Esophageal cancer linked to osteoporosis drugs
Wed Dec 31, 2008 10:31pm GMT
BOSTON (Reuters) - Merck's popular osteoporosis drug Fosamax and other similar drugs may carry a risk for esophageal cancer, a Food and Drug Administration official said on Wednesday.
Diane Wysowski of the FDA's division of drug risk asessment said researchers should check into potential links between so called bisphosphonate drugs and cancer.
In a letter in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, Wysowski said since the initial marketing of Fosamax, known generically as alendronate, in 1995, the FDA has received 23 reports in which patients developed esophageal tumors.
Typically, two years lapsed between the start of the drug and the development of esophageal cancer. Eight patients died, she reported.
In Europe and Japan, 21 cases involving Fosamax have been logged, with another six instances where Procter & Gamble's Actonel or risedronate and Didronel or etidronate, and Roche's Boniva (ibandronate) may have been involved. Six of those people died.
Esophagitis, which is an inflammation of the lining of the tube carrying food to the stomach, is already know to be a side effect of the drugs, which is why patients are instructed to remain upright for at least a half hour after taking them.
In addition, Wysowski said, doctors should avoid prescribing the drugs to people with Barrett's esophagus, which is a change in the lining that leads to the stomach. It is often found in people with acid reflux disease and itself increases the risk of cancer.
In November the FDA said that clinical trial data showed no overall risk of heart rhythm problems in patients taking bisphosphonates.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Vitamin B1 Reverses Kidney Damage in Diabetics, So Why Won't Doctors Recommend It?
Vitamin B1 Reverses Kidney Damage in Diabetics, So Why Won't Doctors Recommend It?
Monday, December 29, 2008 by: Mike Adams, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) New research shows that the low-cost vitamin Thiamine (vitamin B1) reverses kidney damage in diabetics, restoring the ability of the kidneys to function without allowing proteins to spill over into the urine.
The finding proves that a very low-cost treatment is highly effective and could serve as a low-cost nutritional therapy for diabetics, ultimately saving tens of millions of dollars a year in medical treatment costs in the U.S. alone.
The research was conducted at Warwick University in the UK. Predictably, the UK version of the American Diabetes Association (called "Diabetes UK") took the new evidence as an opportunity to tell people to avoid nutritional therapies. As reported by the BBC, Dr. Iain Frame said, "We would like to stress that it's still too early to come to any firm conclusions about the role of vitamin B1 and we would not advise that people look to vitamin supplements to reduce their risk of kidney complications at this stage."
In other words, it's the same advice diabetics get in the United States: Don't you dare use vitamins to enhance and protect your health... use pharmaceuticals instead!
More than three-fourths of the populations in both the U.S. and U.K. are deficient in thiamine. The deficiency can be easily corrected with nutritional supplementation.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, does not believe there is any vitamin or nutrient in the known universe that prevents or treats any disease or health condition. This is actually the official position of the FDA, and thus anyone selling vitamin B1 who also claims the vitamin could reverse diabetic kidney damage would be violating FDA regulations and subjected to arrest at gunpoint. Any doctor recommending vitamin B1 for the same purpose could be stripped of his license to practice medicine.
Why orthodox medicine opposes nutrition
The entire orthodox medical system in both the U.S. and U.K. is dead set against the use of vitamins to prevent or treat any disease. Rather than embracing vitamins that could greatly ease human suffering and save billions of dollars in health care costs, the corrupt medical authorities of both nations conspire to discredit vitamins and limit patients to the use of highly-profitable, yet dangerously toxic drugs.
And each time new research surfaces, showing the remarkable health benefits of a vitamin, these same medical authorities immediately denounce those vitamins, insisting that "more research is needed."
That's code for "we'll never advocate it." Whether we're talking about vitamin D (which prevents cancer), vitamin E (which prevents heart disease) or any of the B vitamins, conventional medicine remains unconditionally opposed to any patient using vitamins for any purpose whatsoever.
This isn't based on evidence, and it isn't about science; it's about politics and profits. Vitamins are discredited precisely because they threaten the profits of Big Pharma and strip power from doctors by allowing patients to prevent and treat their own health conditions are home (for pennies on the dollar).
Most conventional medical practitioners literally believe that vitamins are nutritionally worthless in the human body, but that people suffer from "pharmaceutical deficiencies" that can only be corrected through the lifetime use of prescription drugs (statin drugs, for example).
Monday, December 29, 2008 by: Mike Adams, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) New research shows that the low-cost vitamin Thiamine (vitamin B1) reverses kidney damage in diabetics, restoring the ability of the kidneys to function without allowing proteins to spill over into the urine.
The finding proves that a very low-cost treatment is highly effective and could serve as a low-cost nutritional therapy for diabetics, ultimately saving tens of millions of dollars a year in medical treatment costs in the U.S. alone.
The research was conducted at Warwick University in the UK. Predictably, the UK version of the American Diabetes Association (called "Diabetes UK") took the new evidence as an opportunity to tell people to avoid nutritional therapies. As reported by the BBC, Dr. Iain Frame said, "We would like to stress that it's still too early to come to any firm conclusions about the role of vitamin B1 and we would not advise that people look to vitamin supplements to reduce their risk of kidney complications at this stage."
In other words, it's the same advice diabetics get in the United States: Don't you dare use vitamins to enhance and protect your health... use pharmaceuticals instead!
More than three-fourths of the populations in both the U.S. and U.K. are deficient in thiamine. The deficiency can be easily corrected with nutritional supplementation.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, does not believe there is any vitamin or nutrient in the known universe that prevents or treats any disease or health condition. This is actually the official position of the FDA, and thus anyone selling vitamin B1 who also claims the vitamin could reverse diabetic kidney damage would be violating FDA regulations and subjected to arrest at gunpoint. Any doctor recommending vitamin B1 for the same purpose could be stripped of his license to practice medicine.
Why orthodox medicine opposes nutrition
The entire orthodox medical system in both the U.S. and U.K. is dead set against the use of vitamins to prevent or treat any disease. Rather than embracing vitamins that could greatly ease human suffering and save billions of dollars in health care costs, the corrupt medical authorities of both nations conspire to discredit vitamins and limit patients to the use of highly-profitable, yet dangerously toxic drugs.
And each time new research surfaces, showing the remarkable health benefits of a vitamin, these same medical authorities immediately denounce those vitamins, insisting that "more research is needed."
That's code for "we'll never advocate it." Whether we're talking about vitamin D (which prevents cancer), vitamin E (which prevents heart disease) or any of the B vitamins, conventional medicine remains unconditionally opposed to any patient using vitamins for any purpose whatsoever.
This isn't based on evidence, and it isn't about science; it's about politics and profits. Vitamins are discredited precisely because they threaten the profits of Big Pharma and strip power from doctors by allowing patients to prevent and treat their own health conditions are home (for pennies on the dollar).
Most conventional medical practitioners literally believe that vitamins are nutritionally worthless in the human body, but that people suffer from "pharmaceutical deficiencies" that can only be corrected through the lifetime use of prescription drugs (statin drugs, for example).
Global warming: The new eugenics
Global warming: The new eugenics
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911): 'The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind.'
Henry Lamb - December 27, 2008
Eugenics pioneer, Francis Galton, defined eugenics as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”
Global warming can be defined as: “The study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the environmental quality of future generations.”
The eugenics movement and the global warming movement are similar in many respects. Both ideas were introduced by scientists, advanced by politicians, popularized by the media, embraced as a moral necessity, resulted in severe consequences and eventually rejected as harmful hogwash.
Eugenics, thankfully, has run its course. Global warming, however, is approaching its zenith, just before imposing severe consequences, and is, perhaps, still a generation away from being rejected as the hogwash it is.
Early in the last century, eugenics was called a science that justified public policies that promoted selective breeding among humans and attempted to force sterilization among the “lower classes” of people who did not fit the vision of popular eugenicists. In this century, what is called science is used to justify public policies that promote prescribed lifestyles and attempts to penalize people whose choices do not fit the vision of popular global warming zealots.
Scientists, politicians, preachers and ordinary people who doubted the doctrine of eugenics were outcasts, subject to ridicule and worse. Scientists, politicians, preachers and ordinary people who doubt the doctrine of global warming are outcasts, ridiculed and worse.
The eugenics movement, carried to its logical conclusion by Hitler, killed millions of innocent people. Global warming, when carried to its logical conclusion, will kill far more people than eugenics, and cause incomprehensible agony to people who desperately need affordable energy to survive and prosper.
The goal of the global warming movement is to end the use of fossil fuel. Proponents of this movement claim that fossil fuel use is “killing God’s green Earth,” as one popular TV ad declares. They claim that the use of alternative energy will save the planet for future generations.
Eugenics proponents claimed that selective breeding would constantly improve society by eliminating the lower classes destined for perpetual poverty. They were wrong. Global warming proponents are also wrong in their claims. The use of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide which certainly does not kill God’s green Earth – it enhances it. Carbon dioxide is to vegetation what oxygen is to people – essential to life. It is an indisputable fact that vegetation growth and production is enhanced in direct proportion to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The idea that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is “killing God’s green Earth” is as preposterous as the idea that society would be better if it consisted only of blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.
Were President-elect Obama taking office 100 years ago, he would undoubtedly be filling his cabinet with eugenics experts. This is a reasonable conclusion because he has obviously bought into the popular global warming movement and is filling his cabinet with people who share his vision.
The more than 31,000 scientists who reject this vision are outcasts, and are ridiculed by the elite politicians who are caught up in the global warming movement. More than 650 climate scientists, many of whom have been a part of the U.N. global warming studies, have publicly renounced the claims of the global warming movement.
These people too, are outcasts, ridiculed by the Obama global warming elite.
The tragedy is that the consequences of the proposed global warming policies will be as painful as the consequences of eugenics policies. People will die. Many more millions will be denied access to energy that could provide affordable life-saving refrigeration, heat, transportation and energy for industry.
These consequences are unnecessary. Fossil fuel energy is affordable and available for at least another century. Laws that arbitrarily deny use of this available resource are as unconscionable as the laws that forced sterilization 100 years ago.
Society was not made better by the eugenics movement; the planet will not be made better by the global warming movement.
From all the studies produced by billions of dollars of research in the last two decades, the only thing that has been learned for sure is that climate change is a natural function that the human race has not begun to comprehend. Science has barely scratched the surface. It is the height of arrogance to think that Congress can enact laws that nature will obey. As it always has, the climate will change according to the dictates of the architect of the universe, not according to the dictates of Barack Obama, Al Gore, Carol Browner, the U.S. Congress, or even the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change.
The climate change movement is, indeed, quite similar to the eugenics movement. In a generation or two, people will look back and wonder what on Earth was wrong with this generation to get caught up in such foolishness.
Tags: Darwin, Eugenics, Galton, Social Darwinism
This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Global Warming Hoax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “Global warming: The new eugenics”
Roxan Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 7:40 am
The ‘global warming crowd” are completely ignoring: Chem Trails, HAARP, Depleted Uranium from our perpetual wars, GM Terminator seeds, fluoridated water and China’s carbon footprint. Also, these people are deafeningly silent about those ill from Agent Orange, Gulf War Syndrome, MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity) and those ill from 9/11.
Johnny De Vulcan Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 11:43 am
The eugenic agenda is NOT history; today it is just disguised and being eagerly and forcefully deployed by the medical industry,the military (chem-trails) and the food-industry; the number of poisons in food,water ,air,medicins and vaccinations is staggering. On top of that cars emanate gasses that will kill you in 4 minutes if led into the cabin with a vacuum-cleaner hose - and an additional 100.000 un-tested (7 are tested) chemicals and Hormones are distributed into the ECO-SPHERE. The situation is far worse than when it was only some perverted murdererous crackpot-eugenicists doing it. But can it be true? you might ask; it is all part of a de-population scheme administered by illuminati-and lackeys, engineered by the reptoids in the shadows that want to take over our planet and alter its atmo-sphere to fit their needs. Sounds crazy? well just wait and see - or you could fight it, here and now if you have a taste for staying alive.
Vicky Davis Says:
December 31st, 2008 at 10:14 pm
The Eugenics movement has not run it’s course. It was just on hiatus until they could find a better way. The better way will come under the heading of health care reform in the United States. A national networked system of electronic medical records, coupled with telemedicine and decision support systems for providers who are barely competant above the level of First Aid (Physicians Assistants and Nurse Practioners) and real physicians/researchers available only through the Internet with their exposure to the patient via the medical record. This will allow “blind” eugenics. Finding sociopaths will no longer be necessary. All they will need is well meaning - poorly trained front line providers.
The integrated school-work histories that includes medical records with DNA info that will be kept cradle-to-grave will provide the information needed to determine who has the bad gene pools and appropriate action will be taken - covertly.
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911): 'The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind.'
Henry Lamb - December 27, 2008
Eugenics pioneer, Francis Galton, defined eugenics as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”
Global warming can be defined as: “The study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the environmental quality of future generations.”
The eugenics movement and the global warming movement are similar in many respects. Both ideas were introduced by scientists, advanced by politicians, popularized by the media, embraced as a moral necessity, resulted in severe consequences and eventually rejected as harmful hogwash.
Eugenics, thankfully, has run its course. Global warming, however, is approaching its zenith, just before imposing severe consequences, and is, perhaps, still a generation away from being rejected as the hogwash it is.
Early in the last century, eugenics was called a science that justified public policies that promoted selective breeding among humans and attempted to force sterilization among the “lower classes” of people who did not fit the vision of popular eugenicists. In this century, what is called science is used to justify public policies that promote prescribed lifestyles and attempts to penalize people whose choices do not fit the vision of popular global warming zealots.
Scientists, politicians, preachers and ordinary people who doubted the doctrine of eugenics were outcasts, subject to ridicule and worse. Scientists, politicians, preachers and ordinary people who doubt the doctrine of global warming are outcasts, ridiculed and worse.
The eugenics movement, carried to its logical conclusion by Hitler, killed millions of innocent people. Global warming, when carried to its logical conclusion, will kill far more people than eugenics, and cause incomprehensible agony to people who desperately need affordable energy to survive and prosper.
The goal of the global warming movement is to end the use of fossil fuel. Proponents of this movement claim that fossil fuel use is “killing God’s green Earth,” as one popular TV ad declares. They claim that the use of alternative energy will save the planet for future generations.
Eugenics proponents claimed that selective breeding would constantly improve society by eliminating the lower classes destined for perpetual poverty. They were wrong. Global warming proponents are also wrong in their claims. The use of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide which certainly does not kill God’s green Earth – it enhances it. Carbon dioxide is to vegetation what oxygen is to people – essential to life. It is an indisputable fact that vegetation growth and production is enhanced in direct proportion to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The idea that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is “killing God’s green Earth” is as preposterous as the idea that society would be better if it consisted only of blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.
Were President-elect Obama taking office 100 years ago, he would undoubtedly be filling his cabinet with eugenics experts. This is a reasonable conclusion because he has obviously bought into the popular global warming movement and is filling his cabinet with people who share his vision.
The more than 31,000 scientists who reject this vision are outcasts, and are ridiculed by the elite politicians who are caught up in the global warming movement. More than 650 climate scientists, many of whom have been a part of the U.N. global warming studies, have publicly renounced the claims of the global warming movement.
These people too, are outcasts, ridiculed by the Obama global warming elite.
The tragedy is that the consequences of the proposed global warming policies will be as painful as the consequences of eugenics policies. People will die. Many more millions will be denied access to energy that could provide affordable life-saving refrigeration, heat, transportation and energy for industry.
These consequences are unnecessary. Fossil fuel energy is affordable and available for at least another century. Laws that arbitrarily deny use of this available resource are as unconscionable as the laws that forced sterilization 100 years ago.
Society was not made better by the eugenics movement; the planet will not be made better by the global warming movement.
From all the studies produced by billions of dollars of research in the last two decades, the only thing that has been learned for sure is that climate change is a natural function that the human race has not begun to comprehend. Science has barely scratched the surface. It is the height of arrogance to think that Congress can enact laws that nature will obey. As it always has, the climate will change according to the dictates of the architect of the universe, not according to the dictates of Barack Obama, Al Gore, Carol Browner, the U.S. Congress, or even the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change.
The climate change movement is, indeed, quite similar to the eugenics movement. In a generation or two, people will look back and wonder what on Earth was wrong with this generation to get caught up in such foolishness.
Tags: Darwin, Eugenics, Galton, Social Darwinism
This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Global Warming Hoax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “Global warming: The new eugenics”
Roxan Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 7:40 am
The ‘global warming crowd” are completely ignoring: Chem Trails, HAARP, Depleted Uranium from our perpetual wars, GM Terminator seeds, fluoridated water and China’s carbon footprint. Also, these people are deafeningly silent about those ill from Agent Orange, Gulf War Syndrome, MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity) and those ill from 9/11.
Johnny De Vulcan Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 11:43 am
The eugenic agenda is NOT history; today it is just disguised and being eagerly and forcefully deployed by the medical industry,the military (chem-trails) and the food-industry; the number of poisons in food,water ,air,medicins and vaccinations is staggering. On top of that cars emanate gasses that will kill you in 4 minutes if led into the cabin with a vacuum-cleaner hose - and an additional 100.000 un-tested (7 are tested) chemicals and Hormones are distributed into the ECO-SPHERE. The situation is far worse than when it was only some perverted murdererous crackpot-eugenicists doing it. But can it be true? you might ask; it is all part of a de-population scheme administered by illuminati-and lackeys, engineered by the reptoids in the shadows that want to take over our planet and alter its atmo-sphere to fit their needs. Sounds crazy? well just wait and see - or you could fight it, here and now if you have a taste for staying alive.
Vicky Davis Says:
December 31st, 2008 at 10:14 pm
The Eugenics movement has not run it’s course. It was just on hiatus until they could find a better way. The better way will come under the heading of health care reform in the United States. A national networked system of electronic medical records, coupled with telemedicine and decision support systems for providers who are barely competant above the level of First Aid (Physicians Assistants and Nurse Practioners) and real physicians/researchers available only through the Internet with their exposure to the patient via the medical record. This will allow “blind” eugenics. Finding sociopaths will no longer be necessary. All they will need is well meaning - poorly trained front line providers.
The integrated school-work histories that includes medical records with DNA info that will be kept cradle-to-grave will provide the information needed to determine who has the bad gene pools and appropriate action will be taken - covertly.
Iran says ready to mediate between Pakistan and India- report
Iran says ready to mediate between Pakistan and India- report
Tehran announced its readiness to mediate between India and Pakistan to ease the tensions sparked by the Mumbai attacks, Iranian media reported on Wednesday.
Tensions grew between India and Pakistan after last month's terrorist attacks on Mumbai in which at least 179 people were killed.
Officials from the U.S., Britain and India have alleged that Pakistan was liable for the attacks due to its inability to take out terrorist groups operating on its soil.
Iran late on Tuesday affirmed that it would talk with India and Pakistan to defuse tensions between the two nuclear-armed countries, Press TV reported.
"Certain extra-regional powers are carrying out activities that cause instability in South Asia. They have organized plans that lead to extremism," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted by Press TV as saying on Tuesday.
Iranian media suggested that Mottaki was referencing the United States in saying "extra-regional powers". His comments came after the Iranian president blamed the U.S. for the attacks earlier in December.
"By keeping its forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. has inflicted a heavy financial burden on its economy," said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, suggesting that Washington seeks to bring down the economies of India and China by causing instability.
"Their ulterior motive is to weaken India and China," he added.
