil. It remains the consensus among investors on Wall Street and among a number of policy makers in the West that current high prices are a temporary aberration. Such misplaced optimism mirrors the stated (inflated) production targets of oil companies and oil-producing nations. Oil companies themselves appear to be consistently overly optimistic because of their desire to convey to investors that they still have attractive growth prospects. This was certainly the case with Shell, which only recently sacked its CEO and director of exploration for persistently overstating the company's reserves. (...) "It now appears that world oil production, about 80 million barrels a day, will soon peak. In fact, conventional oil production has already peaked and is declining. For every 10 barrels of conventional oil consumed, only four new barrels are discovered. Without the unconventional oil from tar sands, liquefied natural gas and other deposits, world production would have peaked several years ago... CLIP
FEMA worker ordered home (July 08, 2004)
http://www.wvgazette.com/section/News/2004070734
Woman, husband wore T-shirts with anti-Bush logo at July Fourth rally - A worker with the Federal Emergency Management Agency who wore an anti-Bush T-shirt at the president's July Fourth rally in Charleston has been sent home to Texas. Nicole Rank, who was working for FEMA in West Virginia, and her husband,Jeff, were removed from the Capitol grounds in handcuffs shortly before Bush's speech. The pair wore T-shirts with the message "Love America, Hate Bush." CLIP
Sonic Weapons to be Deployed at Political Conventions?
http://mindcontrol.twoday.net/stories/263743/
Master Blaster: A New Weapon for Homeland Security -- American Technology Corporation has designed a Long Range Acoustic Device, a megaphone with unprecedented clarity and aim that can shoot compact sound waves across several hundred yards at up to 150 decibels. Miami, Los Angeles, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the Department of Homeland Security are considering purchases. With protesters coming to New York and Boston for the conventions, might we see the first domestic use this summer?
Omega-News Collection 6. July 2004
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/258989/
Omega-News Collection 8. July 2004
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/261130/
Omega-News Collection 12. July 2004
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/263992/
1.
Date: 11 Jul 2004
From: Patty-Lynne Herlevi pherlevi@yahoo.com>
Subject: Saint Francis message
Bonjour Jean,
After reading the latest compilation, I was disturbed by the idea that one writer mentioned that we must only focus on the light. I once thought the same thing, but I didn't feel comfortable with those words this time because I realize that we are all projecting our shadows onto others and denying one of the polarities in favor of the other instead of balancing the forces. This can only lead to self-righteousness or an us verses them attitude as I have discovered.
Now, Saint Francis began working with me around two years ago. I had been heavily involved working with animal spirits or totems and in a conversation with my mother who was raised Catholic, I suddenly asked her about Saint Francis (I call him by his Italian name, Francesco). After that conversation, I felt the presence of Francesco strongly in my life. We communicate on a regular basis and he has handed me some extremely challenging lessons, including learning humility.
So last night around 2 a.m. I felt the urge to perform automatic writing in this is what Francesco had to say on the subject of light and darkness.
The first words are my own and then they flow into Francesco's words. I will use quotes where his words begin. Consider this part one since the message is quite long and talks about identity, love and other issues.
I keep reading about how we need to move away from darkness and embrace the light. I think now this is erroneous thinking because what we must do is balance the light and darkness so that we no longer experience polarities. We must embrace our shadow or at least acknowledge it so that we do not project the parts of us we consider evil onto others.
"It is easy to point at some other entity for polluting the planet instead of looking at our own behavior and how each of us contributes to pollution of the planet. It is easy to point the finger at someone else and label them evil as if we have never performed any acts of "evil" in our own lives or thought about committing those acts. Even judging others could be considered, "evil."
I think a lot of what we see in the world are projections of our disowned selves and the way to heal our planet, is to heal ourselves and reclaim these disowned selves.
Also remember that if you walk into a dark room and flip on the light, you will see those things that you have bumped into. You will finally see that creature that has been growling in the corner and perhaps it is not as ferocious as you originally thought or perhaps you will find the courage within yourself to face the creature which more than likely is your deepest fear.
In any case there is an obsession with fear in this society. Either people are greatly attracted to fear--look at the rise of thrillers and suspense movies on the market or at people that are repulsed by it--people who practice light spirituality only which I think is unbalanced spirituality. And what you need to remember is that the more light you put into the world, the more darkness you will encounter. The more wise and powerful you become, the more dark energy will arrive in your life for you to transmute.
Think of the shaman that descends and journeys into dark places, often terrifying realms to retrieve souls or answers to their client's questions. If the shaman refused to go to these dark places, then healing could not occur and balance in the clients lives could not be restored. So be careful when you advise others to embrace the light as if doing this is shooing away darkness."
Namaste,
Patty-Lynne Herlevi
recording a message from Saint Francis
AND MY REPLY WAS (in part):
Personally I feel both perspectives are complementary and do not necessarily contradict each other. Some people are more comfortable at this point in their life to nurture only what they believe if of the light, while others have no problem keeping an eye of what is not yet of the light while pursuing their own life mission which may have to do with confronting more directly these disturbing energies and actions so as to bring more Light to shine on them and eventually help transmute them back into perfectly balanced energies and actions.
I ALSO SENT PATTY-LYNNE'S EMAIL TO KALAMA TO SEE IF SHE WOULD LIKE TO RESPOND TO THAT COMMENT AND SHE WROTE BACK (in part)...
These are the KNOWN words of St. Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace... where there is hatred, let me sow love...where there is injury, pardon.... where there is doubt, faith... where there is darkness, light and where there is sadness, joy.
There is no talk by St Francis about balancing the dark and the light. My intention is the same... sowing love, light, faith, joy, peace. We do this daily with our words. We are too keenly aware of the darkness that exists in the world and within our own hearts. Do we wish to continue to struggle with it? Can we not try to sow another way?
If we look at the concepts of science... quantum physics, the Power of Intention by Dr. Wayne Dyer, the quantum healing by Deepak Chopra, the wonderful movie What the Bleep do we know, etc. ... the message is the same... we have a choice. We create based on our words, thoughts, feelings. As we focus with strong feeling and energy on anything, we actually create more of it. As we lose attention on anything, it goes to the background of the field of possibilities. It remains, but not in the forefront of awareness.
What do we want to create? More of the same? Something better? That works for more of us? Do we want to create a more balanced life by adding more light than we now experience as a planet and society? Will we have more light if all we do is keep our focus on what is? HOW will we do this and how will this be any different than what we have been doing for centuries?
Patti Cota-Robles has said that it takes only 51% of the conscious energy working with the light to create a shift. I choose to work with the light for this end. There is no judgement about the dark or mention of fear... those are the words of the letter writer.
Blessings to you,
Kalama
Kalama Hawkrider kalama52@yahoo.com>
2.
From: "Maggie Erotokritou" surya@spidernet.com.cy>
Date: 11 Jul 2004
Subject: The grieving parents who might yet bring Bush down
At a time when investigations into whether the war in Iraq was justified, and when the Bush administration and others involved and Prime Minister Tony Blair are being asked to come forward and answer pertinent questions about what really happened in Iraq and why, the ultimate prevailing thought in so many people's mind is that we want peace and enough of war, no more. Enough of lies and deception. It has been prophesized that many will be called forth to explain their actions and and these will be brought to the surface and revealed. This now seems to be happening everywhere, has the time of truth and retribution finally come?
Let us clearly hold the candle of peace steadily within our hearts and not let it falter for even a second until these glimmering lights everywhere create one light that maintains permanent peace all over the world. We wait patiently for that day to come.
Following is a relevant and interesting article that was published today in the Guardian.
Love and blessings,
Maggie
---
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1258117,00.html
The grieving parents who might yet bring Bush down
The families of dead American soldiers have overcome censorship and fear
Naomi Klein Saturday
July 10, 2004
The Guardian
There is a remarkable scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 when Lila Lipscomb talks with an anti-war activist outside the White House about the death of her 26-year-old son, Michael, in Iraq. A pro-war passer-by doesn't like what she overhears and announces: "This is all staged!"
Ms Lipscomb turns to the woman, her voice shaking with rage, and says: "My son is not a stage. He was killed in Karbala, April 2. It is not a stage. My son is dead." Then she walks away and cries: "I need my son."
Watching Ms Lipscomb doubled over in pain on the White House lawn, I was reminded of other mothers who have taken the loss of their children to the seat of power and changed the fate of wars. During Argentina's dirty war, a group of women whose children had been "disappeared" by the military regime gathered every Thursday in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. At a time when all public protest was banned, they would walk silently in circles, wearing white headscarves and carrying photographs of their missing children.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo revolutionised human rights activism by transforming maternal grief from a cause for pity into an unstoppable political force. The generals could not attack the mothers openly, so they launched fierce covert operations against their organisation. But the mothers kept walking, playing a significant role in the eventual collapse of the dictatorship.
Unlike the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who march together every week to this day, in Fahrenheit 9/11 Lila Lipscomb stands alone, hurling her fury at the White House. But Lila Lipscomb is not alone. Other American and British parents whose children have died in Iraq are also coming forward to condemn their governments, and their moral outrage could help to end the military conflict still raging in Iraq.