Iranian officials say the current situation requires the unity of regional countries and not the intervention of world powers.
The U.S., however, has released various reports suggesting that war between New Delhi and Islamabad may be on the horizon. Troop numbers from both sides have since increased along the border between the two countries.
Tehran announced its readiness to mediate between India and Pakistan to ease the tensions sparked by the Mumbai attacks, Iranian media reported on Wednesday.
Tensions grew between India and Pakistan after last month's terrorist attacks on Mumbai in which at least 179 people were killed.
Officials from the U.S., Britain and India have alleged that Pakistan was liable for the attacks due to its inability to take out terrorist groups operating on its soil.
Iran late on Tuesday affirmed that it would talk with India and Pakistan to defuse tensions between the two nuclear-armed countries, Press TV reported.
"Certain extra-regional powers are carrying out activities that cause instability in South Asia. They have organized plans that lead to extremism," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted by Press TV as saying on Tuesday.
Iranian media suggested that Mottaki was referencing the United States in saying "extra-regional powers". His comments came after the Iranian president blamed the U.S. for the attacks earlier in December.
"By keeping its forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. has inflicted a heavy financial burden on its economy," said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, suggesting that Washington seeks to bring down the economies of India and China by causing instability.
"Their ulterior motive is to weaken India and China," he added.
Iranian officials say the current situation requires the unity of regional countries and not the intervention of world powers.
The U.S., however, has released various reports suggesting that war between New Delhi and Islamabad may be on the horizon. Troop numbers from both sides have since increased along the border between the two countries.
C.H. Douglas: Pioneer of Monetary Reform by Richard C. Cook
December 31, 2008
C.H. Douglas: Pioneer of Monetary Reform
by Richard C. Cook
Global Research, September 24, 2007
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C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), a Scottish-born engineer, who worked for a number of American and British companies in the early years of the twentieth century, was the founder of the modern monetary reform movement. My own interest in monetary reform dates from discovering Douglas’s ideas through a reprint of A.R. Orage’s articles about them in Orage’s publication The New Age dating from the 1920s.
Douglas pointed out that modern industry can readily produce enough goods to meet the needs of everyone in society, but that the reason we sink further into debt, while at the same time we are driven to produce more and more, is because of the nature of industrial production combined with the monopoly on money-creation held by the banking system.
Douglas elaborated that for various reasons having to do with the process of production over time, there is always a gap in monetary terms between the value of what is manufactured and the purchasing power needed to consume it. Regarding the factors which cause this gap, Douglas wrote as follows in a 1932 pamphlet, The Old and the New Economics: “Categorically, there are at least the following five causes of a deficiency of purchasing power as compared with collective prices of goods for sale: 1) Money profits collected from the public (interest is profit on an intangible); 2) Savings; i.e., mere abstention from buying; 3) Investment of savings in new works, which create a new cost without fresh purchasing power; 4) Difference of circuit velocity between cost liquidation and price creation which results in charges being carried over into prices from a previous cost accountancy cycle. Practically all plant charges are of this nature, and all payments for material brought in from a previous wage cycle are of the same nature; 5) Deflation; i.e., sale of securities by banks and recall of loans.”
Such factors apply in full to the present state of every developed modern economy, including the U.S. and Canada, which uses bank-created debt as the method to fill the gap between production, as denoted by GDP; i.e., prices, and the available purchasing power to consume it, consisting of income from wages, salaries, and dividends.
This was commented on in a communication to the author from a Canadian expert on Social Credit who wrote: “The present system attempts to ‘bridge’ this widening disparity by the creation and issue of money as bank loans for consumption and/or for superfluous and increasingly destructive (e.g., war goods) capital production. Debt issued in such a manner does not finally liquidate financial cost but, in an inflationary manner, merely transfers such financial costs as an additional charge to be recovered in the prices generated by future cycles of production.” (May 17, 2007)
Douglas went on to propose that the production/consumption gap should be filled by distribution of a cash stipend called a National Dividend, which would actually be the proper share of individuals in the bounty of the nation’s economy and resources. I believe that Douglas’s ideas merge with those of a basic income guarantee as a measure of economic freedom and justice promoted by many economists and advocates today.
It is said that ideas from the 1930s of achieving full employment by government deficit spending, a policy which can only be achieved fully in a wartime economy, were
invented to counter Douglas’s ideas, which fully supported economic democracy and also provided for the elusive “leisure divided” we all know should result from modern technology. Instead, this technology in the hands of finance capitalism, backed by the power of the military imperial police state, increasingly lays waste to the resources of the earth while binding a majority of people to ever-increasing debt slavery, unemployment, and ill health due to stress.
Douglas was the first in modern times to show how technology and economic know-how could serve rather than destroy humanity, without recourse to a totalitarian collectivist society. The Social Credit movement that Douglas founded remains a powerful force in the British Commonwealth but is only starting to be known in the U.S.
While I was writing the recent series of articles on monetary reform for Global Research and other websites, I had the good luck to be contacted by Social Credit proponents from Canada and New Zealand, who provided me with texts from the writings of Douglas and others. The clearest short description of Social Credit by Douglas himself seemed to be in a speech he gave during the depths of the Great Depression at a meeting in 1935 in Oslo, Norway, which was attended by the King of Norway himself.
With all due respect, Douglas was an educated Briton of his day, and like others of the time, seemed to use twice as many words as necessary to make his point. So I have taken the liberty of condensing the speech while retaining Douglas’s own words.
Douglas’s ideas are as pertinent today as when they were written, with economic and social conditions becoming as bad in the U.S. and the rest of the world as they were in the 1930s, if not worse—except of course for the rich who control the world’s resources, money, military, educational institutions, and media.
Douglas focused mainly on the private sector economy. In my opinion, overall reform must also involve the public sector, which is why much of the program I have outlined in my articles has to do with infrastructure funding and public policy. This approach also reflects my experience from having spent a lifetime working for the federal government, whereas Douglas was employed mainly by private companies.
Douglas’s ideas have already changed the world by educating several generations of interested people in the British Commonwealth in how we can have a modern economy that still serves democratic ends. Now we need to take a step further in actually implementing his program, along with other reforms.
MONEY AND THE PRICE SYSTEM
By C.H.Douglas
Condensed version of a speech given at Oslo on February 14, 1935, to H. M. the King of Norway, H.E. the British Minister, and the president and members of the Oslo Merchants Club.
There is…a good deal of discussion in regard to what we shall call the crisis, matters of unemployment, the economic depression, and other names we give to our present state of affairs…[There is also] a great deal of misunderstanding which surrounds the various proposals made,…for dealing with this crisis arises from an unfamiliarity with the…monetary system….
…We hear, or we did hear in the happy days gone by, that, let us say, Mr. Jones was "making money." Mr. Jones was a bootmaker or a brewer, or something of that kind, or a manufacturer of motor cars….[but] there are only three classes of people in the world who make money, in any literal sense of the word. In Great Britain, for example, there is the Master of His Majesty's Mint, who makes metal coinage….There is the gentleman who sets up a little plant of his own and either makes counterfeit coins or writes very delicately executed signatures on pieces of special paper. He "makes" money, but he gets as a reward fifteen years imprisonment. There is the third who…is much less advertised and much more retiring, and that is the banker, and it is he, in the literal sense of the word, who makes over 90 per cent of the actual money that we use.
The method by which the banker makes money is ingenious, and consists very largely of bookkeeping….Every bank loan creates a deposit, the repayment of every bank loan destroys a deposit; the purchase of a security by a bank creates a deposit and the sale of a security by a bank destroys a deposit. There you have…a quite undeniable statement of where money comes from. All but 0.7 of one per cent. (or over 99 per cent), in Great Britain…of the money transactions - without which none of us under modern conditions could exist - are in the form of "bank credit," which is actually manufactured by the banking system and is claimed by the banking system as its own property. That is undeniably because the banking system lends this money (it does not give it), a condition of affairs which will be accepted by anybody as sufficient proof of a claim to ownership.
Over against that, you have the manufacturer of real wealth, by which I mean things which money will buy, clothes, houses, motor cars, the things that go to raise the physical standard of living…. We realize…that the possession of money is a claim upon real wealth: some of us…are still hypnotized into thinking that money is real wealth. I am sure, in an audience of this calibre, it is not necessary to emphasize this: money is not real wealth….
The modern economic production system is not a system of individual production and exchange of production between individuals. It is more and more the synthetic assembly, in a central pool, of wealth consisting of goods and services which are preponderantly due to the use of power, to modern scientific processes, and all sorts of organizations and other constituent contributions of [factors] which will occur to you. The problem is not to exchange the constituent contributions of each one of us to that central pool, because in fact our contribution to that central pool, in the ordinary sense of tangible economic things, is that a small number of persons operating on this machine of industrial "production", can produce all that is required for the use of the population….The problem is to draw from this central pool of wealth by means of what can be visualized as a ticket system. And the modern money system is in fact losing almost daily its aspect of …a medium of exchange, and becoming more and more a ticket system by which people, who are not exchanging their production, can draw from that central pool of wealth….
…When…money was a medium of exchange and…everyone was…employed in a productive system…the price system was what is called self-liquidating…If I make a pair of shoes and charge Kr.10 for them, the amount which you have given for those shoes has…been distributed; it has come to me as an individual, and I am able to spend that Kr.10 on buying ten kroners' worth of things, say five kroners' worth of leather and five kroners' worth of bread. The fact that the system is self-liquidating, that it will go on working more or less indefinitely is self-evident; and this is the assumption of the classical economists….The whole economic and financial system in its present form stands or falls by the contention that the present price system is self-liquidating, that is to say, that no matter what price is charged for an article, there is always sufficient money distributed through the production of that or other articles to buy the article and therefore there is nothing inherent in the system…to prevent the process going on indefinitely.
…This belief is not true…the [present] price system is not self-liquidating. There is…”Poverty amidst Plenty,"…enormous quantities of valuable foodstuffs, production and so forth, for which there is everywhere a great demand and for which there is no purchasing power….The fact that half the factories are semi-employed and that farms are decreasing their production, that in America the supply of cotton on account of so-called over-production is being restricted, would in itself suggest that there is not sufficient purchasing power to buy the goods which are for sale, at the prices at which they are for sale.
…There is…inductive proof which puts this question beyond any discussion whatever and that is the question of rise of debt. It must…be quite obvious to anybody that, if the world as a whole is consistently getting further and further into debt, it is not…paying its way, and if it is not paying its way it is quite obvious that the price system demands of it more purchasing power than is available. The public is paying all it can, and buying what it can of the total production. The failure to pay more is therefore forcing the destruction of some of it and at the same time it is piling up debt, which means that, to be self-liquidating, the purchasing public ought to pay a great deal more than it is in fact paying.
If I as an individual require, let us say, 10,000 kroners' worth of goods per annum, and, while getting that 10,000 kroners' worth of goods per annum, I get into debt to the extent of 10,000 kroner per annum, then it is quite obvious that the real price which I ought to be paying - in order that the system could go on for ever - is Kr.20,000 for what I am getting for Kr.10,000 and borrowing Kr.10,000 to pay in addition. If you are running up a debt continuously you are not paying your way. The real price that you are being asked to pay for the things you use in your daily life is what you do in fact pay, plus what the system says you ought to pay; and what you ought to pay is the debt.
In the year 1694 the Bank of England was formed in Great Britain, and…the system that was unfortunately inaugurated at the time of the founding of the Bank of England has probably more to do with the present crisis than any other single factor. In the 17th. Century…the world debt… increased 47%....By the end of the 18th. century the world debt had increased by 466 per cent., and by the end of the 19th. century the world debt, public and private, had increased by 12,000 per cent….And that is in spite of the numerous repudiations of debt, the writing down of debts which takes place with every bankruptcy, and other methods used to write off debts and start again.
That…is an indisputable proof that the present financial price system is not merely not self-liquidating, but is decreasingly self-liquidating. We also know that in fact, in those times of boom which are referred to by economists as proving that it is self-liquidating, the rate of increase of debt is greater than in times of depression….Even in times of boom, there is no justification for saying that at any time of the trade cycle, the price system is self-liquidating.
…Of course it might be asked why [the banks resist]…the idea that the price system is not self-liquidating?...The first reason is that, if it is true that there is always extant sufficient purchasing power to buy goods, then it must be true that the poor are poor because the rich are rich, and it follows that the correct method of dealing with the present situation is to tax the rich in order that the money be given to the poor….
So far as Great Britain is concerned - taxation is, I think, twice as heavy as that in any other country in the world - more than half of its taxation is in connection with what are called national debts, war loans and things of that kind. If you investigate the facts as to the ownership of these world debts and war loans you will find them held preponderantly by large financial institutions. You have at once a very good business reason for large quantities of taxation if half of it goes to the service of national loans which are held by large financial institutions. That, as an ordinary business proposition, is obvious. It is still more obvious when you consider that these debts were actually created in the first place by financial institutions, by lending of that money to governments, and the receiving in return of large blocks of national securities which the financial institutions receive for nothing….
You [also] have the fact that there is always a deficit of available purchasing power. This deficit has to be met to a greater or less extent, so that the process may go on, and the making up of the deficit by the creation of loans is, or course, the chief business of the banking system. It is the business by which, ultimately, the whole of every country - its industries, its loans, its institutions…must mathematically go into the control of the financial institutions. This is so, since they alone have the possibility of meeting these deficits in purchasing power, which sooner or later must occur in every business relationship.
…You have a system which is operating badly and which under present conditions must continue to operate even more badly. Then…you have an enormous vested interest in possession of the most powerful monopoly that the whole history of the world has ever known - the monopoly of credit. That is, the monopoly of the creation of, and dealing in money - a monopoly against which any other monopoly pales into insignificance - and it is determined to use every weapon to retain this monopoly….
In the modern world it is possible to do without almost any single material thing,…but it is practically impossible for any of us to through twenty-four hours without either money or "credit" which attaches to the belief that we shall have money available sooner or later. The monopoly of the control of the money system is the great over-riding monopoly of the world as it is worked at the present time. And, if you just realize - as you will realize in dealing with this problem - that it is not merely an economic or mathematical side, but is also a side which penetrates into the very highest politics.
…To put it very shortly, the core of the defect in this price and money system under which we operate at the present time is that it cannot, without the help of the banks, liquidate "costs" as they are produced. To put it another way, it is under an inevitable necessity of piling up debt at an increasing rate. The perfectly simple cure for that situation is to create money at the rate at which debt is created. And taking the very simple statement…that every loan creates a deposit, it is quite obvious that, if you create money even at the astronomical rate at which debts are being created, you can apply the money so created to the liquidation of the debt, and both money and the debt will go out of existence at the same time. In that way the process will, as it has not for many hundreds of years past, become a self-liquidating process which can be carried on indefinitely.
….This word inflation is one which is always raised by bankers and those whose interests are with bankers, when any question of modification to the system is raised. It is a kind of bogey-bogey, which unfortunately at once frightens everybody…The first thing to realize is the true meaning of inflation. Inflation is not an increase of purchasing power, it is an increase in the number or amount of money tokens, whether paper or otherwise, accompanied by an increase in price, so that both the money-to-spend side is, in figures, raised and the price side is also, in figures, raised. That is true inflation. It is simply a multiplication of figures without altering the relation between money-to-spend and price, and of course, is a tax on savings.
An increase of money-to-spend is not inflation unless it raises prices. On the other hand, with a given amount of money-to-spend, a given total of money tokens, and a fall in prices there is an increase in purchasing power. You can get an increase of purchasing power by one of two methods. You can either keep prices constant and raise the quantity of money tokens, assuming that is possible to do so, or you can keep the money tokens constant and lower prices; or, of course, you can do both of them at the same time. Now, broadly speaking, what we are aiming at in the Social Credit Movement is, in the first place, simply an increase in purchasing power so that the money system shall become self-liquidating. And, secondly, we are aiming to meet that condition, at which I just hinted at the beginning of my talk, that fewer, and fewer operators are required to tap the machines of industrial production.
….You have to recognize that some of the best brains (scientists and others) have for 180 years or more been endeavouring to put the world out of work - and they have succeeded. Production, industrial production, is in itself a misuse of terms: there is, to be exact, no such thing as production. The law of the conservation of energy and matter prohibits the use of the word production in any exact sense in that connection. What you do is change matter from a form in which it is not useful to human beings into a form in which it is useful, and that transformation always requires power. Until 150 years ago, we provided that power by eating as many meals as we could get and by employing the power of the muscles of our arms. When the first steam engine was made that process became obsolete. The power which is required for this transformation of matter from one form into another is now supplied from the sun more directly and in the form of water power, driving water-turbines, dynamos, motors of workshops, and so on….
In 1921 the American Buick car, with which you are quite familiar in Oslo, I think, took 1,100 man-hours to produce in the Buick works. In 1931, ten years later, a much better car with many great refinements took 90 man-hours to produce….A friend of mine,…an airship builder,…said that if we continue in the same way in Great Britain as we are doing, by 1940 we should have 8,000,000 unemployed. There are said to be 12,000,000 employable people in Great Britain, yet all the goods required could be produced by about 4,000,000 people.
That state of affairs, the result of effort,…is always referred to as an unemployment problem, as if it were a catastrophe! Whether it is a catastrophe or a magnificent achievement depends purely on how we regard it, because so long as people demand of us that we must solve the unemployment problem - while or best brains are, in effect, endeavouring to increase the unemployment problem - it is obvious that we shall get nowhere. From our point of view, the point of view of those who share my views, we say this is a magnificent achievement.
The so-called unemployment problem is really a problem of leisure….The problem really is a problem, first of the distribution of purchasing power to those who are not required, and will decreasingly be required, in the industrial system, and secondly, of ensuring that the total purchasing distributed shall always be enough to pay for the goods and services for sale….
We believe that the most pressing needs of the moment could be met by means of what we call a National Dividend. This would be provided by the creation of new money - by exactly the same methods as are now used by the banking system to create new money - and its distribution as purchasing power to the whole population….this is not collection-by-taxation, because…the very rapid and drastic reduction of taxation is vitally important. The distribution by way of dividends of a certain amount of purchasing power, sufficient at any rate to attain a certain standard of self-respect, of health and of decency, is the first desideratum of the situation.
…The issue of a National Dividend would be a recognition of the fact that, if work is not available, [the worker]…has the right to an income sufficient for self respect and subsistence - as by right and not as a "dole."….It is of course, suggested…that if you did that to any considerable extent without taking further steps, there would be a rise in prices….But we propose that a further issue of credit be made for the purpose of lowering prices….We propose to apply a certain proportion of the total created money to a reduction of prices. The public will thus pay a part of the price out of their own pockets in the ordinary way, and a part of the price will be paid by various means through the creation of national credit. The effect will be a drop in the price level, while at the same time the producer and the business man will not be losing money. They will enjoy the dividends and the increase in trade which comes from the ability to charge lower prices. They will not lose money as they would if they had to lower prices without the aid of the creation of national credit.
In that way we believe that it will be possible at one and the same time to increase purchasing power and to lower prices while preventing anything in the nature of what is called inflation. That covers in principle nearly all that we have to propose….The great difficulty, of course, is that it is extraordinarily hard to bring sufficient pressure to bear upon this world-wide monopoly of credit. …If it can be done I believe that nobody will lose. I am not myself, for instance, an advocate of the nationalization of the banks. I believe this again to be one of those misapprehensions so common in regard to these matters, for nationalization of the banks is merely an administrative change: it does not mean a change in policy, and mere administrative change cannot be expected to produce any result whatever in regard to this matter. A change in monetary policy can be made without interfering with the administration or ownership of a single bank in the world; and if it could be got into the heads of the comparatively few people who control these enormous monetary institutions that would lose nothing but power - and that they will lose that power anyway - the thing would be achieved.