Last week, Nadia McCaffrey, a California resident, defied the Bush administration by inviting news cameras to photograph the arrival of her son's casket from Iraq. The White House has banned photography of flag-draped coffins arriving at air force bases, but because Patrick McCaffrey's remains were flown into the Sacramento International airport, his mother was able to invite the photographers inside. "I don't care what [President Bush] wants," Ms McCaffrey declared, telling her local newspaper: "Enough war."
Just as Patrick McCaffrey's body was coming home to California, another soldier was killed in Iraq: 19-year-old Gordon Gentle, from Glasgow.
Upon hearing the news, his mother, Rose Gentle, immediately blamed the government of Tony Blair, saying: "My son was just a bit of meat to them, just a number...This is not our war, my son has died in their war over oil."
And just as Rose Gentle was saying those words, Michael Berg happened to be visiting London to speak at an anti-war rally. Since the beheading of his 26-year-old son, Nicholas, who had been working in Iraq as a contractor, Michael Berg has insisted that "Nicholas Berg died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld". Asked by an Australian journalist whether such bold statements were "making the war seem fruitless", Mr Berg responded: "The only fruit of war is death and grief and sorrow. There is no other fruit."
It is as if these parents have lost more than their children - as if they have also lost their fear, allowing them to speak with great clarity and power. This represents a dangerous challenge to the Bush administration, which likes to claim a monopoly on "moral clarity". Victims of war and their families aren't supposed to interpret their losses for themselves, they are supposed to leave that to the flags, ribbons, medals and three-gun salutes.
Parents and spouses are supposed to accept their tremendous losses with stoic patriotism, never asking whether a death could have been avoided, never questioning how their loved ones are used to justify more killing. At Patrick McCaffrey's military funeral last week, Paul Harris, the chaplain of the 579th Engineer Battalion, informed the mourners: "What Patrick was doing was good and right and noble...There are thousands, no, millions, of Iraqis who are grateful for his sacrifice."
But Nadia McCaffrey knows better and is insisting on carrying her son's own feelings of deep disappointment from beyond the grave. "He was so ashamed by the prisoner abuse scandal," Ms McCaffrey told the Independent. "He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there."
Freed from the military censors who prevent soldiers from speaking their minds when alive, Lila Lipscomb has also shared her son's doubts about his work in Iraq. In Fahrenheit 9/11, she reads from a letter Michael mailed home. "What in the world is wrong with George, trying to be like his dad, Bush. He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I'm so furious right now, Mama."
Fury is an entirely appropriate response to a system that sends young people to kill other young people in a war that never should have been waged. Yet the American right is forever trying to pathologise anger as something menacing and abnormal, dismissing war opponents as hateful and, in the latest slur, "wild-eyed". This is much harder to do when victims of wars begin to speak for themselves: no one questions the wildness in the eyes of a mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter, or the fury of a soldier who knows that he is being asked to kill, and to die, needlessly.
Many Iraqis who have lost loved ones to foreign aggression have responded by resisting the occupation. Now victims are starting to organise themselves inside the countries that are waging the war. First it was the September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which speaks out against any attempt by the Bush administration to use the deaths of their family members in the World Trade Centre to justify further killings of civilians. Military Families Speak Out has sent delegations of veterans and parents of soldiers to Iraq, while Nadia McCaffrey is planning to form an organisation of mothers who have lost children in Iraq.
American elections always seem to swing on some parental demographic or other; last time it was soccer moms, this time it is supposed to be Nascar [stock-car racing] dads. On Sunday, Nascar champion Dale Earnhardt Junior said that he had taken his buddies to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and that "it's a good thing as an American to go see". It seems as if there may be another demographic that swings this election: not soccer moms or Nascar dads but the parents of victims of the war. They don't have the numbers to change the outcome in swing states, but they might just change something more powerful: the hearts and minds of Americans.
. Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows
http://www.nologo.org
Planetary Awakening Network Co-ordinator Maggie Erotokritou contact surya@spidernet.com.cy
3.
Date: 13 Jul 2004
From: Annie smilingmoon14@yahoo.com>
Subject: Petition to save the Alaska Wildlife Preserve / An Important Message from Robert Redford...
For the sake of the Alaska Wildlife Preserve PLEASE take a couple of seconds and sign this petition. Thanks!!!
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Dear NRDC BioGems Defender,
I wanted you to know that the Bush administration is using the recent rise in gasoline prices as a pretext to sacrifice one of America's greatest natural treasures -- the Western Arctic Reserve of Alaska -- to massive oil development.
We have a very narrow window in which to block this corporate-sponsored raid on our natural heritage. Over the next 30 days, the Bush administration is taking public comments on its plan to put 96 percent of the reserve's wildlife-filled northeast region on the auction block.
I am asking you and hundreds of thousands of others to join me in flooding the Bush administration with messages of protest over the next critical weeks.
Please do your part by going to http://www.savebiogems.org/westernarctic/takeaction.asp?RR0407 and sending an electronic message telling the Bureau of Land Management to withdraw its destructive plan and to permanently protect the reserve's world- class wildlife habitats.
Then please forward my message to as many people as you can.
The Western Arctic Reserve may be less well-known than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- which lies directly to the east -- but its wildlife populations are every bit as unique, spectacular and endangered.
I am especially concerned about the Western Arctic Reserve's Teshekpuk Lake region -- one of the most important tundra-wetland ecosystems left on our planet. This vast network of coastal lagoons, deep water lakes, sedge grass meadows and braided streams provides the critical calving grounds for the 45,000-member Teshekpuk Lake caribou herd.
Thirty percent of all Pacific black brant also take refuge in these safe and remote wetlands, remaining flightless while they replace their old feathers. Steller's eiders, northern pin! tails, tundra swans and rare yellow-billed loons are just a few of the other amazing species that flock to Teshekpuk Lake to nest, free from disturbance. Come fall, some of these birds will migrate as far south as Antarctica.
Polar bears roam the coastal areas of Teshekpuk Lake from summer to early winter. And people are counting on the lake for survival as well. The Inupiat Eskimos have subsisted here in balance with nature for at least 8,000 years by following the herds of caribou.
Incredibly, the Western Arctic has never been granted full federal protection. That's because it was set aside as the "National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska" nearly a century ago. But Congress also stipulated that this oil field be tapped only in time of dire national need.
Our government kept oil rigs out of the Western Arctic Reserve even during the darkest days of World War II and the oil embargo of the 1970s. As a result, most of the res! erve has remained pristine -- its primeval beauty unmarred by roads, oil rigs or other signs of human interference.
Interior secretaries since the 1970s have recognized the need for special protection in the Teshekpuk Lake area. But if the Bush administration gets its way, Teshekpuk Lake will soon be stripped of most of those protections and sold to the highest bidder.
And for what? Drilling in the Western Arctic would have no effect on gas prices at the pump. Its oil would take years to get to market and would never equal more than one or two percent of America's oil supply -- a tiny drop in the bucket of our nation's oil consumption.
Only one group would benefit from destroying the Western Arctic: the oil giants. Meanwhile, they would turn one of the planet's most fragile homes for Arctic wildlife into an industrial zone of pipelines, producing wells and contaminated waste sites.
The Western Arctic Reserve is supposed to be an energy savings account of last resort. A recent poll shows that the vast majority of Americans would rather save oil and lower gas prices by adopting tougher fuel economy standards for our cars and trucks.
Please join me in telling the Bush administration to follow the cleaner and more self-reliant path of fuel efficiency -- and to put Teshekpuk Lake and other critical habitats off limits to the oil industry.
Please go to http://www.savebiogems.org/westernarctic/takeaction.asp?RR0407 and tell the Bush administration to withdraw its destructive plan. And remember to forward my message to your friends, colleagues and family.
This fight represents one of our very last chances to preserve untrammeled wilderness as we first found it. Let's speak with one voice and stop this senseless attack on one of the world's greatest sanctuaries for Arctic wildlife. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Robert Redford Board of Trustees Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
. . .
BioGems: Saving Endangered Wild Places A project of the Natural Resources Defense Council http://www.savebiogems.org
URGENT WARNING FROM SOMEONE WHO OUGHT TO KNOW...
4.
From: http://www.thinkingpeace.com/pages/articles.html
Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger
by Al Gore
June 25, 2004 | When we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an Executive, whether he be a King or a president. Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power. It is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear.
It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's stewardship at the beginning of this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, according to our new president is that he - the president - label any citizen an "unlawful enemy combatant," and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty - even for the rest of his life, if the president so chooses. And there is no appeal.
What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners - and that any law or treaty, which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the constitution our founders put together.
What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he has the inherent power - even without a declaration of war by the Congress - to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States.
How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current President's recent claim, in Department of Justice legal opinions, that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as Commander in Chief.
I think it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in American democracy and that they would feel that we are now facing a clear and present danger that has the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.