Richard C. Cook is a retired federal analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, and NASA, followed by twenty-one years with the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on monetary reform, economics, and space policy have appeared on Global Research, Economy in Crisis, Dissident Voice, Atlantic Free Press, and elsewhere. He is the author of “Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.”
C.H. Douglas: Pioneer of Monetary Reform
by Richard C. Cook
Global Research, September 24, 2007
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C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), a Scottish-born engineer, who worked for a number of American and British companies in the early years of the twentieth century, was the founder of the modern monetary reform movement. My own interest in monetary reform dates from discovering Douglas’s ideas through a reprint of A.R. Orage’s articles about them in Orage’s publication The New Age dating from the 1920s.
Douglas pointed out that modern industry can readily produce enough goods to meet the needs of everyone in society, but that the reason we sink further into debt, while at the same time we are driven to produce more and more, is because of the nature of industrial production combined with the monopoly on money-creation held by the banking system.
Douglas elaborated that for various reasons having to do with the process of production over time, there is always a gap in monetary terms between the value of what is manufactured and the purchasing power needed to consume it. Regarding the factors which cause this gap, Douglas wrote as follows in a 1932 pamphlet, The Old and the New Economics: “Categorically, there are at least the following five causes of a deficiency of purchasing power as compared with collective prices of goods for sale: 1) Money profits collected from the public (interest is profit on an intangible); 2) Savings; i.e., mere abstention from buying; 3) Investment of savings in new works, which create a new cost without fresh purchasing power; 4) Difference of circuit velocity between cost liquidation and price creation which results in charges being carried over into prices from a previous cost accountancy cycle. Practically all plant charges are of this nature, and all payments for material brought in from a previous wage cycle are of the same nature; 5) Deflation; i.e., sale of securities by banks and recall of loans.”
Such factors apply in full to the present state of every developed modern economy, including the U.S. and Canada, which uses bank-created debt as the method to fill the gap between production, as denoted by GDP; i.e., prices, and the available purchasing power to consume it, consisting of income from wages, salaries, and dividends.
This was commented on in a communication to the author from a Canadian expert on Social Credit who wrote: “The present system attempts to ‘bridge’ this widening disparity by the creation and issue of money as bank loans for consumption and/or for superfluous and increasingly destructive (e.g., war goods) capital production. Debt issued in such a manner does not finally liquidate financial cost but, in an inflationary manner, merely transfers such financial costs as an additional charge to be recovered in the prices generated by future cycles of production.” (May 17, 2007)
Douglas went on to propose that the production/consumption gap should be filled by distribution of a cash stipend called a National Dividend, which would actually be the proper share of individuals in the bounty of the nation’s economy and resources. I believe that Douglas’s ideas merge with those of a basic income guarantee as a measure of economic freedom and justice promoted by many economists and advocates today.
It is said that ideas from the 1930s of achieving full employment by government deficit spending, a policy which can only be achieved fully in a wartime economy, were
invented to counter Douglas’s ideas, which fully supported economic democracy and also provided for the elusive “leisure divided” we all know should result from modern technology. Instead, this technology in the hands of finance capitalism, backed by the power of the military imperial police state, increasingly lays waste to the resources of the earth while binding a majority of people to ever-increasing debt slavery, unemployment, and ill health due to stress.
Douglas was the first in modern times to show how technology and economic know-how could serve rather than destroy humanity, without recourse to a totalitarian collectivist society. The Social Credit movement that Douglas founded remains a powerful force in the British Commonwealth but is only starting to be known in the U.S.
While I was writing the recent series of articles on monetary reform for Global Research and other websites, I had the good luck to be contacted by Social Credit proponents from Canada and New Zealand, who provided me with texts from the writings of Douglas and others. The clearest short description of Social Credit by Douglas himself seemed to be in a speech he gave during the depths of the Great Depression at a meeting in 1935 in Oslo, Norway, which was attended by the King of Norway himself.
With all due respect, Douglas was an educated Briton of his day, and like others of the time, seemed to use twice as many words as necessary to make his point. So I have taken the liberty of condensing the speech while retaining Douglas’s own words.
Douglas’s ideas are as pertinent today as when they were written, with economic and social conditions becoming as bad in the U.S. and the rest of the world as they were in the 1930s, if not worse—except of course for the rich who control the world’s resources, money, military, educational institutions, and media.
Douglas focused mainly on the private sector economy. In my opinion, overall reform must also involve the public sector, which is why much of the program I have outlined in my articles has to do with infrastructure funding and public policy. This approach also reflects my experience from having spent a lifetime working for the federal government, whereas Douglas was employed mainly by private companies.
Douglas’s ideas have already changed the world by educating several generations of interested people in the British Commonwealth in how we can have a modern economy that still serves democratic ends. Now we need to take a step further in actually implementing his program, along with other reforms.
MONEY AND THE PRICE SYSTEM
By C.H.Douglas
Condensed version of a speech given at Oslo on February 14, 1935, to H. M. the King of Norway, H.E. the British Minister, and the president and members of the Oslo Merchants Club.
There is…a good deal of discussion in regard to what we shall call the crisis, matters of unemployment, the economic depression, and other names we give to our present state of affairs…[There is also] a great deal of misunderstanding which surrounds the various proposals made,…for dealing with this crisis arises from an unfamiliarity with the…monetary system….
…We hear, or we did hear in the happy days gone by, that, let us say, Mr. Jones was "making money." Mr. Jones was a bootmaker or a brewer, or something of that kind, or a manufacturer of motor cars….[but] there are only three classes of people in the world who make money, in any literal sense of the word. In Great Britain, for example, there is the Master of His Majesty's Mint, who makes metal coinage….There is the gentleman who sets up a little plant of his own and either makes counterfeit coins or writes very delicately executed signatures on pieces of special paper. He "makes" money, but he gets as a reward fifteen years imprisonment. There is the third who…is much less advertised and much more retiring, and that is the banker, and it is he, in the literal sense of the word, who makes over 90 per cent of the actual money that we use.
The method by which the banker makes money is ingenious, and consists very largely of bookkeeping….Every bank loan creates a deposit, the repayment of every bank loan destroys a deposit; the purchase of a security by a bank creates a deposit and the sale of a security by a bank destroys a deposit. There you have…a quite undeniable statement of where money comes from. All but 0.7 of one per cent. (or over 99 per cent), in Great Britain…of the money transactions - without which none of us under modern conditions could exist - are in the form of "bank credit," which is actually manufactured by the banking system and is claimed by the banking system as its own property. That is undeniably because the banking system lends this money (it does not give it), a condition of affairs which will be accepted by anybody as sufficient proof of a claim to ownership.
Over against that, you have the manufacturer of real wealth, by which I mean things which money will buy, clothes, houses, motor cars, the things that go to raise the physical standard of living…. We realize…that the possession of money is a claim upon real wealth: some of us…are still hypnotized into thinking that money is real wealth. I am sure, in an audience of this calibre, it is not necessary to emphasize this: money is not real wealth….
The modern economic production system is not a system of individual production and exchange of production between individuals. It is more and more the synthetic assembly, in a central pool, of wealth consisting of goods and services which are preponderantly due to the use of power, to modern scientific processes, and all sorts of organizations and other constituent contributions of [factors] which will occur to you. The problem is not to exchange the constituent contributions of each one of us to that central pool, because in fact our contribution to that central pool, in the ordinary sense of tangible economic things, is that a small number of persons operating on this machine of industrial "production", can produce all that is required for the use of the population….The problem is to draw from this central pool of wealth by means of what can be visualized as a ticket system. And the modern money system is in fact losing almost daily its aspect of …a medium of exchange, and becoming more and more a ticket system by which people, who are not exchanging their production, can draw from that central pool of wealth….
…When…money was a medium of exchange and…everyone was…employed in a productive system…the price system was what is called self-liquidating…If I make a pair of shoes and charge Kr.10 for them, the amount which you have given for those shoes has…been distributed; it has come to me as an individual, and I am able to spend that Kr.10 on buying ten kroners' worth of things, say five kroners' worth of leather and five kroners' worth of bread. The fact that the system is self-liquidating, that it will go on working more or less indefinitely is self-evident; and this is the assumption of the classical economists….The whole economic and financial system in its present form stands or falls by the contention that the present price system is self-liquidating, that is to say, that no matter what price is charged for an article, there is always sufficient money distributed through the production of that or other articles to buy the article and therefore there is nothing inherent in the system…to prevent the process going on indefinitely.
…This belief is not true…the [present] price system is not self-liquidating. There is…”Poverty amidst Plenty,"…enormous quantities of valuable foodstuffs, production and so forth, for which there is everywhere a great demand and for which there is no purchasing power….The fact that half the factories are semi-employed and that farms are decreasing their production, that in America the supply of cotton on account of so-called over-production is being restricted, would in itself suggest that there is not sufficient purchasing power to buy the goods which are for sale, at the prices at which they are for sale.
…There is…inductive proof which puts this question beyond any discussion whatever and that is the question of rise of debt. It must…be quite obvious to anybody that, if the world as a whole is consistently getting further and further into debt, it is not…paying its way, and if it is not paying its way it is quite obvious that the price system demands of it more purchasing power than is available. The public is paying all it can, and buying what it can of the total production. The failure to pay more is therefore forcing the destruction of some of it and at the same time it is piling up debt, which means that, to be self-liquidating, the purchasing public ought to pay a great deal more than it is in fact paying.
If I as an individual require, let us say, 10,000 kroners' worth of goods per annum, and, while getting that 10,000 kroners' worth of goods per annum, I get into debt to the extent of 10,000 kroner per annum, then it is quite obvious that the real price which I ought to be paying - in order that the system could go on for ever - is Kr.20,000 for what I am getting for Kr.10,000 and borrowing Kr.10,000 to pay in addition. If you are running up a debt continuously you are not paying your way. The real price that you are being asked to pay for the things you use in your daily life is what you do in fact pay, plus what the system says you ought to pay; and what you ought to pay is the debt.
In the year 1694 the Bank of England was formed in Great Britain, and…the system that was unfortunately inaugurated at the time of the founding of the Bank of England has probably more to do with the present crisis than any other single factor. In the 17th. Century…the world debt… increased 47%....By the end of the 18th. century the world debt had increased by 466 per cent., and by the end of the 19th. century the world debt, public and private, had increased by 12,000 per cent….And that is in spite of the numerous repudiations of debt, the writing down of debts which takes place with every bankruptcy, and other methods used to write off debts and start again.
That…is an indisputable proof that the present financial price system is not merely not self-liquidating, but is decreasingly self-liquidating. We also know that in fact, in those times of boom which are referred to by economists as proving that it is self-liquidating, the rate of increase of debt is greater than in times of depression….Even in times of boom, there is no justification for saying that at any time of the trade cycle, the price system is self-liquidating.
…Of course it might be asked why [the banks resist]…the idea that the price system is not self-liquidating?...The first reason is that, if it is true that there is always extant sufficient purchasing power to buy goods, then it must be true that the poor are poor because the rich are rich, and it follows that the correct method of dealing with the present situation is to tax the rich in order that the money be given to the poor….
So far as Great Britain is concerned - taxation is, I think, twice as heavy as that in any other country in the world - more than half of its taxation is in connection with what are called national debts, war loans and things of that kind. If you investigate the facts as to the ownership of these world debts and war loans you will find them held preponderantly by large financial institutions. You have at once a very good business reason for large quantities of taxation if half of it goes to the service of national loans which are held by large financial institutions. That, as an ordinary business proposition, is obvious. It is still more obvious when you consider that these debts were actually created in the first place by financial institutions, by lending of that money to governments, and the receiving in return of large blocks of national securities which the financial institutions receive for nothing….
You [also] have the fact that there is always a deficit of available purchasing power. This deficit has to be met to a greater or less extent, so that the process may go on, and the making up of the deficit by the creation of loans is, or course, the chief business of the banking system. It is the business by which, ultimately, the whole of every country - its industries, its loans, its institutions…must mathematically go into the control of the financial institutions. This is so, since they alone have the possibility of meeting these deficits in purchasing power, which sooner or later must occur in every business relationship.
…You have a system which is operating badly and which under present conditions must continue to operate even more badly. Then…you have an enormous vested interest in possession of the most powerful monopoly that the whole history of the world has ever known - the monopoly of credit. That is, the monopoly of the creation of, and dealing in money - a monopoly against which any other monopoly pales into insignificance - and it is determined to use every weapon to retain this monopoly….
In the modern world it is possible to do without almost any single material thing,…but it is practically impossible for any of us to through twenty-four hours without either money or "credit" which attaches to the belief that we shall have money available sooner or later. The monopoly of the control of the money system is the great over-riding monopoly of the world as it is worked at the present time. And, if you just realize - as you will realize in dealing with this problem - that it is not merely an economic or mathematical side, but is also a side which penetrates into the very highest politics.
…To put it very shortly, the core of the defect in this price and money system under which we operate at the present time is that it cannot, without the help of the banks, liquidate "costs" as they are produced. To put it another way, it is under an inevitable necessity of piling up debt at an increasing rate. The perfectly simple cure for that situation is to create money at the rate at which debt is created. And taking the very simple statement…that every loan creates a deposit, it is quite obvious that, if you create money even at the astronomical rate at which debts are being created, you can apply the money so created to the liquidation of the debt, and both money and the debt will go out of existence at the same time. In that way the process will, as it has not for many hundreds of years past, become a self-liquidating process which can be carried on indefinitely.
….This word inflation is one which is always raised by bankers and those whose interests are with bankers, when any question of modification to the system is raised. It is a kind of bogey-bogey, which unfortunately at once frightens everybody…The first thing to realize is the true meaning of inflation. Inflation is not an increase of purchasing power, it is an increase in the number or amount of money tokens, whether paper or otherwise, accompanied by an increase in price, so that both the money-to-spend side is, in figures, raised and the price side is also, in figures, raised. That is true inflation. It is simply a multiplication of figures without altering the relation between money-to-spend and price, and of course, is a tax on savings.
An increase of money-to-spend is not inflation unless it raises prices. On the other hand, with a given amount of money-to-spend, a given total of money tokens, and a fall in prices there is an increase in purchasing power. You can get an increase of purchasing power by one of two methods. You can either keep prices constant and raise the quantity of money tokens, assuming that is possible to do so, or you can keep the money tokens constant and lower prices; or, of course, you can do both of them at the same time. Now, broadly speaking, what we are aiming at in the Social Credit Movement is, in the first place, simply an increase in purchasing power so that the money system shall become self-liquidating. And, secondly, we are aiming to meet that condition, at which I just hinted at the beginning of my talk, that fewer, and fewer operators are required to tap the machines of industrial production.
….You have to recognize that some of the best brains (scientists and others) have for 180 years or more been endeavouring to put the world out of work - and they have succeeded. Production, industrial production, is in itself a misuse of terms: there is, to be exact, no such thing as production. The law of the conservation of energy and matter prohibits the use of the word production in any exact sense in that connection. What you do is change matter from a form in which it is not useful to human beings into a form in which it is useful, and that transformation always requires power. Until 150 years ago, we provided that power by eating as many meals as we could get and by employing the power of the muscles of our arms. When the first steam engine was made that process became obsolete. The power which is required for this transformation of matter from one form into another is now supplied from the sun more directly and in the form of water power, driving water-turbines, dynamos, motors of workshops, and so on….
In 1921 the American Buick car, with which you are quite familiar in Oslo, I think, took 1,100 man-hours to produce in the Buick works. In 1931, ten years later, a much better car with many great refinements took 90 man-hours to produce….A friend of mine,…an airship builder,…said that if we continue in the same way in Great Britain as we are doing, by 1940 we should have 8,000,000 unemployed. There are said to be 12,000,000 employable people in Great Britain, yet all the goods required could be produced by about 4,000,000 people.
That state of affairs, the result of effort,…is always referred to as an unemployment problem, as if it were a catastrophe! Whether it is a catastrophe or a magnificent achievement depends purely on how we regard it, because so long as people demand of us that we must solve the unemployment problem - while or best brains are, in effect, endeavouring to increase the unemployment problem - it is obvious that we shall get nowhere. From our point of view, the point of view of those who share my views, we say this is a magnificent achievement.
The so-called unemployment problem is really a problem of leisure….The problem really is a problem, first of the distribution of purchasing power to those who are not required, and will decreasingly be required, in the industrial system, and secondly, of ensuring that the total purchasing distributed shall always be enough to pay for the goods and services for sale….
We believe that the most pressing needs of the moment could be met by means of what we call a National Dividend. This would be provided by the creation of new money - by exactly the same methods as are now used by the banking system to create new money - and its distribution as purchasing power to the whole population….this is not collection-by-taxation, because…the very rapid and drastic reduction of taxation is vitally important. The distribution by way of dividends of a certain amount of purchasing power, sufficient at any rate to attain a certain standard of self-respect, of health and of decency, is the first desideratum of the situation.
…The issue of a National Dividend would be a recognition of the fact that, if work is not available, [the worker]…has the right to an income sufficient for self respect and subsistence - as by right and not as a "dole."….It is of course, suggested…that if you did that to any considerable extent without taking further steps, there would be a rise in prices….But we propose that a further issue of credit be made for the purpose of lowering prices….We propose to apply a certain proportion of the total created money to a reduction of prices. The public will thus pay a part of the price out of their own pockets in the ordinary way, and a part of the price will be paid by various means through the creation of national credit. The effect will be a drop in the price level, while at the same time the producer and the business man will not be losing money. They will enjoy the dividends and the increase in trade which comes from the ability to charge lower prices. They will not lose money as they would if they had to lower prices without the aid of the creation of national credit.
In that way we believe that it will be possible at one and the same time to increase purchasing power and to lower prices while preventing anything in the nature of what is called inflation. That covers in principle nearly all that we have to propose….The great difficulty, of course, is that it is extraordinarily hard to bring sufficient pressure to bear upon this world-wide monopoly of credit. …If it can be done I believe that nobody will lose. I am not myself, for instance, an advocate of the nationalization of the banks. I believe this again to be one of those misapprehensions so common in regard to these matters, for nationalization of the banks is merely an administrative change: it does not mean a change in policy, and mere administrative change cannot be expected to produce any result whatever in regard to this matter. A change in monetary policy can be made without interfering with the administration or ownership of a single bank in the world; and if it could be got into the heads of the comparatively few people who control these enormous monetary institutions that would lose nothing but power - and that they will lose that power anyway - the thing would be achieved.
Richard C. Cook is a retired federal analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, and NASA, followed by twenty-one years with the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on monetary reform, economics, and space policy have appeared on Global Research, Economy in Crisis, Dissident Voice, Atlantic Free Press, and elsewhere. He is the author of “Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.”
National Guard Soldiers to Usher in New Year at Times Square
National Guard Soldiers to Usher in New Year at Times Square
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
December 31, 2008
Later this evening as the newfangled Times Square Ball descends in Manhattan, you may see New York National Guard soldiers patrolling with the NYPD as you watch on television. “Under orders from New York Governor David Paterson, members of the New York Army and Air National Guard will conduct additional security missions and stand ready to respond to city authorities if a man-made or natural emergency occurs,” reports Jim Kouri, who is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police.
Photo: National Guard troops in New Orleans. Troops will patrol Times Square later this evening.