Shouldn't we be equally concerned? And shouldn't we ask ourselves how we have come to this point?
CLIP
In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by an aroused congress whose bipartisan members know they stand before the judgment of history. We cannot depend up on a debased department of Justice given over to the hands of zealots. "Congressional oversight" and "special prosecution" are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns: it is by bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves. Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a society or as a people: it came from the belief that in the end, this was a country which would pursue justice as the compass pursues the pole: that although we might deviate, we would return and find our path. This is what we must now do.
5.
MORE URGENT WARNINGS
From: "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net>
Subject: Bush Coordinating War on Terror With Election
Date: 9 Jul 2004
THE DAILY MIS-LEAD
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1158650&l=44444
BUSH COORDINATING WAR ON TERROR WITH ELECTION
In the months after the tragic attacks of 9/11, President Bush told the American people that he had "no ambition whatsoever to use [the War on Terror] as a political issue."[1] But according to a new report, the Bush Administration is now demanding that international allies coordinate the arrest of al Qaeda terrorists to coincide with key U.S. political events, so as to maximize political benefits for the President.
According to the New Republic, top Pakistani intelligence officials have confirmed that the Bush Administration is demanding the Pakistani government find as many "high value" terrorist targets specifically before Americans go to the polls in November. By contrast, no similar urgent push or "timetable" was discussed in 2002 or 2003. Even more troubling, Pakistani sources admit White House aides told the Pakistani Director of Intelligence that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any high value terrorist target] were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July" - the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.[2]
The report calls into question whether key military decisions were affected by similar political motivations during the last three years. For instance, during 2002 and 2003 when al Qaeda was regrouping along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the Bush administration refused calls to seriously increase operations there. Only in March of 2004 - once the Presidential election campaign had begun -- did the President finally announce "stepped up efforts" in Afghanistan to find bin Laden.[3]
Sources:
1. "Republicans, Democrats seek political returns on 9/11, terror war," TwinCities.com, 4/01/04
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1158650&l=44445
2. "Pakistan for Bush. July Surprise?," New Republic, 7/07/2004 http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1158650&l=44446
3. "U.S. military announces new operation in Afghanistan," USA Today, 3/13/04
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1158650&l=44447
Visit http://www.misleader.org for more about Bush Administration distortion.
6.
NOW THAT WOULD SOUND THE DEATH KNELL OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA....
From: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5637434
U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack
11 July 2004
Washington - A senior House Democratic lawmaker was skeptical on Sunday of a Bush administration idea to obtain the authority to delay the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda,
U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the presidential election in case of such an attack, Newsweek reported on Sunday.
"I think it's excessive based on what we know," said Rep. Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in a interview on CNN's "Late Edition."
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network want to attack within the United States to try to disrupt the election.
Harman said Ridge's threat warning "was a bust" because it was based on old information.
Newsweek cited unnamed sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department last week to review what legal steps would be needed to delay the vote if an attack occurred on the day before or on election day.
The department was asked to review a letter from DeForest Soaries, chairman of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission, in which he asked Ridge to ask Congress for the power to put off the election in the event of an attack, Newsweek reported in its issue out on Monday.
The commission was created in 2002 to provide funds to states to replace punch card voting systems and provide other assistance in conducting federal elections.
In his letter, Soaries wrote that while New York's Board of Elections suspended primary elections in New York on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election."
Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Rochrkasse told the magazine the agency is reviewing the matter "to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election."
Republican Rep. Christopher Cox of California, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN that the idea of legislation allowing the election to be postponed was similar to what had already been looked at in terms of how to respond to an attack on Congress.
"These are doomsday scenarios. Nobody expects that they're going to happen," he said. "But we're preparing for all these contingencies now."
More related articles at http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071204Y.shtml
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See also:
"Guidelines" for Postponing November Elections by Michel Chossudovsky (July 12)
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO407C.html
"... Credible reporting indicates that Al Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process..."This is sobering information about those who wish to do us harm... But every day we strengthen the security of our nation." (DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, 8 July 2004) Does this last announcement by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge entail a code red emergency scenario of "closing down the country" (prior to the November elections) as conveyed by Secretary Ridge in a previous statement:"If we go to [code] Red ... it basically shuts down the country," (22 December 2003, emphasis added) Homeland Security and the White House no doubt have several "scenarios" in mind to "win" the presidential elections in November. (See Steven Moore, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO407A.html). Recent developments suggest that Homeland Security is indeed contemplating a code red alert. (See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO402A.html). At the same time, the Bush Administration is also maneuvering cautiously behind the scenes, with a view to embedding formal "guidelines" into federal election procedures, which would allow for the cancellation or postponement of an election in the event of a terror attack. CLIP
A Scheme to Cancel the Elections? (July 12, 2004)
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/
Why bother? No matter who wins this November, the War Party will remain in the saddle by Justin Raimondo We're fighting a war to export "democracy" to Iraq – as U.S. government officials openly discuss the possibility of canceling the November elections. While it's no surprise that a government official of any nationality would talk out of both sides of his mouth, in the Bizarro America of the post-9/11 era a distinctly double-jointed rhetorical style seems to have become an all-pervasive aspect of political discourse. (...) It's easier for a political party to get on the ballot in Iraq than it is in the U.S. Which is why it is possible that, in spite of the majority's negative opinion of our widening war in the Middle East, both "major" parties oppose any talk of a U.S. withdrawal. A leaflet handed to me on San Francisco's Fillmore Street, bearing the Kerry for President imprint, calls for "burden sharing," wants NATO to relieve 20,000 American troops (leaving well over 100,000), and wants to overlay the colonial administration with a fresh coat of bureaucracy, a "High Commissioner" who would "move Iraq forward on the road to sovereignty." There is, of course, no indication of just how long that particular road will be, but, in any case, it depends on the success of Kerry's third recommendation: re-arming Iraq. We need "a massive effort to build an Iraqi security force," i.e. a new Iraqi Army.Okay, so, let's see if I get this straight: we just fought (and "won") a war, one that John Kerry voted to authorize, in which the ostensible casus belli was that Iraq was thought to be too heavily armed for the good of the neighborhood. Now we're told we can't leave until the disarmament process is reversed. The dizzying irony of this tortured rationale is the perfect Democratic complement to the Republican concept that we must cancel or postpone elections in order to preserve democracy. CLIP
Only Cowards Cancel Elections By William Rivers Pitt (14 July 2004)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071404A.shtml
A number of trial balloons have been floated in recent days, from Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge specifically, about canceling or postponing the national election because of a terrorist attack. DeForest B. Soaries Jr., the Bush-appointed chairman of the newly minted U.S. Election Assistance Commission, apparently got the ball rolling with Ridge by writing a letter to him. In it, he bade Ridge ask Congress for the power to put off the November election in the event of an attack. There are wild cards shuffled all through this deck. The simple fact, however, is that no national election has ever been cancelled in all of American history. This is not a streak to be broken under any circumstances. In the darkest hours of the Civil War, when the continued existence of the nation was gravely in doubt, Abraham Lincoln wrote, "We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us." CLIP
7.
Recommended by Suzanne Phillips pjsage@laplaza.org> who wrote: "Telling the truth!"
From: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jul2004/edwa-j07.shtml
Statement of the Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate
Kerry-Edwards: Democrats finalize their pro-war, millionaires’ ticket
By Bill Van Auken
7 July 2004
The following statement was issued by the presidential candidate of the SEP in response to John Kerry’s announcement Tuesday that his former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, North Carolina Senator John Edwards, will be his running mate.
With the selection of Senator John Edwards as its vice presidential nominee, the Democratic Party has assembled a pro-war ticket composed of two multi-millionaires.
The choice of Edwards as Kerry’s running mate marks another step in the political disenfranchisement of huge numbers of voters. They include the many thousands who participated in the Democratic primaries earlier this year, mistakenly seeing in the party’s nomination process a means to end the criminal war initiated by the Bush administration against Iraq.
With polls showing substantial majorities opposing the war and nearly half of the population—and a clear majority of Democratic voters—calling for the immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq, the Democrats are fielding two candidates who are every bit as committed as Bush to continuing Washington’s colonial enterprise and the daily carnage suffered by the Iraqi people as well as the US troops sent to occupy the country.
The media reaction to the Edwards choice was predictable: a barrage of banalities about the wealthy trial lawyer’s supposed “fresh-faced charisma” and “southern appeal.” Whatever role such cosmetic calculations played in the decision to tap Edwards, they were entirely secondary. The principal consideration was that Edwards is a man whose political views are fully in sync with the interests of America’s financial oligarchy.
With Edwards’ personal wealth estimated as high as $60 million and the Kerry family fortune reaching into the hundreds of millions, the Democrats have managed to field a ticket that leaves George Bush the poorest candidate from either major party running in the national election. Nothing could more clearly expose the tattered myth that the Democrats are the “party of the people.” The Kerry-Edwards ticket demonstrates once again the iron grip of big money over the entire US two-party system.