Short of a hurricane, blizzard, or al-Qaeda bio attack — all extremely unlikely — the presence of armed soldiers on the streets during the celebration has an obvious purpose: to get you accustomed to soldiers working with the police.
Earlier this month, the U.S. military announced it will place 20,000 troops on the streets of America by 2011. “But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” the Washington Post reported on December 1. “The Pentagon’s plan calls for three rapid-reaction forces to be ready for emergency response by September 2011. The first 4,700-person unit, built around an active-duty combat brigade based at Fort Stewart, Ga., was available as of Oct. 1, said Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command.”
The Pentagon plans to include the National Guard and reserve units in this effort. “All would be trained to respond to a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attack, or CBRNE event, as the military calls it.”
In October, the Department of Defense announced it was assigning a full-time Army unit to be “on call” to facilitate military cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security. On October 1, the Army Times reported Northern Command’s deployment of the Army’s battle-hardened 3rd Infantry Division 1st Brigade Combat Team, ostensibly to respond to a natural disaster or terror attack.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
According to Bert B. Tussing, director of homeland defense and security issues at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership, the long standing Pentagon plan “breaks the mold” by assigning an active-duty combat brigade to the Northern Command for the first time. Although Mr. Tussing did not mention it, this plan also breaks the Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the military working with law enforcement.
“The National Guard’s 2nd Civil Support Team, a full-time, rapid-response element that detects chemical, biological or radiological hazards, also will provide a detachment in Manhattan to support the New York Police Department,” Kouri continues. “The 22-man detachment, based at the Scotia Air National Guard Base near Schenectady, NY, has worked with New York City police for counterterrorism support operations since the unit’s formation in 2000, according to police officials.” In other words, the unconstitutional deployment was on the agenda well before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In addition to parading uniformed and armed soldiers on the streets, the New York National Guard will provide liaison officers to New York’s emergency management office and the New York City Police Department, according to Kouri, again a direct violation of Posse Comitatus.
Predictably, the New York Times and the rest of the corporate media are ignoring this report based on information obtained by the 14,000-member National Association of Chiefs of Police.
Don’t be surprised if you see soldiers toting carbines mingling with the revelers later this evening. It is all part of a psychological warfare campaign to get you acclimated to the incremental presence of troops on the streets and the implementation of a police state.
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
December 31, 2008
Later this evening as the newfangled Times Square Ball descends in Manhattan, you may see New York National Guard soldiers patrolling with the NYPD as you watch on television. “Under orders from New York Governor David Paterson, members of the New York Army and Air National Guard will conduct additional security missions and stand ready to respond to city authorities if a man-made or natural emergency occurs,” reports Jim Kouri, who is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police.
Photo: National Guard troops in New Orleans. Troops will patrol Times Square later this evening.
Short of a hurricane, blizzard, or al-Qaeda bio attack — all extremely unlikely — the presence of armed soldiers on the streets during the celebration has an obvious purpose: to get you accustomed to soldiers working with the police.
Earlier this month, the U.S. military announced it will place 20,000 troops on the streets of America by 2011. “But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” the Washington Post reported on December 1. “The Pentagon’s plan calls for three rapid-reaction forces to be ready for emergency response by September 2011. The first 4,700-person unit, built around an active-duty combat brigade based at Fort Stewart, Ga., was available as of Oct. 1, said Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command.”
The Pentagon plans to include the National Guard and reserve units in this effort. “All would be trained to respond to a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attack, or CBRNE event, as the military calls it.”
In October, the Department of Defense announced it was assigning a full-time Army unit to be “on call” to facilitate military cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security. On October 1, the Army Times reported Northern Command’s deployment of the Army’s battle-hardened 3rd Infantry Division 1st Brigade Combat Team, ostensibly to respond to a natural disaster or terror attack.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
According to Bert B. Tussing, director of homeland defense and security issues at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership, the long standing Pentagon plan “breaks the mold” by assigning an active-duty combat brigade to the Northern Command for the first time. Although Mr. Tussing did not mention it, this plan also breaks the Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the military working with law enforcement.
“The National Guard’s 2nd Civil Support Team, a full-time, rapid-response element that detects chemical, biological or radiological hazards, also will provide a detachment in Manhattan to support the New York Police Department,” Kouri continues. “The 22-man detachment, based at the Scotia Air National Guard Base near Schenectady, NY, has worked with New York City police for counterterrorism support operations since the unit’s formation in 2000, according to police officials.” In other words, the unconstitutional deployment was on the agenda well before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In addition to parading uniformed and armed soldiers on the streets, the New York National Guard will provide liaison officers to New York’s emergency management office and the New York City Police Department, according to Kouri, again a direct violation of Posse Comitatus.
Predictably, the New York Times and the rest of the corporate media are ignoring this report based on information obtained by the 14,000-member National Association of Chiefs of Police.
Don’t be surprised if you see soldiers toting carbines mingling with the revelers later this evening. It is all part of a psychological warfare campaign to get you acclimated to the incremental presence of troops on the streets and the implementation of a police state.
May We No Longer Be Silent By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
May We No Longer Be Silent
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, John Bryson Chane, delivered on October 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church. The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon he called on “politicians seeking the highest office in [our] land” to find the courage to “speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims” by the state of Israel.
Bishop Chane’s courage was to no avail. When America’s new leader of “change” was informed of Israel’s massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources--food, medicine, water, energy--America’s president-elect Obama had “no comment.”
According to the Jerusalem Post ( December 26), “at 11:30 a.m., more than 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters swept into Gazan airspace and dropped more than 100 bombs on 50 targets. . . . Thirty minutes later, a second wave of 60 jets and helicopters struck at 60 targets . . . More than 170 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout the day. At least 230 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded . . .”
As I write, news reports are that Israel is sending tanks and infantry reinforcements in preparation for a ground invasion of Gaza.
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, John Bryson Chane, delivered on October 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church. The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon he called on “politicians seeking the highest office in [our] land” to find the courage to “speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims” by the state of Israel.
Bishop Chane’s courage was to no avail. When America’s new leader of “change” was informed of Israel’s massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources--food, medicine, water, energy--America’s president-elect Obama had “no comment.”
According to the Jerusalem Post ( December 26), “at 11:30 a.m., more than 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters swept into Gazan airspace and dropped more than 100 bombs on 50 targets. . . . Thirty minutes later, a second wave of 60 jets and helicopters struck at 60 targets . . . More than 170 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout the day. At least 230 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded . . .”
As I write, news reports are that Israel is sending tanks and infantry reinforcements in preparation for a ground invasion of Gaza.
Iran ready for gas deal with Pakistan, without India
GEO news
Iran ready for gas deal with Pakistan, without India
Updated at: 0054 PST, Wednesday, December 31, 2008
TEHRAN: Iran will sign a deal with Pakistan to sell gas to the neighbouring country, even if India, a third party to the deal, walked out, a news agency reported Iran's oil minister as saying on Monday.
India stayed away from talks in Tehran on a proposed $7 billion pipeline in September, saying it wanted to agree transit costs through Pakistan on a bilateral basis first.
Iran Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari said a delegation from Pakistan had arrived in Tehran for two days.
"Iran will sign a deal with Pakistan, if India does not take part in the project," agency quoted Nozari as saying.
In July, Iran said India and Pakistan had accepted Iran's demand for gas price reviews based on market changes, denying reports by some Indian newspapers that the pipeline talks had failed after Iran demanded a review every three years.
The pipeline would initially carry 60 million cubic metres of gas daily to Pakistan and India, half for each country. The pipeline's capacity would later rise to 150 million cu metres.
Iran said it has completed 18 percent of the work for the pipeline to bring gas from its South Pars field to the Iran-Pakistan border.
Pakistan has yet to begin work on a 1,000 km (625 mile) stretch of the pipeline to link Iran with India.
Iran has the world's second-largest gas reserves after Russia. But sanctions, politics and construction delays have slowed its gas development, and analysts say Iran is unlikely to become a major exporter for a decade.
Iran ready for gas deal with Pakistan, without India
Updated at: 0054 PST, Wednesday, December 31, 2008
TEHRAN: Iran will sign a deal with Pakistan to sell gas to the neighbouring country, even if India, a third party to the deal, walked out, a news agency reported Iran's oil minister as saying on Monday.
India stayed away from talks in Tehran on a proposed $7 billion pipeline in September, saying it wanted to agree transit costs through Pakistan on a bilateral basis first.
Iran Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari said a delegation from Pakistan had arrived in Tehran for two days.
"Iran will sign a deal with Pakistan, if India does not take part in the project," agency quoted Nozari as saying.
In July, Iran said India and Pakistan had accepted Iran's demand for gas price reviews based on market changes, denying reports by some Indian newspapers that the pipeline talks had failed after Iran demanded a review every three years.
The pipeline would initially carry 60 million cubic metres of gas daily to Pakistan and India, half for each country. The pipeline's capacity would later rise to 150 million cu metres.
Iran said it has completed 18 percent of the work for the pipeline to bring gas from its South Pars field to the Iran-Pakistan border.
Pakistan has yet to begin work on a 1,000 km (625 mile) stretch of the pipeline to link Iran with India.
Iran has the world's second-largest gas reserves after Russia. But sanctions, politics and construction delays have slowed its gas development, and analysts say Iran is unlikely to become a major exporter for a decade.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Top Neo-Con John Bolton told Fox News yesterday that the conflict in Gaza could lead to a U.S. attack on Iran as the former U.S. ambassador to the UN exploited the crisis to propagandize for a new war.
“So while our focus obviously is on Gaza right now, this could turn out to be a much larger conflict,” said Bolton, adding that “we’re looking at potentially a multi-front war here.”
“I don’t think there’s anything at this point standing between Iran and nuclear weapons other than the possibility of the use of military force possibly by the United States, possibly by Israel,” added the former ambassador, suggesting that a strike on Iran’s facilities by Israel alone would be risky but could push Iran back by three or four years.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Bolton’s ceaseless fearmongering about Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon contradicts the U.S. intelligence community’s own National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and was highly unlikely to develop a nuclear weapon this decade.
Bolton’s implication that other Arab states would support an attack on Iran to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, and in his own words “pop champagne corks,” is a ludicrous claim. Bolton is actually trying to suggest that Arabs celebrate when the U.S. attacks the Middle East. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan alone have stoked anti-US sentiment across the Middle East and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, far from being viewed as a dangerous tyrant, is seen as more of a “hero” across the Middle East, according to a 2007 L.A. Times investigative report.
Watch the clip.
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Top Neo-Con John Bolton told Fox News yesterday that the conflict in Gaza could lead to a U.S. attack on Iran as the former U.S. ambassador to the UN exploited the crisis to propagandize for a new war.
“So while our focus obviously is on Gaza right now, this could turn out to be a much larger conflict,” said Bolton, adding that “we’re looking at potentially a multi-front war here.”
“I don’t think there’s anything at this point standing between Iran and nuclear weapons other than the possibility of the use of military force possibly by the United States, possibly by Israel,” added the former ambassador, suggesting that a strike on Iran’s facilities by Israel alone would be risky but could push Iran back by three or four years.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Bolton’s ceaseless fearmongering about Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon contradicts the U.S. intelligence community’s own National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and was highly unlikely to develop a nuclear weapon this decade.
Bolton’s implication that other Arab states would support an attack on Iran to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, and in his own words “pop champagne corks,” is a ludicrous claim. Bolton is actually trying to suggest that Arabs celebrate when the U.S. attacks the Middle East. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan alone have stoked anti-US sentiment across the Middle East and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, far from being viewed as a dangerous tyrant, is seen as more of a “hero” across the Middle East, according to a 2007 L.A. Times investigative report.
Watch the clip.
Dangerous Liaisons: Pakistan, India and Lashkar-e Taiba
Dangerous Liaisons: Pakistan, India and Lashkar-e Taiba
Graham Usher
December 31, 2008
(Graham Usher, a contributing editor of Middle East Report, filed this article from Lahore.)
For more on radical Islamists in Pakistan, see Graham Usher, “The Pakistan Taliban,” Middle East Report Online, February 13, 2007.
See also Kamran Asdar Ali, “Pakistani Islamists Gamble on the General,” Middle East Report 231 (Summer 2004). Order the issue online.
The day after Christmas, the wires buzzed with reports that Pakistan was moving 20,000 troops from its western border with Afghanistan to locations near the eastern border with India. The redeployment, said Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Qureshi, came in response to “certain developments” on the Indian side of the boundary, one reportedly being that New Delhi might be considering military strikes on militant bases inside Pakistan. Pakistani security officials stressed that these moves were “minimum defensive measures”: No soldiers had been taken away from the theater of counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, only from “snowbound areas” where the army sits idle. Still, the troop transfers marked another dip in relations between India and Pakistan since the November 26 massacre of over 170 people in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai.
New Delhi avers that the ten known Mumbai gunmen were Pakistani. Washington and London say the ten were recruited and trained in Pakistan, and then dispatched to India, by Lashkar-e Taiba, a banned Pakistani group active mostly in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Lashkar-e Taiba denies the charge. The Pakistani government says any evidence shared with the US and Britain should be shared with Islamabad as well, as part of a joint Pakistani-Indian probe into the killings. Pakistan should act first, answers New Delhi. It believes an urban guerrilla assault as polished as that in Mumbai could not have happened without the input of Pakistani army officers and/or agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), “rogue,” “former” or otherwise.
To test Islamabad’s mettle -- and sever or expose any ISI “link” to militancy -- India demands that all Lashkar bases in Pakistan and Pakistani-occupied Kashmir be “dismantled.” It also calls for action on ten outstanding cases where militants have allegedly launched attacks upon India from Pakistani soil and the prosecution, imprisonment or extradition of 40 Pakistanis and Indians wanted by India for “terrorism.” Until at least some of these demands are met, India is unlikely to share intelligence with Pakistan. “How can you give evidence to those you think have attacked you?” asks an Indian government official.
Pakistan has responded, in increments. It raided an alleged Lashkar camp in Pakistani-held Kashmir on December 7 and banned Jamaat ud-Dawa -- Lashkar’s supposed civilian arm -- after its designation as a “terrorist organization” by the United Nations. India’s other demands are impossible, says a Pakistani source. “We told the Americans -- and through the Americans, India -- that we can prosecute Pakistanis involved in Mumbai. But we cannot extradite Pakistani suspects to India.”
Washington apparently agrees. It wants prosecution of Pakistanis said to be connected to the Mumbai attacks, including Jamaat ud-Dawa “emir” Hafiz Saeed, currently under house arrest in Lahore. But Pakistani action to date has satisfied no one. In the December 7 raid, Pakistan supposedly picked up Zaki ur-Rahman Lakhvi and Zarrar Shah, two Lashkar commanders who India says orchestrated the mayhem in Mumbai. They have since vanished. And Saeed says he will be freed once he appeals to a higher court. “It will rule that Jamaat ud-Dawa is an Islamic charity unconnected to Lashkar-e Taiba,” he says.
This is why India should share evidence with Pakistan, says President Asif Zardari. Privately, he has told “allies” that he cannot move against Lashkar or Jamaat ud-Dawa without the support of the army and the increasingly nationalist opposition in Parliament. And the Pakistani army (and even more the ISI) may be reluctant to act against a group it has historically deemed an “asset” at the diktat of a state it has historically defined as an “enemy.” Nor will an Indian troop buildup on the border alter behavior in Pakistan. It simply binds the military-militant nexus tighter.
The only way the army may give up its use of “non-state actors” to pursue state policies is when it sees groups like Lashkar as a greater threat to Pakistan’s security than India. And for that to happen it is not only the army that must end a policy of dangerous liaisons; India must as well.
Lashkar-e Taiba
Lashkar-e Taiba was founded in the late 1980s as the armed wing of Markaz ud-Dawa wal-Irshad, the original name of Hafiz Saeed’s Islamist organization. Soon after its founding, Lashkar was enlisted to help fight Pakistan’s “plausibly deniable” proxy wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory claimed by both Pakistan and India since partition and the cause of two of their three wars. Over the last two decades, Lashkar has earned notoriety as the most lethal group fighting in Kashmir, at one time claiming 50,000 men under its command. In December 2001, New Delhi blamed Lashkar for an attack on the Indian parliament, the last time South Asia’s two nuclear-armed states came to the brink of war. The attack -- and India’s charge -- compelled Pakistan and the US to ban Lashkar. After a few months, Markaz ud-Dawa wal-Irshad was reincarnated as Jamaat ud-Dawa, a social welfare organization that Saeed insists has no ties to Lashkar.
Lashkar subscribes to the Ahl-e Hadith school, an austere strain of South Asian Sunni Islam that, like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, advocates a literal reading of Islamic texts. It assumed its modern shape at the hands of ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam, co-founder of Markaz ud-Dawa wal-Irshad, a mentor to Osama bin Laden and a man recognized as one of the major theorists of militant Islam. In the crucible of the Afghan war against Soviet occupation, ‘Azzam instilled in Saeed and the other Lashkar founders a zeal for “the lost science and art of jihad,” says Pakistani analyst Hassan Abbas. And Saeed applied his zeal to South Asia, not only Muslim-majority Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, but also those Muslim-minority areas of south-central India that once fell under the writ of the Mughal empire. He told a Lashkar rally in Lahore in 1999: “We will not rest until the whole [of] India is dissolved into Pakistan.”
Saeed’s hostility to “Hindu” India is not only ideological. Born into a conservative Muslim household, he lost 36 family members in the communal slaughter that accompanied partition. “India has shown us the path,” he once said. Such antagonism chimed with the ISI’s regional policies. The spymasters, too, sought to “bleed India by a thousand cuts,” a phrase attributed to the 1980s dictator Zia ul Haq, if not to “dissolve India into Pakistan,” then to force India to cede Kashmir to Pakistan.
There were other reasons why Lashkar-e Taiba became the preferred ISI proxy. Unlike the Taliban -- for whom modernity is anathema -- Lashkar believes that fulfillment of the duty of jihad comes through advanced scientific knowledge as well as military prowess. A visit to Muridke, Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s “educational complex” near Lahore, shows the difference. There are classes of boys (and girls) reciting the Qur’an. But there are also students working in physics, chemistry and computer laboratories. These are not the poor who flock to Taliban seminaries in return for bed, board and faith. They are scions of Pakistan’s urban middle class -- the educated elite.
In Muridke -- at least when foreign journalists visit -- references to jihad are muted. Not so in Pakistan’s southern Punjab belt bordering India, Lashkar’s historical stomping ground. There one can find villages plastered with Jamaat ud-Dawa and Lashkar graffiti proclaiming jihad to “free Kashmir.” At a funeral in Bahawalpur in the summer of 2008, a Jamaat ud-Dawa preacher eulogized “60 martyrs” from the district, mostly killed in Kashmir. Such proselytizing could not happen without the authorities’ knowledge, but is it encouraged or tolerated on the basis of Jamaat ud-Dawa’s erstwhile status as a charity?
In the 1990s, it was encouraged. Lashkar had recruitment centers in every city in Pakistan, overseen by the ISI. In 1999 Lashkar guerillas fought alongside Pakistani soldiers on the Kargil heights in Indian-held Kashmir, the last time the two armies tried to force a resolution of the conflict. In the same year Saeed welcomed the coup of Gen. Pervez Musharraf against the elected government of Nawaz Sharif. Dictatorship is closer to the “pure Islamic state” than the “corruption” spread by democracy, he said, according to a Jamaat ud-Dawa source.