Edwards was a co-sponsor of the 2002 legislation granting the Bush administration a blank check to launch the unprovoked war against Iraq, a measure also supported by Kerry. He was among the most vociferous in proclaiming the supposed imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.”
Six months before the war began, Edwards distinguished himself by arguing against those who demanded that the Bush administration obtain UN sanction for its military aggression. The US could “not tie our own hands by requiring Security Council action,” he wrote in September 2003, warning his Senate colleagues not to “try to micromanage a war from Capitol Hill.” In other words, Congress was obliged to cede to Bush unlimited powers to launch a war based on lies that Edwards himself helped spread.
During the Democratic primaries, Edwards, like Kerry, claimed that he had been deceived by the Bush administration and vaguely adapted himself to antiwar sentiment in order to better derail the campaign of Howard Dean, which had attracted a layer of supporters seeking to make the war the central issue in the 2004 election. They worked out a division of labor with Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, the candidate who most openly supported the war—and consequently the least popular in the Democratic field.
Significantly, all three—Kerry, Edwards and Lieberman—are members of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the right-wing Democratic Party organization that has championed the Iraq war as well as reactionary social policies that are virtually indistinguishable from those advanced by the Republican Party.
Now, both Kerry and Edwards have publicly embraced the policies on Iraq—thoroughly rejected in the primaries—of Lieberman, who was at that time the DLC-endorsed candidate. More recently, Kerry penned an opinion piece for the July 4 Washington Post arguing for more troops to deal with the popular resistance to the occupation.
Like the Bush administration, the DLC predicates its foreign and military policy on the pretense that the US is engaged in a global war on terrorism that will last for decades. Its principal document on these issues declares, “We reject the left’s perennial complaint that America spends too much on the military. This is no time to cut the Pentagon’s budget.” This, under conditions in which the Pentagon’s official budget has ballooned to $455 billion and estimates of real US military spending range higher than $700 billion.
Edwards, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has distinguished himself in these circles by arguing that the Bush administration has not taken stringent enough measures regarding “homeland security.” Like Kerry, he voted for the USA Patriot Act, the legislation that has been used to initiate sweeping attacks on basic democratic rights. He goes even further, however, arguing for the creation of the country’s first “domestic intelligence organization,” commonly known in other countries as the political police.
The Democrats propose to use Edwards to make a quasi-populist appeal for votes. They invoke his “humble origins”—his father was a supervisor in a textile mill—and his folksy rhetoric, cultivated during his years as a personal injury lawyer, when it was employed to win multi-million-dollar judgments and huge lawyer’s fees. In announcing his selection of Edwards, Kerry evoked the North Carolina senator’s primary-season rhetoric about “the great divide in this country—the ‘two Americas’— that exists between those who are doing well and those who are struggling to make it from day to day.”
Aside from the fact that both Kerry and Edwards stand quite firmly on the side of the divide that is doing more than well, this populism is empty and cynical. It is impossible to oppose the attacks on working people in the US while supporting the predatory war being waged by the Bush administration in Iraq. These are two sides of the same political agenda, one that is aimed at further enriching the corporate and financial elite by plundering the resources of both the US and the world.
The war in Iraq, and the so-called “war on terror” of which it is supposedly a part, both of which Kerry and Edwards support, provide a rationale for diverting hundreds of billions of dollars from desperately needed domestic needs to military spending and an unprecedented buildup of police and security forces. The price is being paid by the working people, who are seeing what remains of health care benefits, public education subsidies and retirement programs gutted to finance the ever-expanding military budget. At the same time, the eruption of US militarism abroad is used to justify an unprecedented assertion of presidential “war-time” powers and a frontal assault on democratic rights.
Kerry and Edwards are incapable of advancing any policies that address the crisis confronting hundreds of millions of Americans as a result of rising unemployment, declining living standards and the destruction of social benefits. Edwards made a point in his primary campaign of attacking his rivals—including Kerry—for promoting the idea of a right to health care. “People need to know the truth about what we can afford and what we can’t afford,” he protested. The “we” in this case is the ruling elite of multi-millionaires and billionaires whom he represents politically and embodies personally.
In a statement posted on the DLC web site last January, entitled “The right kind of populism,” the organization spelled out precisely the limits of the populism practiced by Edwards. It consists, the DLC says, of a “unifying, forward-looking policy agenda that places the national interest, as embodied in the values and aspirations of the great American middle class, above special interests, including those operating through government, who seek to use public policies to feather their own nests.”
This is the kind of “populism” that lumps together war profiteering by Halliburton with extended benefits for the unemployed or relief for the destitute as “special interests” at odds with the “national interest.”
The article contrasts this fraudulent—and therefore acceptable—populist rhetoric with what it terms a populism based on a “reactionary call for class warfare” and a belief that “capitalism itself is fatally flawed.”
One would suppose that class warfare is some foreign idea being foisted upon the “great American middle class.” On the contrary, a largely one-sided class war has been waged by the financial oligarchy for more than two decades, resulting in the steady transfer of wealth from the vast majority of working people to a relative handful of super-rich. The Democratic Party, aided by the sclerotic scoundrels within the trade union bureaucracy, have worked to assure that no coherent struggle be waged by those on the receiving end of this violent assault.
This effort has gone into high gear with the onset of the election season. The Democrats are using all their political muscle to deny voters the right to support anyone challenging them from the left, maneuvering to prevent candidates of the Socialist Equality Party as well as other third-party and independent candidates from appearing on the 2004 ballot. The underlying assumption is that if they are successful, those who oppose Bush will have no choice but to cast a vote for the Democratic candidates, no matter how similar their policies are to those of the Republicans.
The differences between the two big business parties are essentially of a tactical character. If Kerry-Edwards are selected to replace Bush-Cheney it will, in the final analysis, represent a change of personnel at the top, carried out in order to more effectively pursue class war at home and military aggression abroad. Former Chrysler corporation chairman Lee Iacocca spelled out the thinking within growing sections of the financial oligarchy by endorsing Kerry and declaring, “The bottom line is simple: we need a new CEO and a new president.”
Should such a change take place, millions who voted for the Democrats under the false impression that the replacement of Bush would signal an end to war and the amelioration of unemployment and social deprivation be cruelly disappointed, and will quickly find themselves in conflict with the new government.
The Socialist Equality Party is intervening in the 2004 election to prepare for the inevitable social and political struggles that lie ahead, no matter which of these two parties control the White House in 2005. We insist that nothing will be gained by replacing the criminals of the Republican administration with the scoundrels of the Democratic Party.
The interests and desires of the vast majority of the American people find no expression in either of these parties. The working people are politically disenfranchised. Our campaign—that of my vice presidential running mate Jim Lawrence and myself nationally, and those being waged by Senate, congressional and local candidates of the SEP in different parts of the country—offers the only way forward for the tens of millions of working people, students, professionals and youth searching for a new political road in the fight against imperialist war abroad and social reaction at home.
Our campaign starts from the unpostponable necessity of building an independent mass political movement, founded on a socialist program that seeks to unite working people of every country in a common struggle against global capitalism.
We urge all those seeking a means to fight back against the criminal policies of the Bush administration and its Democratic Party accomplices to join our campaign, participate in the struggle to overcome the anti-democratic obstacles to placing our candidates on the ballot, and make the decision to join and build the Socialist Equality Party.
---
See Also:
Democrats, Republicans to spend $1 billion in US presidential campaign [6 July 2004]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jul2004/elec-j06.shtml
The struggle against war and the 2004 US elections [27 April 2004]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/dn-a27.shtml
8.
Date: 12 Jul 2004
Subject: Against "Anybody But Bush:" An Open Letter to Progressives
From: phyllism5@juno.com
I have read that about 40% of the Democrats won't vote for Kerry since it will be government as usual and both parties are so alike. Kerry is a cousin of the Bush family, a member of the Yale University Skull and Bones Society; and he is also a globalist. He is more subtle than Bush but would not be an improvement.
And remember it was the media that pushed Kerry on us by making the others look not so good (and acting as thought Kucinich does not exist). That makes me realize that Kerry is the easiest for the shadow government to control. That makes me feel helpless about the whole situation. Got any answers???
Here is a must read by one man who has been thinking about this.
Against "Anybody But Bush:" An Open Letter to Progressives
[June, 2004, Joe Smith]
This is a strange election year. Time and again I find that my most bitter disagreements are not with conservatives or mainstream Democrats but with fellow progressives. Everywhere I go I hear those who flirted with third party politics in 2000 lining up to recant the folly of their ways. The mantra of "Anybody but Bush" has become a club of unity wielded by the Democratic Leadership Council and progressive alike to bludgeon into submission those who seek alternatives outside the Democratic Party.
This situation is all the more odd because when I talk politics with my closest friends and associates we agree on all the major issues.
On Iraq we agree that the president lied about the stated reasons for going to war. We agree on the need to bring the troops home and the need to reverse the corrupt economic rebuilding program that has handed huge open-ended contracts to politically connected firms like Halliburton and Bechtel.
We agree that in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal the use of torture was systematic and given the green light at the highest levels in the administration. Systematic not only because torture has also occurred in US run prisons in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo Bay, but because abuse of prisoners is endemic to the criminal justice system here at home. And the Green light was given by officials overzealous in their prosecution of the war on terrorism and by the administrations disregard for the Geneva conventions.
We agree that Bush's tax cuts drove the government from surplus to deficit and that George Bush remains on track to be the worst president since Herbert Hoover when it comes to job creation.
We agree that Bush is the most corporate friendly and most civil rights shredding president in living memory. We know that the administration is all too ready to break the law in its efforts to silence critics even if that means outing CIA-operatives like Valerie Palme working under cover.
We agree, and I think Michael Moore would be with us on this, that the personification of 'radical evil' - the one who wears the pants in the family of evil, as it were -- is sitting in the vice president's office.
We even agree that the problem isn't just about Bush or the Republicans but is about the Democratic Party as well.
We agree that George Bush is the most corrupt and despicable in a long line of corrupt and despicable presidents. And we agree that John Kerry is playing the same big money game and is hopelessly entangled in the same web of special corporate interests.
We agree that being asked to choose between two super-rich, Yalie, skull & bones candidates is incredibly offensive and is symptomatic of some serious problems with the democratic order in this country.
We agree that Democrats and Republicans benefit from that distorted democratic order.
And we agree that in this arrangement progressives feel that their values and concerns remain unrepresented.
But we disagree on the question of tactics.
Many progressives seem to think that the mantra of "Anybody But Bush" presents us with a compelling logic that says we must put aside our politics and place our values on hold. This year we must concentrate our efforts on taking back power from the Republicans by holding our noses as we vote for John Kerry.
Sometimes it feels like everyone seems to think this except me.
To me, all of the above points in a direction away from the Democratic Party and toward the Green Party.
Why? Because electing Democrats does not equal taking back power.
Think about it. The People were never in power under Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was about finishing the Reagan Revolution. To this end Clinton waged class warfare by pushing a neoliberal agenda that included deregulation and free trade in the form of Nafta and the World Trade Organization. He attacked the extension of working class entitlements by burying a debate on universal healthcare and rolled back existing ones by ending welfare as we know it. He gave corporations more freedom and power. He attacked civil liberties in the name of the war on terrorism under the guise of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and signed the odious Defense of Marriage Act. Sure he was good at sounding contrite or warm-hearted depending on the needs of the moment. But actions speak louder than words.
As for John Kerry, at best he is a rehash of the Clinton regime. In fact, this is his strongest selling point. He will roll back Bush and restore the golden age of Clinton.
But will he?
True, John Kerry will be better on civil liberties than George Bush. He will get rid of the ugly faces of John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld and the clique of neoconservatives that has raised the specter of fascism for so many. But the Democrats are also the party of Homeland Security. This new department will continue to threaten our civil rights in the name of the war on terrorism.
And John Kerry has signed onto the Bush foreign policy. He supports escalation of the war in Iraq. He wants to add more troops and do whatever it takes to make the occupation work. He doesn't seem to understand that the war is as wrong as the reasons given for starting it in the first place. He wants to undermine the democratically elected presidency of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. He has backed Bush's in supporting Ariel Sharon as the Israeli premier smashes his way through Rafah and builds "security" walls inside the West Bank. Kerry is not going to abandon the principle of preemptive war or the "right" to strike terrorists wherever they are. He has scolded Spain for their democratic decision to withdraw from Iraq and he has criticized the Australian Labor Party's goal of bringing their troops home by Christmas if elected.
Most disturbingly John Kerry reserves the right to take that war on the road.
In terms of helping ordinary Americans the patrician Kerry has already told us in blunt terms that he is not a "redistribution Democrat." I think we should take his word on this. John Kerry will not be a people's president.
And what of the best of the progressive voices inside the Democratic Party? Dennis Kucinich, who continues to press his primary campaign, will remain a marginal voice within the Democratic Party. As kindred spirit Ralph Nader said of Kucinich's efforts, "It's hard to run a cleanup campaign when you're inside a garbage can."
We need to get out of the garbage can. Dennis Kucinich needs to get out too. The Democratic Party has become poor soil for growing progressive causes. As Green presidential nominee David Cobb reminded us in his acceptance speech at the Green Party Conference in Milwaukee, the Democratic Party primaries are the graveyard of genuine progressive movements.
Come November progressives in various states will face a perplexing array of choices. It is almost certain that the dead hand of Anybody But Bush-ism will still be present. Progressives will be warned that if they vote their values the world will be plunged into an abyss from which there is no return. Nevertheless think twice before you throw your vote away on George Bush or John Kerry.
Remember that presidential elections are filtered through the buffer of the electoral college. That means voters who are not already committed to third party alternatives can check the polls before they leave home to vote. The golden rule of 2000 still holds true. If you live in a Democratic safe state then you can vote against the two-party duopoly without fretting about throwing the election to George Bush. You may even have the choice of two alternatives, the independent candidacy of Ralph Nader and the Green Party nominee David Cobb.
Whatever you do, vote your politics and your conscience. Show the powers that be that another world is still possible.
---
Joe Smith is a writer, educator and activist based in New York City. He is a member of the editorial collective of Gloves Off (http://www.glovesoff.org/).
1 Nader quoted in Shankar Vedantam "An Outsider Tries to Shake the 'Spoiler' Label", Washington Post, June 26, 2004, A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6711-2004Jun25.html
---
Also recommended by Phyllis:
The War on the Dollar
http://www.richardmaybury.com/bulletin-041904.html
Iraq War Entering the Runaway Stage?
http://www.richardmaybury.com/bulletin-042104.html
9.
THE WORST CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY - EVER!
Date: 10 Jul 2004
From: "globalresearch.ca" chossudovsky@videotron.ca>
Subject: Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War
GLOBAL RESEARCH (CANADA) FEATURE ARTICLE
http://www.globalresearch.ca
Centre for Research on Globalisation
Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation
DEPLETED URANIUM: THE TROJAN HORSE OF NUCLEAR WAR
by Leuren Moret
8 July 2004
To consult the complete text with figures and tables click: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR407A.html
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.
Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium — from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India — to the US geostrategic imperatives described in Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book The Grand Chessboard.
The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.
Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government's own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout.
A 2003 independent report for the European Parliament by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), reports that based on Chernobyl studies, low level radiation risk is 100 to 1000 times greater than the International Committee for Radiation Protection models estimate which are based on the flawed Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Studies conducted by the US Government. Referring to the extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of the 46 international radiation expert authors of the ECRR report, describes it as:
"The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide."
1943 MANHATTAN PROJECT BLUEPRINT FOR DEPLETED URANIUM
In a declassified memo to General Leslie R. Groves, dated October 30, 1943, three of the top physicists in the Manhattan Project, Dr James B Conant, A H Compton, and H C Urey, made their recommendation, as members of the Subcommittee of the S-1 Executive Committee, on the "Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon":
"As a gas warfare instrument the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small - There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty - it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough to be extremely damaging."
As a Terrain Contaminant:
"To be used in this manner, the radioactive materials would be spread on the ground either from the air or from the ground if in enemy controlled territory. In order to deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations - Areas so contaminated by radioactive material would be dangerous until the slow natural decay of the material took place - for average terrain no decontaminating methods are known. No effective protective clothing for personnel seems possible of development. Reservoirs or wells would be contaminated or food poisoned with an effect similar to that resulting from inhalation of dust or smoke."
Internal Exposure:
"Particles smaller than 1µ [micron] are more likely to be deposited in the alveoli where they will either remain indefinitely or be absorbed into the lymphatics or blood. They could get into the gastro-intestinal tract from polluted water, or food, or air. They may be absorbed from the lungs or G-I tract into the blood and so distributed throughout the body."
Both the fission products and depleted uranium waste from the Atomic Bomb Project were to be utilised under this plan. The pyrophoric nature of depleted uranium, which causes it to begin to burn at very low temperatures from friction in the gun barrel, made it an ideal radioactive gas weapon then and now. Also it was more available because the amount of depleted uranium produced was much greater than the amount of fission products produced in 1943.
Britain had thoughts of using poisoned gas on Iraq long before 1991:
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good... and it would spread a lively terror..." (Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after the First World War).
GUIDED WEAPONS SYSTEMS
Depleted uranium weapons were first given by the US to Israel for use under US supervision in the 1973 Sinai war against the Arabs. Since then the US has tested, manufactured, and sold depleted uranium weapons systems to 29 countries. An international taboo prevented their use until 1991, when the US broke the taboo and used them for the first time, on the battlefields of Iraq and Kuwait.
The US military admitted using depleted uranium projectiles in tanks and planes, but warheads in missiles and bombs are classified or referred to as a dense‚ or mystery metal‚. Dai Williams, a researcher at the 2003 World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, reported finding 11 US patents for guided weapons systems with the term "depleted uranium" or "dense metal", which from the density can only be depleted uranium or tungsten, in order to fit the dimensions of the warhead.