Relations cooled after the attack on the Indian parliament. Musharraf banned several “jihadi” groups, Lashkar among them. Funds dried up and 12,000 fighters were demobilized in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Six divisions of the army (80,000 to 100,000 soldiers) were moved from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan, where Pakistan was battling an indigenous insurgency led by the Pakistan Taliban. As Pakistani-Indian relations improved from a state of near war to, in 2004, a peace process, what had seemed to be a tactical feint by Pakistan started to look like a shift in strategy. “Under Musharraf the army moved from a position of hostility to India to one similar to the pro-peace policies of the Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto governments,” said an Indian official. “He helped create a Pakistani consensus.”
But war by proxy was not abandoned altogether, particularly for “pro-Pakistan” groups like Lashkar-e Taiba. Its camps on the frontiers were moved inland or camouflaged as Jamaat ud-Dawa “centers.” Its cadre was also encouraged to diversify, becoming Jamaat ud-Dawa “social workers” rather than Lashkar mujahideen.
This transformation was not simply a “front” for continued Lashkar militancy, as it is often called. Jamaat ud-Dawa runs schools, hospitals and ambulance services in 73 Pakistani cities. In 2007 it tended 6,000 patients, taught 35,000 students and administered 800,000 hepatitis vaccinations, says Saeed. “When it comes to social welfare Jamaat ud-Dawa’s model is Hizballah and Hamas,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, a Pakistani analyst.
Jamaat ud-Dawa’s most public endeavor occurred after the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, when Lashkar fighters emerged from their lairs in the mountains to serve the wounded. Musharraf praised them as “exemplary humanitarian outfits,” in the words of Pakistani analyst Ilyas Khan. So did US officials, who were impressed by Jamaat ud-Dawa’s “state-of-the-art” field hospitals, until they were informed that the facilities were run by a “terrorist front.” Nudged by India on the alleged link to Lashkar, the US blacklisted Jamaat ud-Dawa in 2006. When confronted with the fact the jihadis had not been demobbed but rejobbed, a Pakistani general was unapologetic: “We won’t disband them. If we did, Kashmir would go cold and India will bury it forever.”
Kashmir has heated up since. Indian monitors say there have been 41 militant infractions across the Line of Control separating Pakistani- from Indian-controlled Kashmir in 2008, an escalation they say must have been directed by the ISI since it came between the close of Musharraf’s military regime and the election of Pakistan’s civilian government in February. Far from preventing the incursions, the Pakistani army provided “covering fire” to the infiltrators, say the Indians. The army denies this. It cites Indian figures showing a 40 percent drop in violence in Indian-held Kashmir in 2008, and the lowest total of incidents in 20 years.
Indian analysts also accept there was no Pakistani prompting for the mass protests that rocked Indian-controlled Kashmir in the summer. These demonstrations were caused by indigenous Muslim alienation from Indian rule. Nor did they follow a Pakistani script: The protesters demanded independence not only from New Delhi but also from Islamabad, and, in contrast to Lashkar, which believes that “military jihad” is the path to Kashmir’s reintegration with Pakistan, they were non-violent, even though more than 50 of them were shot dead by the Indian army.
If the ISI has loosened the lid on Lashkar-e Taiba, it is not because of Kashmir. It is because of Afghanistan.
The Army’s Worries
Islamabad has been worried by India’s influence in Afghanistan ever since the fall of the “pro-Pakistan” Taliban regime in 2001. Pakistani officers point out the Afghan government’s fledgling military is “disproportionately” staffed by officers from the “pro-India” Northern Alliance, the erstwhile Afghan coalition that, with the US, drove the Taliban from power. But worry has become paranoia. In the last year, India has drawn closer to two states the Pakistani army deems hostile to its interests in Afghanistan: Iran and the US.
India denies any mischief. “Our main activity in Afghanistan is building roads,” says an Indian official. That is so. Together with Iran, India is currently laying a road network that, when complete, will circumvent landlocked Afghanistan’s need to use Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea, outlets Islamabad deems vital to its economic future.
New Delhi is also exerting influence on US policy in Afghanistan, alleges the army. Two examples are cited. One is Washington’s endorsement of India’s claim of ISI involvement in the bombing of its Kabul embassy in July. The ISI pleaded not guilty. But since then the CIA has all but refused to share intelligence with the Pakistani agency, including for operations on the Pakistani-Afghan border. “It fears we will pass any information to the Afghan Taliban,” says a Pakistani officer. The other piece of evidence is President George W. Bush’s decree in July that US Special Forces could enter Pakistani territory in pursuit of al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives without the approval of the Pakistani government. There have since been 23 US aerial strikes and one ground assault, together killing more than 100 people. The CIA says it is targeting bases whence Taliban fighters are dispatched to Afghanistan and where al-Qaeda is “plotting the next 9/11.” It also says it has a “tacit” agreement about the strikes with Pakistan.
The Pakistani government denies this. The army says the strikes are violations of Pakistani sovereignty and “completely counterproductive” in view of its attempts to rally local tribes against the militants on the Pakistani-Afghan border. And it sees India’s fingerprints all over the US missiles.
To what end would India be meddling in Afghanistan? Two scenarios are bruited by the army. The milder of the two is that India and the Afghan government wish to create such ferment in the borderlands that the CIA and NATO will invade them, wresting back Pashtun territories long claimed by governments in Kabul (which have never recognized the legitimacy of Pakistan’s western border). The worse scenario is that the US and its regional allies actually aim to dismember Pakistan as the world’s only Muslim nuclear state. “India thinks a fragmented Pakistan would reduce the threat level,” says an officer. “The more I talk to the establishment, the more I’m convinced fear and hatred of India is growing,” says a Pakistani analyst. “And now it’s India with America.”
A Regional Solution
Does all this mean that the ISI was behind what happened in Mumbai? Although Indian security officials have claimed as much, the US says there is no evidence to support the charge. Pakistani historian and author Ahmed Rashid has charted the ISI’s liaisons with militant groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir. But he, too, thinks official Pakistani involvement is unlikely. Although many Lashkar cadres accepted the army’s decision in 2004 to wind down the “Kashmiri jihad,” he says, others did not. And these “youngest and most radicalized members joined up with al-Qaeda and the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. They embraced the global jihad to fight US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later attacked the Pakistan government.” These are the likeliest suspects in the Mumbai massacres, says Rashid. “In my opinion, [the Mumbai operation was] an al-Qaeda-planned attack using local surrogates to relieve pressure on them in the tribal areas. What better way than to create a conflict between India and Pakistan?”
Other Pakistani analysts agree. Lashkar is no longer just a Pakistani outfit, they say. It has transnational reach, with cells in Indian-held Kashmir, India and Bangladesh. It acts autonomously. And while India has played up the Pakistani origins of the gunmen, it is inconceivable that the Mumbai attacks could have transpired without backup from indigenous forces, Islamist or criminal or both. The devastation wrought in Mumbai is also beyond anything the ISI would have planned or desired, says a Pakistani security analyst. “It may be that Mumbai has a Pakistani militant connection. But it is also quite clear most active militant groups are no longer under the control of Pakistan’s security apparatus.”
What the Mumbai events do underscore is the recklessness of Pakistan’s long-standing policy of permitting militant groups free rein. This is why many Pakistanis hope there will be a serious move against groups like Lashkar-e Taiba. But they also know that the army is unlikely to give up the use of proxies unless what it defines as Pakistan’s security concerns are addressed: In Afghanistan, addressing Pakistani concerns means recognition by the Afghan government of Pakistan’s western border, and acceptance by the US that all operations within Pakistan are the right of the Pakistani army alone. With India, it means serious negotiations to resolve the conflict over Kashmir.
But there is little use in India appealing to Washington to practice coercive diplomacy with Islamabad. In many ways, recent US policy has aggravated the sores that linger in Indian-Pakistani relations. It was the Bush administration’s nuclear agreement with India that convinced the army that New Delhi was now the “strategic partner” of the US in the region, with Islamabad merely a hired gun for the fight with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And if India is considering “surgical” strikes inside Pakistan, it may be because it sees the US doing the same with impunity. There could be no more fatal equation. “India is not the United States,” says analyst and retired Gen. Talat Masood simply. The Pakistani army would respond to any Indian strike.
A better approach would be recognition that Afghanistan and Kashmir are regional problems requiring regional solutions -- and that there are no regional solutions without India, Pakistan and Iran. “We must steer an independent policy toward Iran as a factor of regional stability…. [And] India must eventually resume the arduous search to make Pakistan a stakeholder in good neighborly relations. The US factor complicates this search, which is best undertaken bilaterally,” says M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former Indian ambassador and Ministry of External Affairs insider.
There could be no better response to the terror in Mumbai than a common front of India, Iran and Pakistan against those who would fragment the region by religion or rule it by division.
Graham Usher
December 31, 2008
(Graham Usher, a contributing editor of Middle East Report, filed this article from Lahore.)
For more on radical Islamists in Pakistan, see Graham Usher, “The Pakistan Taliban,” Middle East Report Online, February 13, 2007.
See also Kamran Asdar Ali, “Pakistani Islamists Gamble on the General,” Middle East Report 231 (Summer 2004). Order the issue online.
The day after Christmas, the wires buzzed with reports that Pakistan was moving 20,000 troops from its western border with Afghanistan to locations near the eastern border with India. The redeployment, said Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Qureshi, came in response to “certain developments” on the Indian side of the boundary, one reportedly being that New Delhi might be considering military strikes on militant bases inside Pakistan. Pakistani security officials stressed that these moves were “minimum defensive measures”: No soldiers had been taken away from the theater of counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, only from “snowbound areas” where the army sits idle. Still, the troop transfers marked another dip in relations between India and Pakistan since the November 26 massacre of over 170 people in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai.
New Delhi avers that the ten known Mumbai gunmen were Pakistani. Washington and London say the ten were recruited and trained in Pakistan, and then dispatched to India, by Lashkar-e Taiba, a banned Pakistani group active mostly in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Lashkar-e Taiba denies the charge. The Pakistani government says any evidence shared with the US and Britain should be shared with Islamabad as well, as part of a joint Pakistani-Indian probe into the killings. Pakistan should act first, answers New Delhi. It believes an urban guerrilla assault as polished as that in Mumbai could not have happened without the input of Pakistani army officers and/or agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), “rogue,” “former” or otherwise.
To test Islamabad’s mettle -- and sever or expose any ISI “link” to militancy -- India demands that all Lashkar bases in Pakistan and Pakistani-occupied Kashmir be “dismantled.” It also calls for action on ten outstanding cases where militants have allegedly launched attacks upon India from Pakistani soil and the prosecution, imprisonment or extradition of 40 Pakistanis and Indians wanted by India for “terrorism.” Until at least some of these demands are met, India is unlikely to share intelligence with Pakistan. “How can you give evidence to those you think have attacked you?” asks an Indian government official.
Pakistan has responded, in increments. It raided an alleged Lashkar camp in Pakistani-held Kashmir on December 7 and banned Jamaat ud-Dawa -- Lashkar’s supposed civilian arm -- after its designation as a “terrorist organization” by the United Nations. India’s other demands are impossible, says a Pakistani source. “We told the Americans -- and through the Americans, India -- that we can prosecute Pakistanis involved in Mumbai. But we cannot extradite Pakistani suspects to India.”
Washington apparently agrees. It wants prosecution of Pakistanis said to be connected to the Mumbai attacks, including Jamaat ud-Dawa “emir” Hafiz Saeed, currently under house arrest in Lahore. But Pakistani action to date has satisfied no one. In the December 7 raid, Pakistan supposedly picked up Zaki ur-Rahman Lakhvi and Zarrar Shah, two Lashkar commanders who India says orchestrated the mayhem in Mumbai. They have since vanished. And Saeed says he will be freed once he appeals to a higher court. “It will rule that Jamaat ud-Dawa is an Islamic charity unconnected to Lashkar-e Taiba,” he says.
This is why India should share evidence with Pakistan, says President Asif Zardari. Privately, he has told “allies” that he cannot move against Lashkar or Jamaat ud-Dawa without the support of the army and the increasingly nationalist opposition in Parliament. And the Pakistani army (and even more the ISI) may be reluctant to act against a group it has historically deemed an “asset” at the diktat of a state it has historically defined as an “enemy.” Nor will an Indian troop buildup on the border alter behavior in Pakistan. It simply binds the military-militant nexus tighter.
The only way the army may give up its use of “non-state actors” to pursue state policies is when it sees groups like Lashkar as a greater threat to Pakistan’s security than India. And for that to happen it is not only the army that must end a policy of dangerous liaisons; India must as well.
Lashkar-e Taiba
Lashkar-e Taiba was founded in the late 1980s as the armed wing of Markaz ud-Dawa wal-Irshad, the original name of Hafiz Saeed’s Islamist organization. Soon after its founding, Lashkar was enlisted to help fight Pakistan’s “plausibly deniable” proxy wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory claimed by both Pakistan and India since partition and the cause of two of their three wars. Over the last two decades, Lashkar has earned notoriety as the most lethal group fighting in Kashmir, at one time claiming 50,000 men under its command. In December 2001, New Delhi blamed Lashkar for an attack on the Indian parliament, the last time South Asia’s two nuclear-armed states came to the brink of war. The attack -- and India’s charge -- compelled Pakistan and the US to ban Lashkar. After a few months, Markaz ud-Dawa wal-Irshad was reincarnated as Jamaat ud-Dawa, a social welfare organization that Saeed insists has no ties to Lashkar.
Lashkar subscribes to the Ahl-e Hadith school, an austere strain of South Asian Sunni Islam that, like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, advocates a literal reading of Islamic texts. It assumed its modern shape at the hands of ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam, co-founder of Markaz ud-Dawa wal-Irshad, a mentor to Osama bin Laden and a man recognized as one of the major theorists of militant Islam. In the crucible of the Afghan war against Soviet occupation, ‘Azzam instilled in Saeed and the other Lashkar founders a zeal for “the lost science and art of jihad,” says Pakistani analyst Hassan Abbas. And Saeed applied his zeal to South Asia, not only Muslim-majority Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, but also those Muslim-minority areas of south-central India that once fell under the writ of the Mughal empire. He told a Lashkar rally in Lahore in 1999: “We will not rest until the whole [of] India is dissolved into Pakistan.”
Saeed’s hostility to “Hindu” India is not only ideological. Born into a conservative Muslim household, he lost 36 family members in the communal slaughter that accompanied partition. “India has shown us the path,” he once said. Such antagonism chimed with the ISI’s regional policies. The spymasters, too, sought to “bleed India by a thousand cuts,” a phrase attributed to the 1980s dictator Zia ul Haq, if not to “dissolve India into Pakistan,” then to force India to cede Kashmir to Pakistan.
There were other reasons why Lashkar-e Taiba became the preferred ISI proxy. Unlike the Taliban -- for whom modernity is anathema -- Lashkar believes that fulfillment of the duty of jihad comes through advanced scientific knowledge as well as military prowess. A visit to Muridke, Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s “educational complex” near Lahore, shows the difference. There are classes of boys (and girls) reciting the Qur’an. But there are also students working in physics, chemistry and computer laboratories. These are not the poor who flock to Taliban seminaries in return for bed, board and faith. They are scions of Pakistan’s urban middle class -- the educated elite.
In Muridke -- at least when foreign journalists visit -- references to jihad are muted. Not so in Pakistan’s southern Punjab belt bordering India, Lashkar’s historical stomping ground. There one can find villages plastered with Jamaat ud-Dawa and Lashkar graffiti proclaiming jihad to “free Kashmir.” At a funeral in Bahawalpur in the summer of 2008, a Jamaat ud-Dawa preacher eulogized “60 martyrs” from the district, mostly killed in Kashmir. Such proselytizing could not happen without the authorities’ knowledge, but is it encouraged or tolerated on the basis of Jamaat ud-Dawa’s erstwhile status as a charity?
In the 1990s, it was encouraged. Lashkar had recruitment centers in every city in Pakistan, overseen by the ISI. In 1999 Lashkar guerillas fought alongside Pakistani soldiers on the Kargil heights in Indian-held Kashmir, the last time the two armies tried to force a resolution of the conflict. In the same year Saeed welcomed the coup of Gen. Pervez Musharraf against the elected government of Nawaz Sharif. Dictatorship is closer to the “pure Islamic state” than the “corruption” spread by democracy, he said, according to a Jamaat ud-Dawa source.
Relations cooled after the attack on the Indian parliament. Musharraf banned several “jihadi” groups, Lashkar among them. Funds dried up and 12,000 fighters were demobilized in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Six divisions of the army (80,000 to 100,000 soldiers) were moved from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan, where Pakistan was battling an indigenous insurgency led by the Pakistan Taliban. As Pakistani-Indian relations improved from a state of near war to, in 2004, a peace process, what had seemed to be a tactical feint by Pakistan started to look like a shift in strategy. “Under Musharraf the army moved from a position of hostility to India to one similar to the pro-peace policies of the Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto governments,” said an Indian official. “He helped create a Pakistani consensus.”
But war by proxy was not abandoned altogether, particularly for “pro-Pakistan” groups like Lashkar-e Taiba. Its camps on the frontiers were moved inland or camouflaged as Jamaat ud-Dawa “centers.” Its cadre was also encouraged to diversify, becoming Jamaat ud-Dawa “social workers” rather than Lashkar mujahideen.
This transformation was not simply a “front” for continued Lashkar militancy, as it is often called. Jamaat ud-Dawa runs schools, hospitals and ambulance services in 73 Pakistani cities. In 2007 it tended 6,000 patients, taught 35,000 students and administered 800,000 hepatitis vaccinations, says Saeed. “When it comes to social welfare Jamaat ud-Dawa’s model is Hizballah and Hamas,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, a Pakistani analyst.
Jamaat ud-Dawa’s most public endeavor occurred after the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, when Lashkar fighters emerged from their lairs in the mountains to serve the wounded. Musharraf praised them as “exemplary humanitarian outfits,” in the words of Pakistani analyst Ilyas Khan. So did US officials, who were impressed by Jamaat ud-Dawa’s “state-of-the-art” field hospitals, until they were informed that the facilities were run by a “terrorist front.” Nudged by India on the alleged link to Lashkar, the US blacklisted Jamaat ud-Dawa in 2006. When confronted with the fact the jihadis had not been demobbed but rejobbed, a Pakistani general was unapologetic: “We won’t disband them. If we did, Kashmir would go cold and India will bury it forever.”
Kashmir has heated up since. Indian monitors say there have been 41 militant infractions across the Line of Control separating Pakistani- from Indian-controlled Kashmir in 2008, an escalation they say must have been directed by the ISI since it came between the close of Musharraf’s military regime and the election of Pakistan’s civilian government in February. Far from preventing the incursions, the Pakistani army provided “covering fire” to the infiltrators, say the Indians. The army denies this. It cites Indian figures showing a 40 percent drop in violence in Indian-held Kashmir in 2008, and the lowest total of incidents in 20 years.
Indian analysts also accept there was no Pakistani prompting for the mass protests that rocked Indian-controlled Kashmir in the summer. These demonstrations were caused by indigenous Muslim alienation from Indian rule. Nor did they follow a Pakistani script: The protesters demanded independence not only from New Delhi but also from Islamabad, and, in contrast to Lashkar, which believes that “military jihad” is the path to Kashmir’s reintegration with Pakistan, they were non-violent, even though more than 50 of them were shot dead by the Indian army.
If the ISI has loosened the lid on Lashkar-e Taiba, it is not because of Kashmir. It is because of Afghanistan.
The Army’s Worries
Islamabad has been worried by India’s influence in Afghanistan ever since the fall of the “pro-Pakistan” Taliban regime in 2001. Pakistani officers point out the Afghan government’s fledgling military is “disproportionately” staffed by officers from the “pro-India” Northern Alliance, the erstwhile Afghan coalition that, with the US, drove the Taliban from power. But worry has become paranoia. In the last year, India has drawn closer to two states the Pakistani army deems hostile to its interests in Afghanistan: Iran and the US.
India denies any mischief. “Our main activity in Afghanistan is building roads,” says an Indian official. That is so. Together with Iran, India is currently laying a road network that, when complete, will circumvent landlocked Afghanistan’s need to use Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea, outlets Islamabad deems vital to its economic future.
New Delhi is also exerting influence on US policy in Afghanistan, alleges the army. Two examples are cited. One is Washington’s endorsement of India’s claim of ISI involvement in the bombing of its Kabul embassy in July. The ISI pleaded not guilty. But since then the CIA has all but refused to share intelligence with the Pakistani agency, including for operations on the Pakistani-Afghan border. “It fears we will pass any information to the Afghan Taliban,” says a Pakistani officer. The other piece of evidence is President George W. Bush’s decree in July that US Special Forces could enter Pakistani territory in pursuit of al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives without the approval of the Pakistani government. There have since been 23 US aerial strikes and one ground assault, together killing more than 100 people. The CIA says it is targeting bases whence Taliban fighters are dispatched to Afghanistan and where al-Qaeda is “plotting the next 9/11.” It also says it has a “tacit” agreement about the strikes with Pakistan.
The Pakistani government denies this. The army says the strikes are violations of Pakistani sovereignty and “completely counterproductive” in view of its attempts to rally local tribes against the militants on the Pakistani-Afghan border. And it sees India’s fingerprints all over the US missiles.
To what end would India be meddling in Afghanistan? Two scenarios are bruited by the army. The milder of the two is that India and the Afghan government wish to create such ferment in the borderlands that the CIA and NATO will invade them, wresting back Pashtun territories long claimed by governments in Kabul (which have never recognized the legitimacy of Pakistan’s western border). The worse scenario is that the US and its regional allies actually aim to dismember Pakistan as the world’s only Muslim nuclear state. “India thinks a fragmented Pakistan would reduce the threat level,” says an officer. “The more I talk to the establishment, the more I’m convinced fear and hatred of India is growing,” says a Pakistani analyst. “And now it’s India with America.”
A Regional Solution
Does all this mean that the ISI was behind what happened in Mumbai? Although Indian security officials have claimed as much, the US says there is no evidence to support the charge. Pakistani historian and author Ahmed Rashid has charted the ISI’s liaisons with militant groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir. But he, too, thinks official Pakistani involvement is unlikely. Although many Lashkar cadres accepted the army’s decision in 2004 to wind down the “Kashmiri jihad,” he says, others did not. And these “youngest and most radicalized members joined up with al-Qaeda and the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. They embraced the global jihad to fight US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later attacked the Pakistan government.” These are the likeliest suspects in the Mumbai massacres, says Rashid. “In my opinion, [the Mumbai operation was] an al-Qaeda-planned attack using local surrogates to relieve pressure on them in the tribal areas. What better way than to create a conflict between India and Pakistan?”
Other Pakistani analysts agree. Lashkar is no longer just a Pakistani outfit, they say. It has transnational reach, with cells in Indian-held Kashmir, India and Bangladesh. It acts autonomously. And while India has played up the Pakistani origins of the gunmen, it is inconceivable that the Mumbai attacks could have transpired without backup from indigenous forces, Islamist or criminal or both. The devastation wrought in Mumbai is also beyond anything the ISI would have planned or desired, says a Pakistani security analyst. “It may be that Mumbai has a Pakistani militant connection. But it is also quite clear most active militant groups are no longer under the control of Pakistan’s security apparatus.”
What the Mumbai events do underscore is the recklessness of Pakistan’s long-standing policy of permitting militant groups free rein. This is why many Pakistanis hope there will be a serious move against groups like Lashkar-e Taiba. But they also know that the army is unlikely to give up the use of proxies unless what it defines as Pakistan’s security concerns are addressed: In Afghanistan, addressing Pakistani concerns means recognition by the Afghan government of Pakistan’s western border, and acceptance by the US that all operations within Pakistan are the right of the Pakistani army alone. With India, it means serious negotiations to resolve the conflict over Kashmir.
But there is little use in India appealing to Washington to practice coercive diplomacy with Islamabad. In many ways, recent US policy has aggravated the sores that linger in Indian-Pakistani relations. It was the Bush administration’s nuclear agreement with India that convinced the army that New Delhi was now the “strategic partner” of the US in the region, with Islamabad merely a hired gun for the fight with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And if India is considering “surgical” strikes inside Pakistan, it may be because it sees the US doing the same with impunity. There could be no more fatal equation. “India is not the United States,” says analyst and retired Gen. Talat Masood simply. The Pakistani army would respond to any Indian strike.
A better approach would be recognition that Afghanistan and Kashmir are regional problems requiring regional solutions -- and that there are no regional solutions without India, Pakistan and Iran. “We must steer an independent policy toward Iran as a factor of regional stability…. [And] India must eventually resume the arduous search to make Pakistan a stakeholder in good neighborly relations. The US factor complicates this search, which is best undertaken bilaterally,” says M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former Indian ambassador and Ministry of External Affairs insider.
There could be no better response to the terror in Mumbai than a common front of India, Iran and Pakistan against those who would fragment the region by religion or rule it by division.
Study: Bipolar Disorder Linked to Older Dads
Study: Bipolar Disorder Linked to Older Dads
at：2008-12-31 05:25:14 Click: 12
Schizophrenia, autism and now bipolar disorder are all linked with older fathers. Here is the Associated Press story by Lindsey Tanner that ran two days ago discussing the newest study.
CHICAGO (AP) — Children born to older fathers face a greater chance of developing bipolar disorder, according to one of the largest studies linking mental illness with advanced paternal age.
Previous research has connected schizophrenia and autism with older dads, and a Danish study published last year added bipolar disorder to the list. The new study led by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute strengthens the evidence.
The leading theory is that older men's sperm may be more likely to develop mutations. Even so, the odds of a person becoming bipolar are so low that the study's authors said it shouldn't dissuade older men from becoming fathers.
Researchers analyzed Swedish national registry data from more than 80,000 people, including 13,428 with bipolar disorder who were born between 1932 and 1991.
The risks started increasing around age 40 but were strongest among those 55 and older. Children born to these dads were 37 percent more likely to develop bipolar disorder than those born to men in their 20s.
They also faced more than double the risk of developing bipolar disorder before age 20. Scientists call that early onset disease, and while they have long known that bipolar disorder tends to run in families, early onset disease has been thought to be most strongly linked with genetics.
The age of the mothers didn't appear to be much of a factor.
The study, released Monday, appears in September's Archives of General Psychiatry.
While the findings don't explain what might cause some older men to have bipolar children, it "reinforces the notion that there's a strong biological component to this," said Dr. Harold Pincus, vice chair of psychiatry at Columbia University.
Bipolar disorder causes dramatic mood swings, from deep depression to manic highs. It affects more than 5 million Americans.
Lifetime risks for it have been estimated at roughly 1 percent to 4 percent. The study results suggest that having an older father might increase that slightly. The findings aren't definitive, but even if the link proves to be real, Pincus noted that still means most people with older fathers won't ever get bipolar disorder.
Factors involving mothers, including age and health, have long been thought to be most closely linked with birth defects and other abnormalities. But the new study adds to mounting evidence that paternal factors also play an important role, said New York University researcher Susan Harlap.
Sperm are produced throughout a man's lifetime, and scientists believe that as men age there is a greater chance for mutations that could contribute to disorders in their children.
Advanced paternal age also has been linked with birth defects, and some sperm banks have age limits for donors because of that.
While important for scientists, the study results shouldn't discourage older men from fathering children, said Emma Frans, the lead author.
She said the results suggest that similar mechanisms might contribute to risks for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and autism. Each of these disorders is thought to have many causes including biologic and outside factors.
On the Net:
Archives: http://www.archgenpsychiatry.com
National Institutes of Health bipolar information: http://tinyurl.com/2wjbv7
View text Add Favorite Close
Comments
Les at : 2008-12-31 08:25:35
Type 1 diabetes, MS, Alzheimer's, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, breast, prostate, leukemia, and early childhood cancer are among the many other disorders that rise in incidence with increasing paternal age. Some sperm US banks refuse sperm of a man past his 35th birthday to try an avoid paternal age related genetic disease. By the age of 33-35 men are rapidly accumulating mutations in their sperm making cells. http://how-old-is-too-old.blogspot.com/
Comment
at：2008-12-31 05:25:14 Click: 12
Schizophrenia, autism and now bipolar disorder are all linked with older fathers. Here is the Associated Press story by Lindsey Tanner that ran two days ago discussing the newest study.
CHICAGO (AP) — Children born to older fathers face a greater chance of developing bipolar disorder, according to one of the largest studies linking mental illness with advanced paternal age.
Previous research has connected schizophrenia and autism with older dads, and a Danish study published last year added bipolar disorder to the list. The new study led by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute strengthens the evidence.
The leading theory is that older men's sperm may be more likely to develop mutations. Even so, the odds of a person becoming bipolar are so low that the study's authors said it shouldn't dissuade older men from becoming fathers.
Researchers analyzed Swedish national registry data from more than 80,000 people, including 13,428 with bipolar disorder who were born between 1932 and 1991.
The risks started increasing around age 40 but were strongest among those 55 and older. Children born to these dads were 37 percent more likely to develop bipolar disorder than those born to men in their 20s.
They also faced more than double the risk of developing bipolar disorder before age 20. Scientists call that early onset disease, and while they have long known that bipolar disorder tends to run in families, early onset disease has been thought to be most strongly linked with genetics.
The age of the mothers didn't appear to be much of a factor.
The study, released Monday, appears in September's Archives of General Psychiatry.
While the findings don't explain what might cause some older men to have bipolar children, it "reinforces the notion that there's a strong biological component to this," said Dr. Harold Pincus, vice chair of psychiatry at Columbia University.
Bipolar disorder causes dramatic mood swings, from deep depression to manic highs. It affects more than 5 million Americans.
Lifetime risks for it have been estimated at roughly 1 percent to 4 percent. The study results suggest that having an older father might increase that slightly. The findings aren't definitive, but even if the link proves to be real, Pincus noted that still means most people with older fathers won't ever get bipolar disorder.
Factors involving mothers, including age and health, have long been thought to be most closely linked with birth defects and other abnormalities. But the new study adds to mounting evidence that paternal factors also play an important role, said New York University researcher Susan Harlap.
Sperm are produced throughout a man's lifetime, and scientists believe that as men age there is a greater chance for mutations that could contribute to disorders in their children.
Advanced paternal age also has been linked with birth defects, and some sperm banks have age limits for donors because of that.
While important for scientists, the study results shouldn't discourage older men from fathering children, said Emma Frans, the lead author.
She said the results suggest that similar mechanisms might contribute to risks for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and autism. Each of these disorders is thought to have many causes including biologic and outside factors.
On the Net:
Archives: http://www.archgenpsychiatry.com
National Institutes of Health bipolar information: http://tinyurl.com/2wjbv7
View text Add Favorite Close
Comments
Les at : 2008-12-31 08:25:35
Type 1 diabetes, MS, Alzheimer's, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, breast, prostate, leukemia, and early childhood cancer are among the many other disorders that rise in incidence with increasing paternal age. Some sperm US banks refuse sperm of a man past his 35th birthday to try an avoid paternal age related genetic disease. By the age of 33-35 men are rapidly accumulating mutations in their sperm making cells. http://how-old-is-too-old.blogspot.com/
Comment
Omar says Kashmir issue be resolved through dialogue between Pakistan and India
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Omar says Kashmir issue be resolved through dialogue between Pakistan andIndia
NEW DELHI, Dec 31 (APP)‑ Omar Abdullah, President of National Conference said Kashmir issue should be resolved through dialogue between Pakistan and India.
“If Kashmir is to be resolved and relations between India and Pakistan improved, it will be through dialogue only. I appeal to the two countries not to allow bitterness to creep into their relations,” Omar said.
Dialogue and not the war was the only solution to resolve issues between Islamabad and New Delhi, he said while addressing a gathering of his supporters in Srinagar on Wednesday after his return from New Delhi.
Omar Abdullah will take oath of new Chief Minister of occupied Kashmir soon as his party and Congress Party have entered an alliance to form the next government in Srinagar.
He said nothing can be achieved through war and guns cannot solve any problem. Talks are the only way to address all issues and remove misunderstandings between the neighbouring countries, he said.
He also asked both countries “to avoid taking threatening postures as the relations between India and Pakistan directly affect the people of our state, whether the relations are good or bad,” he said.
Omar said his next government in Srinagar would make efforts to improve relations between the two countries.
He said New Delhi needed to give a “fresh look at peace efforts with Pakistan” and ensure that the “misunderstandings are removed as quickly as possible”. “A stable relation with the neighbouring country will be highly beneficial for the country,” Omar added.
NA Defence Committee to visit PAC, POF - UK High Commissioner calls on President - President Bush telephones President Asif Ali Zardari - PM office denies CNNIBN story - Fate of Iran, Pakistan Interrelated: Iranian President - Youth Parliament condemns Israeli violence against Palestinians
Omar says Kashmir issue be resolved through dialogue between Pakistan andIndia
NEW DELHI, Dec 31 (APP)‑ Omar Abdullah, President of National Conference said Kashmir issue should be resolved through dialogue between Pakistan and India.
“If Kashmir is to be resolved and relations between India and Pakistan improved, it will be through dialogue only. I appeal to the two countries not to allow bitterness to creep into their relations,” Omar said.
Dialogue and not the war was the only solution to resolve issues between Islamabad and New Delhi, he said while addressing a gathering of his supporters in Srinagar on Wednesday after his return from New Delhi.
Omar Abdullah will take oath of new Chief Minister of occupied Kashmir soon as his party and Congress Party have entered an alliance to form the next government in Srinagar.
He said nothing can be achieved through war and guns cannot solve any problem. Talks are the only way to address all issues and remove misunderstandings between the neighbouring countries, he said.
He also asked both countries “to avoid taking threatening postures as the relations between India and Pakistan directly affect the people of our state, whether the relations are good or bad,” he said.
Omar said his next government in Srinagar would make efforts to improve relations between the two countries.
He said New Delhi needed to give a “fresh look at peace efforts with Pakistan” and ensure that the “misunderstandings are removed as quickly as possible”. “A stable relation with the neighbouring country will be highly beneficial for the country,” Omar added.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
‘India is on verge of attacking Pakistan’
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
‘India is on verge of attacking Pakistan’
* Senator John McCain says situation is ‘very dicey’
WASHINGTON: Former Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain has voiced his deep concern over the tense South Asian situation, saying India is preparing for some kind of attack on Pakistan in the wake of last month's Mumbai attacks.
McCain’s statement preceded a relative de-escalation in the tension as both Islamabad and New Delhi stressed avoidance of war and talked peace over the weekend. "The Indians are on the verge of some kind of attack on Pakistan" such as an air attack on suspected militant camps, McCain told a daily newspaper in his home state Arizona in an interview published Monday.
Pakistan Tuesday saw some positive signs over the last two days in Indian leaders' statements but recommended New Delhi de-activate its forward air bases and move its ground troops back to peacetime locations to resume friendly atmosphere. "I think it's a very dicey situation," McCain told The Daily Courier, noting how both countries have nuclear weapons. "We're going to be in for a very difficult time there," added McCain, who earlier this month visited both New Delhi and Islamabad as part of US efforts to avert any standoff between them.
The US and China have been making diplomatic efforts to urge Pakistan and India to ease the situation. McCain's remarks corroborated Islamabad's position last week on New Delhi readying its forces as the Pakistani officials said India had resorted to some "potentially dangerous" moves.
Meanwhile, leaders on both sides have called for peace with Pakistan emphasising cooperative efforts against violent extremism. app
‘India is on verge of attacking Pakistan’
* Senator John McCain says situation is ‘very dicey’
WASHINGTON: Former Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain has voiced his deep concern over the tense South Asian situation, saying India is preparing for some kind of attack on Pakistan in the wake of last month's Mumbai attacks.
McCain’s statement preceded a relative de-escalation in the tension as both Islamabad and New Delhi stressed avoidance of war and talked peace over the weekend. "The Indians are on the verge of some kind of attack on Pakistan" such as an air attack on suspected militant camps, McCain told a daily newspaper in his home state Arizona in an interview published Monday.
Pakistan Tuesday saw some positive signs over the last two days in Indian leaders' statements but recommended New Delhi de-activate its forward air bases and move its ground troops back to peacetime locations to resume friendly atmosphere. "I think it's a very dicey situation," McCain told The Daily Courier, noting how both countries have nuclear weapons. "We're going to be in for a very difficult time there," added McCain, who earlier this month visited both New Delhi and Islamabad as part of US efforts to avert any standoff between them.
The US and China have been making diplomatic efforts to urge Pakistan and India to ease the situation. McCain's remarks corroborated Islamabad's position last week on New Delhi readying its forces as the Pakistani officials said India had resorted to some "potentially dangerous" moves.
Meanwhile, leaders on both sides have called for peace with Pakistan emphasising cooperative efforts against violent extremism. app
Slaughter in Gaza: Another Chapter in the Global Elite Master Plan
Slaughter in Gaza: Another Chapter in the Global Elite Master Plan
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
Tuesday, Dec 30, 2008
Israel is using U.S. munitions against the Palestinians. From the Jerusalem Post:
The Israel Air Force used a new bunker-buster missile that it received recently from the United States in strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post learned on Sunday.
The missile, called GBU-39, was developed in recent years by the US as a small-diameter bomb for low-cost, high-precision and low collateral damage strikes.
The claim that Israel is employing the bomb because it minimizes “collateral damage” is sadistically absurd, to say the least — the Gaza Strip is incontestably the most populated tract of land on earth and any munition, even a “smart” one, will undoubtedly cause “collateral damage.” The 1.3 million Palestinians living on the Gaza Strip are little more than fish in a barrel due to the fact Israel controls Gaza’s airspace, coast and most of its borders.
Israel received approval from Congress to purchase 1,000 units in September and defense officials said on Sunday that the first shipment had arrived earlier this month and was used successfully in penetrating underground Kassam launchers in the Gaza Strip during the heavy aerial bombardment of Hamas infrastructure on Saturday. It was also used in Sunday’s bombing of tunnels in Rafah.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Yaakov Katz, writing for the Jerusalem Post, fails to mention that the tunnels are also used to smuggle food and medicine, items the Israelis have blocked from entering Gaza. “Merchants invented the system,” writes Amira Hass. “The tunnels are not only for weapons and drugs, but for medicine, basic food commodities and cigarettes, at prices much more suitable for poverty-stricken Rafah. They are a way to break an economic siege. The weapons in the hands of the armed men of Rafah prove that the tunnels are not being used to smuggle sophisticated weapons. Nonetheless, the tunnels have turned into a scarecrow that justifies every strike at civilian lives and civilian property.”
On Sunday, head of the Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration Col. Moshe Levy was interviewed by several Arab news outlets during which he stressed that Israel was not against the Palestinian public in Gaza but was operating against Hamas.