Extensive carpet bombing, grid bombing, and the frequent use of missiles and depleted uranium bullets on buildings in densely populated areas has occurred in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The discovery that bomb craters in Yugoslavia in 1999 were radioactive, and that an unexploded missile in 1999 contained a depleted uranium warhead, implies that the total amount of depleted uranium used since 1991 has been greatly underestimated. Of even greater concern, is that 100 per cent of the depleted uranium in bombs and missiles is aerosolized upon impact and immediately released into the atmosphere. This amount can be as much as 1.5 tons in the large bombs. In bullets and cannon shells, the amount aerosolized is 40-70 per cent, leaving pieces and unexploded shells in the environment, to provide new sources of radioactive dust and contamination of the groundwater from dissolved depleted uranium metal long after the battles are over, as reported in a 2003 report by the UN Environmental Program on Yugoslavia. Considering that the US has admitted using 34 tons of depleted uranium from bullets and cannon shells in Yugoslavia, and the fact that 35,000 NATO bombing missions occurred there in 1999, potentially the amount of depleted uranium contaminating Yugoslavia and transboundary drift into surrounding countries is staggering.
Because of mysterious illnesses and post-war birth defects reported among Gulf War veterans and civilians in southern Iraq, and radiation related illnesses in UN Peacekeepers serving in Yugoslavia, growing concerns about radiation effects and environmental damage has stirred up international outrage about the use of radioactive weapons by the US after 1991. At the 2003 meeting of parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, discussing the U.S. desire to maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile, the Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi AKIBA stated,
"It is incumbent upon the rest of the world ... to stand up now and tell all of our military leaders that we refuse to be threatened or protected by nuclear weapons. We refuse to live in a world of continually recycled fear and hatred".
ILLEGAL UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW
Four reasons why using depleted uranium weapons violates the UN Convention on Human Rights:
LEGALITY TEST FOR WEAPONS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW
TEMPORAL TEST - Weapons must not continue to act after the battle is over.
ENVIRONMENTAL TEST - Weapons must not be unduly harmful to the environment.
TERRITORIAL TEST - Weapons must not act off of the battlefield.
HUMANENESS TEST - Weapons must not kill or wound inhumanly.
International Human Rights and humanitarian lawyer, Karen Parker, determined that depleted uranium weaponry fails the four tests for legal weapons under international law, and that it is also illegal under the definition of a "poison" weapon. Through Karen Parker's continued efforts, a sub-commission of the UN Human Rights Commission determined in 1996 that depleted uranium is a weapon of mass destruction that should not be used:
RESOLUTION 1996/16 ON STOPPING THE USE OF DEPLETED URANIUM - DU
The military use of DU violates current international humanitarian law, including the principle that there is no unlimited right to choose the means and methods of warfare (Art. 22 Hague Convention VI (HCIV); Art. 35 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva (GP1); the ban on causing unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury (Art. 23 §le HCIV; Art. 35 §2 GP1), indiscriminate warfare (Art. 51 §4c and 5b GP1) as well as the use of poison or poisoned weapons.
The deployment and use of DU violate the principles of international environmental and human rights protection. They contradict the right to life established by the Resolution 1996/16 of the UN Subcommittee on Human Rights.
FOUR NUCLEAR WARS
Although restricted to battlefields in Iraq and Kuwait, the 1991 Gulf War was one of the most toxic and environmentally devastating wars in world history. Oil well fires, the bombing of oil tankers and oil wells which released millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Arabia and desert, and the devastation from tanks and heavy equipment destroyed the desert ecosystem. The long term and far reaching effects, and dispersal of at least 340 tons of depleted uranium weapons, had a global environmental effect. Smoke from the oil fires was later found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii. Large annual dust storms originating in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia will quickly spread the radioactive contamination around the world, and weathering of old depleted uranium munitions on battlefields and other areas will provide new sources of radioactive contamination in future years. Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes.
RADIATION RESPECTS NO BORDERS, NO SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS, AND NO RELIGION
The expendability of the sanctity of life to achieve US political ends was described by US soldiers on the ground, and from the air, along the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991:
"Iraqi soldiers [whether they] be young boys or old men. They were a sad sight, with absolutely no fight left in them. Their leaders had cut their Achilles' tendons so they couldn't run away and then left them. What weapons they had were in bad repair and little ammunition was on hand. They were hungry, cold, and scared. The hate I had for any Iraqi dissipated. These people had no business being on a battlefield." (S Hersh, New Yorker , May 22, 2000)
American pilots bombing and strafing, with depleted uranium weapons, helpless retreating Iraqi soldiers who had already surrendered, exclaimed:
"We toasted him - we hit the jackpot - a turkey shoot - shooting fish in a barrel - basically just sitting ducks. There's just nothing like it. It's the biggest Fourth of July show you've ever seen, and to see those tanks just "boom", and more stuff just keeps spewing out of them - they just become white hot. It's wonderful." (L A Times and Washington Post, both February 27, 1991)
Nearly 700,000 American Gulf War Veterans returned to the US from a war that lasted just a few weeks. Today more than 240,000 of those soldiers are on permanent medical disability, and over 11,000 are dead. In a US Government study on post-Gulf War babies born to 251 veterans, 67 per cent of the babies were reported to have serious illnesses or serious birth defects. They were born without eyes, ears, had missing organs, fused fingers, thyroid or other malfunctions. Depleted uranium in the semen of the soldiers internally contaminated their wives. Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time. Women in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are afraid now to have babies, and when they do give birth, instead of asking if it is a girl or a boy, they ask "is it normal?".
Soldiers who served in Bradley fighting vehicles, where it was common to sit on ammunition boxes where depleted uranium ammunition was stored, are now reporting that many have rectal cancer.
For the first time, medical doctors in Yugoslavia and Iraq have reported multiple in situ unrelated cancers developing in patients, and even in families who are living in highly contaminated areas. Even stranger, they report that cancer was unknown in previous generations. Very rare and unusual cancers and birth defects have also been reported to be increasing above normal levels prior to 1991, not only in war torn countries, but in neighbouring countries from transboundary contamination.
Dr. Keith Baverstock, a senior radiation advisor who was on the staff of the World Health Organization, co-authored a report in November 2001, warning that the long-term health effects of depleted uranium would endanger Iraq's civilian population, and that the dry climate would increase exposure from the tiny particles blowing around and be inhaled for years to come. The WHO refused to give him permission to publish the study, bowing to pressure from the IAEA. Dr. Baverstock released the damning report to the media in February 2004. Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of the UN Environment Program's Post-Conflict Assessment Unit in Geneva, shares Baverstock's anxiety about depleted uranium but UNEP experts have not been allowed into Iraq to assess the pollution.
"DEPLETED URANIUM SCARE" - Claimed by President George W. Bush on the official White House website:
"During the Gulf War, coalition forces used armor-piercing ammunition made from depleted uranium, which is ideal for the purpose because of its great density. In recent years, the Iraqi regime has made substantial efforts to promote the false claim that the depleted uranium rounds fired by coalition forces have caused cancers and birth defects in Iraq. Iraq has distributed horrifying pictures of children with birth defects and linked them to depleted uranium. The campaign has two major propaganda assets:"
"Uranium is a name that has frightening associations in the mind of the average person, which makes the lie relatively easy to sell; and Iraq could take advantage of an established international network of antinuclear activists who had already launched their own campaign against depleted uranium."
"But scientists working for the World Health Organization, the UN Environmental Programme, and the European Union could find no health effects linked to exposure to depleted uranium."
The US war in Afghanistan made it clear that this was not a war IN the third world, but a war AGAINST the third world. In Afghanistan where 800 to 1000 tons of depleted uranium was estimated to have been used in 2001, even uneducated Afghanis understand the impact these weapons have had on their children and on future generations:
"After the Americans destroyed our village and killed many of us, we also lost our houses and have nothing to eat. However, we would have endured these miseries and even accepted them, if the Americans had not sentenced us all to death. When I saw my deformed grandson, I realized that my hopes of the future have vanished for good, different from the hopelessness of the Russian barbarism, even though at that time I lost my older son Shafiqullah. This time, however, I know we are part of the invisible genocide brought on us by America, a silent death from which I know we will not escape." (Jooma Khan of Laghman province, March 2003)
In 1990, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) wrote a report warning about the potential health and environmental catastrophe from the use of depleted uranium weapons. The health effects had been known for a long time. The report sent to the UK government warned "in their estimation, if 50 tonnes of residual DU dust remained in the region‚ there could be half a million extra cancers by the end of the century [2000]." Estimates of depleted uranium weapons used in 1991, now range from the Pentagon's admitted 325 tons, to other scientific bodies who put the figure as high as 900 tons. That would make the number of estimated cancers as high as 9,000,000, depending on the amount used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the 2003 Gulf War, estimates of 2200 tons have been given — causing about 22,000,000 new cancer cases. Altogether the total number of cancer patients estimated using the UKAEA data would be 25,250,000. In July of 1998, the CIA estimated the population of Iraq to be approximately 24,683,313.
Ironically, the UN Resolution 661 calling for sanctions against Iraq, was signed on Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1990.
THE PARALLELS
War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
- Ludwig von Mises
The parallels between Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are startlingly similar. The weapons used, the unfair treaties offered by the US, and the bombing and destruction of the environment and entire infrastructure. In every city of Iraq and Yugoslavia, the television and radio stations were bombed.
Educational centres were targeted, and stores where educational materials were sold were destroyed on nearly the same day. Under UN sanctions, Iraq was not even allowed pencils for schoolchildren. Cultural antiquities and historical treasures were targeted and destroyed in all three countries, a kind of cultural and historical cleansing, a collective national psychic trauma.
The permanent radioactive contamination and environmental devastation of all three countries is unprecedented, resulting in huge increases in cancer and birth defects following the attacks. These will increase over time from unknown effects due to chronic exposure, increasing internal levels of radiation from depleted uranium dust, and permanent genetic effects passed on to future generations. Clearly, this has been a genocidal plan from the start.
What has happened to Human Rights, to the Rights of the Child, to civil society, and to common humanity?
It is up to the citizens of the world to stop the depleted uranium wars, and future nuclear wars, causing irreversible devastation. There are just a few generations left before the collapse of our environment, and then it will be too late. We can be no healthier than the health of the environment — we breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat food from the same soil.
"Our collective gene pool of life, evolving for hundreds of millions of years has been seriously damaged in less than the past fifty. The time remaining to reverse this culture of lemming death‚ is on the wane. In the future, what will you tell our grandchildren about what you did in the prime of your life to turn around this death process?" (Rosalie Bertell, 1982)
THE DEEPER PURPOSE: G*O*D* [Gold, Oil, and Drugs]
"We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source, of at least a proportion of the oil which we require." (British Royal Commission, agreeing with Winston Churchill's policy towards Iraq 1913).
"It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas." (US President George W. Bush, Beaverton, Oregon, Sep. 25, 2000).
"If they turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs (surface-to-air missiles). They know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need." (US Brig. General William Looney in 1999, referring to Iraq).
Millions of years ago, before India crashed into the Eurasian continent and uplifted the Himalayas, the ancient shallow Tethys sea stretched from the Atlantic across what is now the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian and Aral seas. Rich oil deposits are now located where ancient life accumulated and cooked‚ under just the right conditions to form large oil deposits in the ancient sediments. Long before 1991, Unocal in Afghanistan, Amoco in Yugoslavia, and various oil companies interested in Iraq oil deposits, had conducted extensive exploration and characterisation of oil deposits in the Middle East and Central Asian regions, including the northern half of India.
Britain has maintained an interest in Middle Eastern oil deposits for a century, and has been the staunchest military partner of the US since the first depleted uranium war in 1991 in Iraq. Germany, another military partner in Yugoslavia with forces now in Afghanistan, was one of the major economic beneficiaries of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the colonisation of the Balkans. US interest in Yugoslavia had much to do with building pipelines from Central Asia to the Mediterranean warm water ports in Yugoslavia. A silent and hidden partnership between the US and Japan provided large amounts of cash from Japan to finance the 1991 Iraq and 1995/1999 Yugoslavian wars, with additional help in Afghanistan by providing not only cash, but fuel for the war, from Aegis warships of the Japanese Self Defense Forces in the Indian Ocean. Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi, and Halliburton are now partners in a Central Asian oil pipeline project. In 2004, despite much citizen opposition in Japan, the Japanese government has sent Self Defense Forces to Iraq for "reconstruction". This action taken by the Japanese government, of placing troops on the ground in a war zone, will lead to rescinding Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which forever prohibits military aggression by Japan.
THE IRON TRIANGLE (all under one roof): MILITARY, BIG BUSINESS, POLITICS
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
But what do oil, military partners, depleted uranium wars, and US foreign policy have to do with nuclear weapons? The answer came to me in 1991 when I became a whistleblower at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory near San Francisco, California. Richard Berta, the Western Regional Inspector for the Department of Energy, told me "The Pentagon exists for the oil companies and the nuclear weapons labs exist for the Pentagon."
Depleted uranium was used beginning in 1991 for three reasons:
- To test the radiobiological effects of 4th generation nuclear weapons, which are still under development
- To blur and break down the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons
- To make it easier to reintroduce nuclear weapons into the US military arsenal
Today, the US is number one in 4th generation nuclear weapons research and development, followed by Japan and Germany tied for number two, and Russia and other countries follow.
The Carlyle Group, a private massive equity firm, the 12th largest defense business with an obscenely high profit margin, is a business "arrangement" between the Bush and Bin Laden families, wealthy Saudis, former British Prime Minister John Major, James Baker III, Afsaneh Masheyekhi, Frank Carlucci, Colin Powell, other former US Government administrators, and Madeleine Albright's daughter. The Carlyle Group is the "gatekeeper" to the Saudi investment community. It owns 70 percent of Lockheed Martin Marietta, the largest military contractor in the US, and because Carlyle is privately owned, has no scrutiny or accountability whatsoever. A journalist who calls himself "a skunk at the garden party" described investigating the Carlyle Group, he said "it's like shadow boxing with a ghost". The Group hires as lobbyists the best known politicians from around the world, in order to influence the politics of war, and privately profit from their previous public policies. The conflict of interest is obvious: President George W. Bush is creating wars as his father, former President George Bush, is globally peddling weapons and "protection". Lockheed Martin Marietta now owns Sandia Laboratories, a private contractor that makes the trigger for nuclear weapons, with a Sandia laboratory facility across the street from Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories, where the nuclear bombs are made.
At the May 2003 University of California Regents meeting which I attended, Admiral Linton Brooks was present and newly in charge of the nuclear weapons programme under the Department of Energy. Admiral Brooks informed California Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante and the UC Regents that the management contract for the nuclear weapons laboratories, held unchallenged by the University of California for over 60 years, will be put up for competitive bid in 2005. The favoured institution, with a faculty member on the "blue ribbon committee" making the contract award, is the University of Texas. This privatisation and management contract transfer of the US nuclear weapons programme will put control of the US nuclear weapons programme close to the Carlyle Group. The incestuous relationship between the US government, private companies, and the Bush and Bin Laden families in a way answers many of the lingering questions in everyone's minds about many of the ill fated decisions and policies that have been implemented.
* * *
Leuren Moret has worked at two US nuclear weapons laboratories as a geoscientist. In 1991 she became a whistleblower at the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, and since then has worked as an independent citizen scientist and radiation specialist in communities around the world, and contributed to the UN subcommission investigating depleted uranium. Her research is available on the internet and at http://www.mindfully.org . In 2003, she testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held in Japan. She is a Global Research Contributing Editor, a City of Berkeley Environmental Commissioner, and the Past President of the Association for Women Geoscientists.
Copyright Leuren Moret 2004. This article was published in World Affairs - The Journal of International Issues, July 2004
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR407A.html
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10.
ANOTHER GROWING ORWELLIAN CONCERN...
From: http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=74&contentid=900
VeriChip: RFID Microchip Implants for Humans
by URI DOWBENKO
First it was cattle. Then it was pets. Now it's Mexicans.
Will Americans be next?
In Mexico, implantable and trackable micro-chips for humans, which can be used to store personal information, like medical, military, criminal and credit history, have been introduced by Applied Digital Solutions of Palm Beach, Florida.
Its brand name is Verichip, and it's a tiny microchip the size of a grain of rice that is implanted under the skin.
In Mexico, which is suffering an epidemic of kidnappings for ransom, the device may be touted as "LoJack for People."
After the chip is implanted, government and hospital officials use a
scanning device to download a serial number to access the name, ID and personal history of the individual on their computer.
Applied Digital Solutions, which produces the controversial "Digital Angel" tracking device, as well as the "Verichip," also claims it is developing technology to use satellites to track people.
For government officials, the implications are obvious.
Anyone designated as a so-called "terrorist" can be tracked wherever they go with an implanted microchip.
In fact, eventually an entire micro-chipped population can be more easily tracked, managed and controlled by any government to make sure it’s compliant to the State's will.
In its report, CNN blithely (and falsely) states that "while the idea of using the chip to track people has raised privacy concerns in the United States, the idea has been popular with Mexicans."
This implies that Mexicans don't care about privacy, and will even stand in line just to get their microchip implants, as long as they will be allowed to move to the United States.
The CNN story also falsely implies that Mexicans will pay the $150 cost for the microchip injection plus the $50 annual fee for the "privilege" of being tracked like cattle.
That's probably on every Mexican's top priority list -- right after getting his or her daily burrito.
The IT Government market for Applied Digital Solutions, however, appears to be wide open, since the scanning device and related software cost $1,200.
The downside to the technology? Currently VeriChip can confirm a kidnap victim's identity -- only after the body is found.
YOUR FUTURE I.D. IS UNDER YOUR SKIN
According to the press release, "VeriChip is a secure, subdermal, radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip about the size of a grain of rice that can be used in a variety of security, financial, emergency identification and other applications."