It should be noted that Hamas claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats in 2006, as the Washington Post reported at the time. Fatah won only 43 seats, mostly because many Palestinians realized the organization was heavily comprised, corrupt, and in league with Israeli intelligence and the CIA. Fatah’s relationship with the CIA became apparent last year when Fatah security compounds in Gaza were raided by Hamas — “they found huge supplies of American-made weaponry including 7,400 M-16 assault rifles, dozens of mounted machine guns, rocket launchers, seven armored military jeeps, 800,000 rounds of bullets and 18 US-made armored personnel carriers,” writes Mike Whitney, who cites Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily.
They also discovered something far more valuable — CIA files which purportedly contain “information about the collaboration between Fatah and the Israeli and American security organizations; CIA methods on how to prevent attacks, chase and follow after cells of Hamas and the Committees; plans about Fatah assassinations of members of Hamas and other organizations; and American studies on the security situation in Gaza.
“Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point,” mused Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA operations officer. “Baer is right. The uncovering of the documents is ‘big trouble’ for Abbas who is already facing a loss of public confidence from his closeness to Israel and for his appointment of Salam Fayyad, the ex-World bank official who the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz calls ‘everyone’s favorite Palestinian,’” adds Whitney.
A “favorite Palestinian” for the globalists and banksters, not the Palestinian people.
The corporate media in the U.S. has bent over backwards to portray Hamas as the villain in the latest round of mass murder and carnage. In fact, Hamas has attempted to implement a ceasefire with Israel on numerous occasions. “Israel rejected a cease-fire offer from the Palestinian group Hamas as a humanitarian aid crisis erupting in the Gaza Strip threatened wider instability,” the Christian Science Monitor reported in April. “[The] Palestinian group offered to cease cross-border rocket attacks if Israel opens crossing points into Gaza and ends military incursions into the Palestinian territory,” Al Jazeera reported.
In fact, Israel is notorious for violating ceasefires. For instance, on June 19, 2008, Hamas and the Palestine Information Center accused the Israelis of violating an agreed upon ceasefire three times on the first day of its implementation. “The Center reported that Israeli navy boats fired four shells at fishermen in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, while soldiers opened fire at farmers east of Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip,” the media center reported on its website. “Also, eyewitnesses reported that soldiers fired at farmers in Khuza’a town, near Khan Younis, and fired at a number of houses in AL Qarara town, east of the city.”
Israel fully exploited a Hamas declaration on December 19 to not renew the above ceasefire “because the Zionist enemy has failed to respect the conditions,” according to Joshua Lapide, reporting for Asia News. “The Israeli government blames Hamas for not stopping attacks often carried out by smaller Palestinian factions, while the Islamists claim Israel also broke the truce by failing to lift its blockade of the impoverished territory. Israel responded to a surge of violence in early November by tightening sanctions and closing crossing points with Gaza, halting deliveries of humanitarian aid and other supplies, basically transforming the Strip into one huge gulag.”
Jonathan Cook, writing for ZNet, details Israel’s brutal recruitment of Palestinian collaborators. “Recent reports in the Israeli media, for example, suggest that the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, far from reducing the opportunities for collaboration, may actually have increased them. The current siege of the Strip — in which Israel effectively governs all movement in and out of Gaza — has provided an ideal point of leverage for encouraging collusion… In the past 17 years alone, 150,000 Palestinians have been prosecuted by the military regime. According to the Israeli group Yesh Din, 95 per cent of these trials end in plea bargains, offering yet another chance to persuade a detainee to turn informant in return for a reduced sentence.”
Is it possible the above mentioned “smaller Palestinian factions” engaging in attacks are false flag groups unleashed to ensure an Israeli pretext – in fact, A New World Order pretext – for continued violence against the Palestinian people and make sure there is never an agreeable peace deal between the two?
In 2002, “Palestinian security forces … arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported. “The arrests come two days after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon charged al-Qaeda militants were operating in Gaza and in Lebanon.” An anonymous Palestinian official told the newspaper the alleged collaborators sought to “discredit the Palestinian people, justify every Israeli crime and provide reasons to carry out a new (military) aggression in the Gaza Strip.”
As noted on December 22, the “less influential Islamic Jihad was behind most of the rocket attacks” on Israel, although Hamas has approved of such attacks.
Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad were created by the Muslim Brotherhood, a documented CIA and British intelligence asset. “According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955,” writes Said Aburish in his book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite. “When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East… This signaled the beginning of an alliance between the traditional regimes and mass Islamic movements against Nasser and other secular forces.”
It is also a documented fact that Israeli intelligence created Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO and Arab nationalism. Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO ,” Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, told UPI correspondent Richard Sale. “According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928,” writes Sale (see Yossi Schwartz, Palestine: The origins of Hamas and its role today).
As Peter D. Goodgame details in The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order, the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots and related manifestations are part of a larger plan on the part of the ruling elite to destabilize Muslim and Arab societies and thus curtail the “threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries,” as a leading Australian scientist suggested in a secret report to the Australian Defense Department in 1947.
Goodgame writes:
This explosion of violence throughout the Middle East in the late ’70s and early ’80s was referred to by Zbigniew Brzezinski as the “Arc of Crisis.” It was not something that occurred by chance, but was in fact the result of the deliberate plan developed by the Globalist strategists such as Dr. Alexander King, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and British operative Dr. Bernard Lewis. The Middle Eastern “Arc of Crisis” was not a spontaneous internal conflagration, it was something that came about as a result of Western policy in league with the Muslim Brotherhood. Without help from the West radical Islam would have remained the illegitimate, repressive minority movement that it has always been, and the Middle East would have remained stable and prosperous.
Israel undoubtedly has it own imperialistic and chauvinistic reasons for long brutalizing the Palestinians — as documented by Ralph Schoenman in his book The Hidden History of Zionism — but at the end of the day Israel is essentially a client state not so much under the control of the United States as the New World Order and the eugenicists of the global elite.
(On a side note: the ultimate creation of the state of Israel was a pet project of the Rothschild banking dynasty. Baron Edmond James (Avrahim Binyamin) de Rothschild (1845-1934) is the known as the “Father of the Settlement” (Avi ha-Yishuv). In 1982, Israel released a commemorative Independence Day coin bearing Rothschild’s likeness.)
Bush and Obama have deferred to this ongoing plan to victimize the Palestinians. Earlier today, the Bush administration placed the blame for Israelis bombing of the densely populated Gaza Strip — apparently including the use of GBU-39 missiles provided by the United States — squarely on Hamas (see the above video).
“Mr. Obama’s election has raised expectations, among allies and enemies alike, that new American policies are forthcoming, putting more pressure on him to signal more quickly what he intends to do. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, Mr. Obama has not suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush had to resolve the existential conflict between the Israelis and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza,” reports the New York Times.
Indeed, Obama has not “suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush” because both take orders from the global elite and do not actually formulate policies of their own. As for the “existential conflict” in the Occupied Territories, it is part of a larger Malthusian plan on the part of our eugenicist rulers, a plan spelled out well in advance by the United Nations, the Club of Rome, the Tavistock and Aspen Institutes.
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
Tuesday, Dec 30, 2008
Israel is using U.S. munitions against the Palestinians. From the Jerusalem Post:
The Israel Air Force used a new bunker-buster missile that it received recently from the United States in strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post learned on Sunday.
The missile, called GBU-39, was developed in recent years by the US as a small-diameter bomb for low-cost, high-precision and low collateral damage strikes.
The claim that Israel is employing the bomb because it minimizes “collateral damage” is sadistically absurd, to say the least — the Gaza Strip is incontestably the most populated tract of land on earth and any munition, even a “smart” one, will undoubtedly cause “collateral damage.” The 1.3 million Palestinians living on the Gaza Strip are little more than fish in a barrel due to the fact Israel controls Gaza’s airspace, coast and most of its borders.
Israel received approval from Congress to purchase 1,000 units in September and defense officials said on Sunday that the first shipment had arrived earlier this month and was used successfully in penetrating underground Kassam launchers in the Gaza Strip during the heavy aerial bombardment of Hamas infrastructure on Saturday. It was also used in Sunday’s bombing of tunnels in Rafah.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Yaakov Katz, writing for the Jerusalem Post, fails to mention that the tunnels are also used to smuggle food and medicine, items the Israelis have blocked from entering Gaza. “Merchants invented the system,” writes Amira Hass. “The tunnels are not only for weapons and drugs, but for medicine, basic food commodities and cigarettes, at prices much more suitable for poverty-stricken Rafah. They are a way to break an economic siege. The weapons in the hands of the armed men of Rafah prove that the tunnels are not being used to smuggle sophisticated weapons. Nonetheless, the tunnels have turned into a scarecrow that justifies every strike at civilian lives and civilian property.”
On Sunday, head of the Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration Col. Moshe Levy was interviewed by several Arab news outlets during which he stressed that Israel was not against the Palestinian public in Gaza but was operating against Hamas.
It should be noted that Hamas claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats in 2006, as the Washington Post reported at the time. Fatah won only 43 seats, mostly because many Palestinians realized the organization was heavily comprised, corrupt, and in league with Israeli intelligence and the CIA. Fatah’s relationship with the CIA became apparent last year when Fatah security compounds in Gaza were raided by Hamas — “they found huge supplies of American-made weaponry including 7,400 M-16 assault rifles, dozens of mounted machine guns, rocket launchers, seven armored military jeeps, 800,000 rounds of bullets and 18 US-made armored personnel carriers,” writes Mike Whitney, who cites Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily.
They also discovered something far more valuable — CIA files which purportedly contain “information about the collaboration between Fatah and the Israeli and American security organizations; CIA methods on how to prevent attacks, chase and follow after cells of Hamas and the Committees; plans about Fatah assassinations of members of Hamas and other organizations; and American studies on the security situation in Gaza.
“Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point,” mused Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA operations officer. “Baer is right. The uncovering of the documents is ‘big trouble’ for Abbas who is already facing a loss of public confidence from his closeness to Israel and for his appointment of Salam Fayyad, the ex-World bank official who the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz calls ‘everyone’s favorite Palestinian,’” adds Whitney.
A “favorite Palestinian” for the globalists and banksters, not the Palestinian people.
The corporate media in the U.S. has bent over backwards to portray Hamas as the villain in the latest round of mass murder and carnage. In fact, Hamas has attempted to implement a ceasefire with Israel on numerous occasions. “Israel rejected a cease-fire offer from the Palestinian group Hamas as a humanitarian aid crisis erupting in the Gaza Strip threatened wider instability,” the Christian Science Monitor reported in April. “[The] Palestinian group offered to cease cross-border rocket attacks if Israel opens crossing points into Gaza and ends military incursions into the Palestinian territory,” Al Jazeera reported.
In fact, Israel is notorious for violating ceasefires. For instance, on June 19, 2008, Hamas and the Palestine Information Center accused the Israelis of violating an agreed upon ceasefire three times on the first day of its implementation. “The Center reported that Israeli navy boats fired four shells at fishermen in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, while soldiers opened fire at farmers east of Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip,” the media center reported on its website. “Also, eyewitnesses reported that soldiers fired at farmers in Khuza’a town, near Khan Younis, and fired at a number of houses in AL Qarara town, east of the city.”
Israel fully exploited a Hamas declaration on December 19 to not renew the above ceasefire “because the Zionist enemy has failed to respect the conditions,” according to Joshua Lapide, reporting for Asia News. “The Israeli government blames Hamas for not stopping attacks often carried out by smaller Palestinian factions, while the Islamists claim Israel also broke the truce by failing to lift its blockade of the impoverished territory. Israel responded to a surge of violence in early November by tightening sanctions and closing crossing points with Gaza, halting deliveries of humanitarian aid and other supplies, basically transforming the Strip into one huge gulag.”
Jonathan Cook, writing for ZNet, details Israel’s brutal recruitment of Palestinian collaborators. “Recent reports in the Israeli media, for example, suggest that the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, far from reducing the opportunities for collaboration, may actually have increased them. The current siege of the Strip — in which Israel effectively governs all movement in and out of Gaza — has provided an ideal point of leverage for encouraging collusion… In the past 17 years alone, 150,000 Palestinians have been prosecuted by the military regime. According to the Israeli group Yesh Din, 95 per cent of these trials end in plea bargains, offering yet another chance to persuade a detainee to turn informant in return for a reduced sentence.”
Is it possible the above mentioned “smaller Palestinian factions” engaging in attacks are false flag groups unleashed to ensure an Israeli pretext – in fact, A New World Order pretext – for continued violence against the Palestinian people and make sure there is never an agreeable peace deal between the two?
In 2002, “Palestinian security forces … arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported. “The arrests come two days after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon charged al-Qaeda militants were operating in Gaza and in Lebanon.” An anonymous Palestinian official told the newspaper the alleged collaborators sought to “discredit the Palestinian people, justify every Israeli crime and provide reasons to carry out a new (military) aggression in the Gaza Strip.”
As noted on December 22, the “less influential Islamic Jihad was behind most of the rocket attacks” on Israel, although Hamas has approved of such attacks.
Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad were created by the Muslim Brotherhood, a documented CIA and British intelligence asset. “According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955,” writes Said Aburish in his book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite. “When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East… This signaled the beginning of an alliance between the traditional regimes and mass Islamic movements against Nasser and other secular forces.”
It is also a documented fact that Israeli intelligence created Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO and Arab nationalism. Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO ,” Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, told UPI correspondent Richard Sale. “According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928,” writes Sale (see Yossi Schwartz, Palestine: The origins of Hamas and its role today).
As Peter D. Goodgame details in The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order, the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots and related manifestations are part of a larger plan on the part of the ruling elite to destabilize Muslim and Arab societies and thus curtail the “threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries,” as a leading Australian scientist suggested in a secret report to the Australian Defense Department in 1947.
Goodgame writes:
This explosion of violence throughout the Middle East in the late ’70s and early ’80s was referred to by Zbigniew Brzezinski as the “Arc of Crisis.” It was not something that occurred by chance, but was in fact the result of the deliberate plan developed by the Globalist strategists such as Dr. Alexander King, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and British operative Dr. Bernard Lewis. The Middle Eastern “Arc of Crisis” was not a spontaneous internal conflagration, it was something that came about as a result of Western policy in league with the Muslim Brotherhood. Without help from the West radical Islam would have remained the illegitimate, repressive minority movement that it has always been, and the Middle East would have remained stable and prosperous.
Israel undoubtedly has it own imperialistic and chauvinistic reasons for long brutalizing the Palestinians — as documented by Ralph Schoenman in his book The Hidden History of Zionism — but at the end of the day Israel is essentially a client state not so much under the control of the United States as the New World Order and the eugenicists of the global elite.
(On a side note: the ultimate creation of the state of Israel was a pet project of the Rothschild banking dynasty. Baron Edmond James (Avrahim Binyamin) de Rothschild (1845-1934) is the known as the “Father of the Settlement” (Avi ha-Yishuv). In 1982, Israel released a commemorative Independence Day coin bearing Rothschild’s likeness.)
Bush and Obama have deferred to this ongoing plan to victimize the Palestinians. Earlier today, the Bush administration placed the blame for Israelis bombing of the densely populated Gaza Strip — apparently including the use of GBU-39 missiles provided by the United States — squarely on Hamas (see the above video).
“Mr. Obama’s election has raised expectations, among allies and enemies alike, that new American policies are forthcoming, putting more pressure on him to signal more quickly what he intends to do. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, Mr. Obama has not suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush had to resolve the existential conflict between the Israelis and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza,” reports the New York Times.
Indeed, Obama has not “suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush” because both take orders from the global elite and do not actually formulate policies of their own. As for the “existential conflict” in the Occupied Territories, it is part of a larger Malthusian plan on the part of our eugenicist rulers, a plan spelled out well in advance by the United Nations, the Club of Rome, the Tavistock and Aspen Institutes.
PETER'S NEW YORK
View of New Jersey as seen from the 79th floor of the second of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Copyright 1999 by Peter Duveen.News from a native New YorkerDisclaimer: The views expressed here, unless otherwise stated, reflect only those of the publisher of this web site, and should not be misconstrued to be the views of any other person, corporation or business entity, organization, institution, municipality or nation-state. Email your comments to the attention of the Editor, Peter Duveen, at pduveen@yahoo.com. COMMENTS ARE WELCOME AND MAY BE POSTED.
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Millions have perished in Afghanistan and Iraq and hundreds of thousands have either lost their lives, been maimed, detained, tortured and humiliated as a result of the war on terror. That war has become the biggest excuse in human history to break the law and carry out summary justice. It has been turned into the largest lynching party ever carried out by a posse of outlaws pretending to uphold the law.