This matter-of-fact description of the device is sure to alarm Christians, since it may be identified as the proverbial Mark of the Beast from Revelations, without which “no man might buy or sell save he that had the Mark.”
"In October 2002, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that VeriChip is not a regulated device with regard to its security, financial, personal identification/safety applications,” the press release contionues, “but that VeriChip's healthcare information applications are subject to regulation by the FDA in the United States."
Let's see if the FDA ruling can be deciphered. It's OK if the VeriChip tracks your credit report history, but not OK if it's used to inform doctors you're diabetic? This will undoubtedly be used as an argument to justify the VeriChip as a so-called "medical device" in the future.
The live "chipping" event in Mexico was billed as a "simple, outpatient procedure that requires only a few minutes for a local anesthetic and insertion of the chip with a specially designed needle."
This could actually be the start of a brand new low-cost underground industry. First there were back alley abortions. Then punk garage bands. Can basement microchip insertions be far behind?
HAPPY CHIPPED MEXICANS LOVE THEIR NEW SLAVERY
Even testimonials by satisfied customers were used to promote the “chipping” event by Applied Digital Solutions in Mexico.
For example, according to the VeriChip press release, Manuel Rosillo says, "I used to lead a normal, active life, but I never imagined I'd have a health problem as serious as this at my age. So far, I've suffered two heart attacks. I've undergone heart surgery and I'm under permanent treatment and medical supervision, which makes VeriChip an extremely useful product for me."
In other words, doctors at the hospital could monitor Senor Rosillo, while he was having another heart attack -- and dying at a remote location.
Another VeriChip testimonial comes from Francisco Pujano who says, "I was extremely interested in having a VeriChip implant after suffering a cerebral aneurysm. When I have an attack, I don't remember where I am or understand what's happening around me, and it can sometimes last for a long time, so for safety reasons, I opted for VeriChip."
Imagine how this could have helped George Bush -- while he was choking on that Enron Pretzel a while back.
FROM RFID'S TO NATIONAL I.D. CARD IMPLANTS
So how do RFIDs work?
Patented in 1973, Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFIDs) are very small (11 mm) microchips, which act as transponders (a combination of transmitter and responder), which are always listening for a radio signal sent by the transceivers, or RFID readers. When a transponder receives a radio query, it transmits its unique ID code back to the transceiver.
RFID tags are already in use in the United States, including ID chips for cats and dogs, EZPass for highway tollbooths, and gas cards like ExxonMobil's SpeedPass.
Government officials have discussed putting RFID tags on all vital documents -- paper money, passports, drivers' licenses, passports, stock certificates, university diplomas, medical degrees/ licenses, birth certificates, and so on. In other words, these are the documents necessary for daily life in a "civilized" society.
With implantable microchips containing this information, external microchips (RFIDs) will be a moot point.
A National ID Card-Chip is the logical extension of this technology.
Currently the VeriChip, an RFID microchip tag, has been sold as a way to keep track of errant pets, wandering children and mindless Alzheimers patients.
Future potential uses are, however, much more sinister. For example, delegates to the Chinese Communist Party Congress were required to wear RFID-chipped badges, so their movements could be tracked and recorded. The Chinese correctly assumed that this procedure will cut down on defections to the West.
The next step is also obvious. Who needs a badge when you require your delegates -- or your employees -- or your citizens -- to have a microchip ID implanted in their arms?
Applied Digital Solutions Chairman/ CEO Scott R. Silverman must be salivating at the Global Slave Labor Market with its billions and billions of potential microchip implantees.
NEW IMPROVED IMPERIAL I.D.
It's not difficult to imagine a future which degenerates into a nightmare world where all transactions are tracked and stored on a global basis. The microchip implant makes 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance of any individual a sobering reality.
Today you can crush, puncture or microwave the RFID tag in the jeans you bought at Walmart -- but you can't demagnetize it.
If your ID is under your skin, the only way to get rid of it is to dig it out with an Exacto blade -- a science fiction scenario which is about to become very real.
Of course, this will also bring about a black market of phoney chips and reprogrammed IDs.
While the Roman Empire had tesserae (ID tags) for its slaves, the New American Empire will require more sophisticated devices to keep track of their "citizens."
Since Global High Tech Feudalism is the political-economic model of the future, implantable ID chips will be inevitably marketed to young people as being "cool" -- like the fad for body piercing and tattoos.
VeriChip's own cutesy advertising tagline is "Get Chipped," as in "Hey Mom, can I get chipped?"
The Human MicroChip Implant Scam is here and now. It is the latest affront to human liberty and dignity, disguised as a "simple" means for more "security" and more "comfort."
Rest assured, however, that a new generation of hackers are already working on ways to subvert this technology.
As William Gibson, author of "Neuromancer" wrote, "The street has its own uses..."
* * *
Uri Dowbenko is the author of "Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy" (http://www.conspiracydigest.com/urisbook.html), available at Barnes and Noble and Borders stores nationwide.He can be reached at u.dowbenko@lycos.com
See also:
From the official VeriChip Implants website
http://www.adsx.com/prodservpart/verichip.html
VeriChip is a miniaturized, implantable radio frequency identification device (RFID) that has the potential to be used in a variety of security, financial, and other applications. About the size of a grain of rice, each VeriChip product contains a unique verification number and will be available in several formats. The verification number is captured by briefly passing a proprietary scanner over the VeriChip. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the verification number. Security Identification In the security field, the company is actively developing applications for VeriChip in a variety of security, defense, homeland security and secure-access applications. These opportunities include using VeriChip to control authorized access to government installations and private-sector buildings, nuclear power plants, national research laboratories, correctional facilities, and sensitive transportation resources. VeriChip can enhance airport security, airline security, cruise ship security, intelligent transportation and port congestion management. In these markets, VeriChip could function as a stand-alone, tamper-proof personal verification technology or it could operate in conjunction with other security technologies such as standard ID badges and advanced biometric devices (i.e. retina scanners, thumbprint readers or face recognition devices). The Company recently unveiled VeriPass(tm) and VeriTag(tm), which will allow airport and port security personnel to link a VeriChip subscriber to his or her luggage (both during check-in and on the airplane), flight manifest logs and airline or law enforcement software databases. The concept of using VeriChip as a means for secure access could also be extended to include a range of consumer products such as PCs, laptops, cars, cell phones, and even homes and apartments. Financial Identification In the financial arena, the company sees enormous, untapped potential for VeriChip as a personal verification technology that could help to curb identity theft and prevent fraudulent access to banking (especially via ATMs) and credit card accounts. VeriChip's tamper-proof, personal verification technology would provide banking and credit card customers with the added protection of knowing their accounts could not be accessed unless they themselves initiated -- and were physically present during -- the transaction. How VeriChip Works An implantable, 12mm by 2.1mm radio frequency device, VeriChip is about the size of the point of a typical ballpoint pen. It contains a unique verification number. Utilizing an external scanner, radio frequency energy passes through the skin energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal containing the verification number. The number is displayed by the scanner and transmitted to a secure data storage site by authorized personnel via telephone or Internet.
Mark of the Beast: Get Chipped (TM)
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=74&contentid=1134
by VERICHIP/ APPLIED DIGITAL EDITOR'S NOTE: This is NOT a joke. These idiots are dead serious. Photo shows VeriChip brand Mark of the Beast TM)Get Chipped: VeriChip Pre-Registration Program VeriChip, the world’s first subdermal personal verification technology, announces a special, introductory pre-registration program. Sign up today to be among the first in the world to “Get Chipped.” We invite you to fill out the pre-registration form below to qualify for this special introductory offer for the first 100,000 registrants and all qualified ADS Shareholders. CLIP
Technology gets under clubbers' skin (June 9, 2004)
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/09/spain.club/
(CNN) -- Queuing to get into one nightclub in Spain could soon be a thing of the past for regular customers thanks to a tiny computer chip implanted under their skin. The technology, known as a VeriChip, also means nightclubbers can leave their cash and cards at home and buy drinks using a scanner. The bill can then be paid later. The system is also designed to curb identity theft and prevent fraudulent access to credit card accounts that is increasingly common in crowded restaurants and clubs. Clubbers who want to join the scheme at Baja Beach Club in Barcelona pay 125 euros for the VeriChip -- about the size of a grain of rice -- to be implanted in their body. Then when they pass through a scanner the chip is activated and it emits a signal containing the individual's number, which is then transmitted to a secure data storage site. CLIP
Japanese school children to be chipped (July 08 2004)
http://networks.silicon.com/lans/0,39024663,39122042,00.htm
Japanese authorities decide tracking is best way to protect kids The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school. The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids' movements. The chips will be put onto kids' schoolbags, name tags or clothing in one Wakayama prefecture school. Denmark's Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray. RFID is more commonly found in supermarket and other retailers' supply chains, however, companies are now seeking more innovative ways to derive value from the tracking technology. US airline Delta recently announced it would be using RFID to track travellers' luggage.
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