--Osama Al Sharif
EARLY 9-11 REPORTAGE REVEALS SURPRISESColumnist Robert Novak among the first to use the phrase "inside job" in connection with the events of September 11, 2001Mohamed Atta's mug gets full play on the New York Post's back page. The U.S. government storyline featuring 19 "terrorists" from the Middle East was taking shape within a day of Sept. 11, 2001.By Peter DuveenPETER'S NEW YORK, December 27, 2008--Married as we seem to be to the digital age, it is a great comfort to be able to occasionally resort to "hard copy," tangible pieces of inked paper upon which much of the literary wealth of the world is recorded. Recently, while searching my "hard copy" archives, I came across some issues of the New York Times and New York Post published within days of the events of September 11, 2001. It is interesting to observe that what are often referred to by defenders of the government's 9-11 storyline as "conspiracy theories" were first articulated by mainstream commentators and experts.What follows are a few snippets of 9-11 related material gleaned from these early accounts.Interestingly, columnist Robert Novak was among the first to use the phrase "inside job" in connection with the events of 9-11. New York Post, Sept. 13, page 59"Beyond Pearl Harbor"by Robert D. NovakNovak's first sentence:Security experts and airline officials agree privately that the simultaneous hijacking of four jetliners was an "inside job," probably indicating complicity beyond malfeasance.He continues further down:In the rage and mourning following Tuesday's disaster, few officials wanted to dwell on how a 10-year hiatus of airline hijackings in this country could be followed by four in one hour. At a minimum, the blame can be put on ill-trained, incompetent personnel performing the screening of passengers. At the worst, security experts fear collusion with terrorists, possibly even extending to the cockpit. This is a subject that the airlines are loathe to discuss.In the last paragraph, Novak reports:Stratfor.com, the private intelligence company, reported Tuesday, "The big winner today, intentionally or not, is the state of Israel."The following article indicates there was time to spare to intercept a plane headed toward the Pentagon.The New York Times, Sept. 13, 2001, p. A5"Controllers Say Flow of Information on Hijacked Planes' Course Was Slow and Uneven"by Matthew L. WaldWASHINGTON, Sept. 12 - The controllers assigned to United Airlines Flight 175 on Tuesday suspected that it had been hijacked as it flew off its assigned route, But they did not learn that another plane had been hijacked and had hit the World Trade Center until a minute or two before Flight 175 struck the center, people involved in the air traffic systems said.In contrast, controllers at the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center had much more warning that something was wrong. Those controllers, who handled American Airlines Flight 77, which dived into the Pentagon, knew about the hijacking of the first plane to crash, even before it hit the World Trade Center, those involved said. That was more than an hour before they watched another hijacked plane, United Flight 93, cross their radar screen on its way to the Pentagon.Advance knowledge made no apparent difference in the response; nobody intercepted the plane."We issue control instructions," one controller said. "Any procedures beyond that point don't lie with us."Those procedures would, in fact, lie with the Air Force....[etc].So-called "debunkers" who make their living or idle away their time hounding critics of the government's 9-11 storyline, often disparage comparisons between the collapses of the World Trade Center towers and controlled demolitions. Here's an interesting citation that addresses the issue only days after 9-11:The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2001, pgs. B1, B8Engineers Say Buildings Near Trade Center Held Up Wellby Eric Lipton and James Glanz...the twin towers had collapsed almost straight downward, a circumstance that the engineers said might have reduced the death toll from the terrorist attack."It's like controlled demolition," said Matthys Levy, a founding partner at Weidlinger Associates, a structural engineering firm in New York. Mr. Levy, the co-author of "Why Buildings Fall Down" (Norton, 1992), said the collapse of the towers was "an uncontrolled demolition project but it acted like a controlled demolition project."The following interesting passage is related to ability of the World Trade Center towers to withstand the impact of an airliner:New York Post, Sept. 13, 2001, p. 18"Shocked experts ask: Who dropped the ball?"by Bob DroginOne unanswered question is whether the attackers read trial transcripts and studies of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. "One of the things we learned was the engineers who built it designed it to withstand the crash from a Boeing 707," said John Parachini, executive director of the Washington office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. "The crash today was a [757], which is a bigger plane."Here's another passage that some might find of interest regarding the same topic:The New York Times, Sept. 18, 2001, F1, 7"Defending Skyscrapers Against Terror"by Kenneth ChangNo one designs a skyscraper to withstand the direct hit of a fully fueled 767, and construction engineers agree that such an attack would have doomed almost any high-rise. An article describing how easy it is to fly a commercial jet into the World Trade Center towers from distant points:New York Post, Sept. 13, 2001, pgs. 34-35"AIMING' A JET IS 'VERY VERY EASY" (this was a banner headline over two pages)"757s and 767's perfect picks for 'weapons"[taken from Reuters]Taking control of a big airliner and flying it into as precise a target as the World Trade Center is easier than most people would imagine, aviation experts said today. "It's very, very easy to aim the plane," said a senior captain with a U.S. carrier. "It's not very difficult to get the experience you need. In three months, you can get a pilot's license."Here's a few passages regarding the health effects of 9-11 and warnings about the same:The New York Times, Sept. 18, page F2"Dust is a Problem, but the Risk Seems Small"by Andrew C. Revkin"We haven't found anything that is alarming to us," said Mary Mears, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency....Overall, though, officials said the only significant health risk remained near the destruction. Workers there should wear masks and protective gear and clean their shoes before heading home, they said.Some officials expressed frustration because many of the workers--most of them hard-bitten construction workers--were ignoring their recommendations.And from the same article:Many officials and experts added that decomposing bodies of victims of the attacks posed no danger.And:Agency officials and independent experts tried to quell rumors about other hazards, including the possibility that the fires might have turned freon from air-conditioners into a poisonous gas called phosgene.The chemical reaction that generates phosgene is possible in extremely hot flames, but not in fires like those still burning, agency officials said. Any gas generated by the initial inferno has dissipated, they said.Back to the The New York Times. "Truthers," as critics of the U.S. government's 9-11 storyline are sometimes referred to, often speak of the total collapse of a third major office tower at the World Trade Center complex, Building 7. But there was another, later, collapse, that of the remainder of the the south tower, in the late afternoon of Sept. 12The New York Times, Sept. 13, 2008, p. A12"As Remnants Collapse, Workers Run For Cover,"by Jennifer Steinhauer:The stalagmite remnants of the fallen World Trade Center towers collapsed even further yesterday, sending rumbling debris and clouds of smoke billowing again through lower Manhattan and prompting rescue workers to flee from the site of the destruction.Further down:The seeming aftershocks began about about (sic) 5 p.m. yesterday, while workers ploddingly cut through twisted steel and heavy forklifts moved rubble across the plaza in front of the fallen towers....First came a rumble, then one firefighter yelled: ":That part will go! We are waiting for it to collapse." Moments later, the remaining floors of the south tower of the World Trade Center fell to the ground in a heap of rubble.Rescue workers and medical personnel bolted up Broadway and Church street, away from flying debris, concrete and smoke as ambulances began to scream from all directions, responding to the new collapse."Everyone started running," said a red Cross worker from Rockland County, who stopped at last at Canal and Broadway. "We were told there was more danger of another building falling. Everyone ran and ran--kept going and didn't look back.""I started running, and I didn't look back," Mr. Schwartz said. "And I'm not going back. I'm going home because it's too dangerous here."And:Frantic calls to the police and Fire Department workers came from all directions, with reports of swaying buildings at John Street and the intersection of Greenwich and liberty Streets.Over at the West Side Highway, hundreds of people, frightened of falling debris, raced south away from what the believed to be a collapsing building. They pushed past police barricades and dodged rescue equipment that were hastily being thrown into reverse. Many searched for a car to dive behind.Firefighters and police officers led the stampede, struggling to race along streets thick with dust, empty water bottles, bits of metal and wire. Firefighters in heavy bunker gear yelled at colleagues, who stood looking toward a rolling pillar of smoke to move. "Get out of here!" screamed one investigator. "Run! Run!"The fashioning of an archetypal 9-11 villain and the storyline of the passenger revolt on Flight 93 were already taking shape the day after the "attacks." The New York Post, reporting on Sept. 13 (about the events of Sept. 12, of course), devotes its entire back page to a portrait of Mohamed Atta. The caption describes Atta's expression as "The face of utter hatred," and tells us that his name "was listed on a passenger manifest for one of the four death planes.""In Phone Calls From Airplane, Passengers Said They Were Trying to Thwart Hijackers" (The New York Times, Sept. 13, A21) by Jodi Wilgoren and Edward Wong identifies at least one source for the saga of Flight 93 that would later form the basis for a movie."I would conclude there was a struggle, and a heroic individual decided they were going to die anyway and, 'Let's bring the plane down here,'" Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., was quoted as saying in the above-cited article, only a day after 9-11.The same article identifies Lyzbeth Glick and Deena Burnett and Alice Hogland as three individuals who said they received phone calls from passengers on Flight 93. Another passenger, Lauren Grandcolas, left a message on an answering machine, while still another placed a call to an emergency switchboard, the article quotes sources as saying.Turning to graphics, we have some of the earliest photos of the damaged Pentagon building in Arlington, Va. appearing in the next day's press. Government sources alleged that a "terrorist" caused the damage by flying a commercial airliner into the building. However, the photos are not what one might expect for a crash site. The absence of aircraft debris is striking. The most plausible explanation is that the Pentagon was not hit by an airliner.The absence of aircraft debris in this photo of the damaged section of the Pentagon taken on Sept. 11, 2008 and used to illustrate a New York Times article the following day, is striking, in light of the government contention that an airliner struck the building. On the bright side, we have Rep, Peter DeFazio, D.-Ore., questioning so-called "anti-terrorist" legislation already in the works by the time the anthrax scare hit the country in October of 2001. "This could be the Gulf of Tonkin resolution for civil liberties, instead of a measure meant to fight terrorism," DeFazio was quoted as saying in an article in the New York Post for October 13, 2001, page 7. One sane voice in a sea of predatory spin and political opportunism.
An exchange on immigration
Peter's New York exchanges views on Alex Jones's www.infowars.com website
GOOGLE BOOKS AND THE END OF HISTORYIs Google Books scanning in the entire written opus of the world in preparation for some cataclysmic event?
SILVERSTEIN SUFFERS SETBACK IN 9-11 SUIT AGAINST AIRLINES
FORMER PAKISTANI INTEL CHIEF: MUMBAI EVENTS ORCHESTRATED TO DRAW INDIA INTO MIDEAST CONFLICTSTrio turn 9-11 issues into a blockbuster for local theater
Peter Duveen Photo
An audience questions Loose Change Final Cut producer Korey Rowe after a screening of the film Nov. 25, 2008 at the Charles R. Wood Theater
in Glens Falls, New York. The film was the largest draw of any ever shown at the theater.
Author calls for formation of truth and reconciliation commission to heal wounds of 9-11
Shays: election fraud implicated in loss of congressional seatFormer SEC chief: Paulson to stay in new administrationRon Paul: "Bailout" bill could trigger a major depression
Return to the gold standard, not a bailout, will cure the nation’s economic ills
LETTER TO CHRISTOPHER SHAYS ON HIS RECENT TRIP TO THE MIDDLE EAST A matter of Rape-Speak: The New York Times on SerbiaFORMER U.S. SENATOR HART URGES PARTY TO SOFTEN STANCE ON RUSSIARon Paul: physical opposition to government may become necessaryThe Olson and Ivins cases: suicide or murder?Fort Detrick biowar center connected with employee fatalities, 2001 anthrax mailingsWelcome?...hmmmm..well.....can I take a rain check on that?Russian masterstroke protects Iran, American public
SLAM DUNK!
Government and the Associated Press try to pre-empt anthrax inquiry
LETTER TO REPRESENTATIVE KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND (D-N.Y.) REGARDING REP. DENNIS KUCINICH'S ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT
AUTHOR CLAIMS HIGH SPEED AND HARD MASONRY SHREDDED COMMERCIAL FLIGHT THAT HIT THE PENTAGONChallenger at book signing questions how human remains could be identified
A member of the audience nonchalantly challenges authors Patrick Creed and Rick Newman with questions about the alleged aircraft impact
at the Pentagon on 9-11 at the Borders Books and Music store in Fairfax, Virginia, in June.
House votes to approve FISA revisionDem leadership leaves its party behind in supporting compromise
HELICOPTERS AMONG US
Helicopters and military aircraft are an increasing presence in rural areas.
LETTER TO THE POST-STAR OF GLENS FALLS, NEW YORK REGARDING RICHARD GAGE'S PRESENTATION ON THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER OFFICE TOWERS ON 9-11, AND A RESPONSE FROM A READERLETTER TO REP. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND REGARDING REP. DENNIS KUCINICH'S ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT, AND GILLIBRAND'S RESPONSE Gravel: Cheney and Bush should be tried for war crimesSupports NYC initiative for new 9-11 probeCHARGES DISMISSED AGAINST "F BUSH" PROTESTERNEW YORK CITY BALLOT INITITATIVE COULD BRING 9-11 UNDER RENEWED SCRUTINY
Campaign for 30,000 signatures outlined during rally at St. Mark's Church, the Bowery
NEW INVESTIGATION NEEDED TO PREVENT ANOTHER "9-11", SAYS ARCHITECT
Peter Duveen Photo
Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Gage urges the public
to push for a new investigation into the collapses of the World Trade Center towers.
CONTRACTOR FORCE IN IRAQ COULD REPLACE REDEPLOYED GI'S: REP. KAPTUR
Don't know if Bin Laden is alive or dead: foreign policy expert
Relief chief in denial over falling dollar's effect on food shortages
U.S. uses world food woes to push trade agenda
Former CIA honcho calls the 9-11 Commission "disastrous"
Pradeep Kaphle in Nepal:
Journalist threatened to be killed
International Media Mission-Nepal Election Monitoring Mission
Ralph Nader supports new 9-11 investigationPradeep Kaphle in NepalMaoists threaten seizure of FM radio stationREP. GILLIBRAND: LOOMING BUSH VETO BLOCKS TROOPS' RETURN FROM IRAQ Peter Duveen photoRep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY): "Troops are being pushed to the breaking point."Glens Falls, New YorkLone protester arrested for anti-Bush placardPolice action constitutes challenge to freedom of speechCLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL POST-STAR ARTICLES (2)THE 19TH CENTURY ROOTS OF 9-11Could the 100-year-old ideas of a French political philosopher be the impetus for the Bush Administration's record of cruelty and deceit?Congressman challenges secret House sessionOn illegal searches and seizures 80 years agoIn a blast from the past, G. Herbert Henshaw fills us in (posthumously) on flagrant government violations of the fourth amendment circa 1927 that led to the deaths of hundreds of American citizensDispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalATTACKERS BREAK ARM OF NEWSPAPER DISTRIBUTORAlbany NotebookU.S. could take action against Iran as early as April, former weapons inspector warns.Scott Ritter: U.S. "continues to articulate a policy of regime change" for Iran.From Pradeep Kaphle in NepalJOURNALISTS ATTACKED BY GOVERNMENT POLICE FORCEWORLD TRADE CENTER STEEL DEFORMATIONHere are some pictures of a steel beam that was deformed from either stress, high temperature, or both, due to the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers. Click on the image for a larger image.These exhibits are from a display at the New York State Museum at Albany, New York.Dispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalJOURNALISTS' VEHICLES VANDALIZED, NEWSPAPERS BURNEDLetter to Nancy Pelosi congratulating House Democrats on their defeat of legislation to reauthorize F.I.S.A.PETER'S NEW YORK, February 17, 2008. The House of Representatives defeated the Senate version of a bill that would have reauthorized spying on Americans without proper judicial oversight. The legislation would also have given amnesty to telecommunications companies for cooperating with the Bush administration to illegally spy on Americans. Dispatch from Pradeep Kaphle
NEPALESE JOURNALIST BADLY INJURED IN BLADE ATTACKRon Paul floats "March on Washington"PETER'S NEW YORK, February 12, 2008--In a message to his supporters, presidential contender Ron Paul said today that he would organize a march on Washington, to occur some time before the Republican primary. Paul said it would be a way of getting his message out, and would demonstrate the widespread support he has enjoyed but that has not always been reflected in polls or election results.Paul indicated that he would stay in the presidential race, in spite of the time he insists on devoting to his local congressional race. Paul is being challenged in the Republican primary for his congressional seat. REFLECTIONS ON CURRENT U.S. POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ITS JUSTIFICATION OR LACK THEREOFNepalese Media Harassed in two incidents (2/4/2008)From Nepal: Bomb hurled targeting FM station (1/31/2008)THE POPULAR MOVEMENT OF RON PAULPhoto ©2008 by Junalyn DuveenRon Paul's grass-roots support in upstate New YorkUseful tips and hints for the householdHOW TO CATCH A MOUSE WITH CHOCOLATE MILKDispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalNepalese Journalists attacked, mistreatedDispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalJOURNALIST ATTACKEDDispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalStatement by the International Press Freedom and Freedom of Expression mission to Nepal Kathmandu, Thursday, 17 January 2008Dispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalALERT: TIBETAN JOURNALIST MURDERED (1/14/2008)More thoughts about 9-11WAYS OF VIEWING THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWERSELECTION FRAUD: THE BIG ISSUE IN THE 2008 ELECTION CYCLE- VOTE COUNT FRAUD DETECTED IN NEW HAMPSHIREREFLECTIONS ON 9-11AMERICAN PLANNERS CONSIDERED USING RADIOLOGICAL "DIRTY BOMB" DURING WORLD WAR IIJOURNALISM UNDER SIEGE AROUND THE WORLD! CLICK HERE TO READ THE LATEST OF PRADEEP KAPHLE'S DISPATCHES ON THE ABUSE OF JOURNALISTS IN NEPALPANEL INVESTIGATES ABDUCTION OF NEPALESE JOURNALISTby Pradeep Kaphle (courtesy of Peter's New York)NEWS FROM NEPAL: JOURNALIST MURDERED, ALLEGEDLY BY MAOISTS - DISPATCH BY PRADEEP KAPHLE (11/5/2007)RON PAUL AND DENNIS KUCINICH SINGLED OUT FOR THE MEDIA'S COLD SHOULDER. DOES THE MEDIA MANIPULATE ELECTIONS?On 9-11 Truth protest:"I think these demonstrators are all into restroom gay sex."
--Geraldo Rivera
Geraldo Rivera attempting to broadcast his show from outside Fox News while demonstrators chant and rant.Geraldo Rivera broadcast disrupted by protestors outside Fox News headquarters. Radio commentator and documentarian Alex Jones arrested and released. Sept. 9, 2007 NEWS-BITS FROM PETER'S NEW YORK - AUGUST 29, 2007· American Elections are controlled by the Media· Maliki's friendly relations with Iran do not bode him well· US antsy over possible acquittal of Philippine pres on corruption chargesBUSH/CHENEY/PELOSI: COMRADES IN ARMSMARCHING ORDERS FROM THE TRIUMVIRATE: FULL STEAM AHEAD08/19/2007“This administration, and its Democratic fellowtravelers such as Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, andmany more, are part of a ruthless gang that has takenover our government.”SOUNDS RADICAL? VETERAN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER HELEN THOMAS DOESN'T THINK SO.08/19/2007DIRTY BOMB IS A CIA HOAX, AND NEW YORKERS, YOU ARE THE TARGET!ADMINISTRATION'S WAR PLANS IN MIDDLE EAST, CRACKDOWN ON DOMESTIC CRITICS, ARE FULL STEAM AHEAD!08/10/2007NEWS FLASH!AIRLINES SUE CIA AND FBI TO SHOW GOVERNMENT FAILURES WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR 9-11 08/08/07 Official's remarks indicate danger of ASEAN becoming "elitist."08/08/07FORCED LABOR USED TO CONSTRUCTAMERICAN EMBASSY IN IRAQ08/08/07Associated Press uses Fed propaganda to bias future jury in so-called JFK bomb plot caseHelps spread Bush Administration's foreign-policy rehtoric against Iran 08/07/07AS IN THE PHILIPPINES, SO IN AMERICA: ASEAN AND ITS COUNTER-PART, THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION 08/05/2007New letter to Nancy Pelosi, speaker, US House of Representatives (Aug. 2, 2007)EXTRA!SHAYS REVEALS MAJOR U.S. INTEREST IN IRAQ IS OILAPOLOGIZES FOR WAR, BUT WANTS TO KEEP TROOP PRESENCE (Aug. 1. 2007)A SPECIAL REPORT FROM PETER'S NEW YORK:MORE ZOMBIES TO STAFF OUR PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS?YES!IF THENATIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE ACADEMY LEGISLATION IS PASSED July 26, 2007THE NEWSFOR JULY 28, 2007Pelosi promoted bill to support recommendations of the bogus 9-11 CommissionThere are penalties for bugging out. Are you listening, Korea?Doctor in Australia freed, with apologies, after his detention for a bogus connection with the latest FAKE London terrorist attackNow those 500 children you were talking aboutFOR JULY 27, 2007Obama refuses to sign on to "one upmanship" diplomacy of war-mongering ClintonMore "Chatter"FOR JULY 25, 2007New ID''s issued to legal "illegal" immigrantsThe US-Iran "Talk Down"Is Pakistan next in Bush's fantasmagora of horrors?"We're WINNING!".......... NOT!The Democratic candidate show on CNN"Chatter": What it means on this websiteIMPEACHMENT LIGHT? SOME FAVOR A SLAP ON THE WRIST 07/22/20079-11 a controlled demolition? Read this! 07/18/2007
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES RESTART THE COLD WAR WITH RUSSIA 07/18/2007
What it means when Bush says "We can win this war" (It's the bases, stupid!") 7/14/2007THE NEW STORYBOARD OF FAKE TERRORISM (again?)7/11/2007
THE NEW STORYBOARD OF FAKE TERRORISM (CONTINUED) 7/8/2007The Storyboard Revisited; A Cornered Administration;, and Al Queda still trumped up as the poster child of international terrorism 7/7/200745 PERCENT OF AMERICANS WANT BUSH IMPEACHED, 54 PERCENT WANT CHENEY IMPEACHED: POLLRESOLUTION TO IMPEACH MR. RICHARD B. CHENEY, VP OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, HAS BEEN INTRODUCED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. Posted 07/07/2007
Ron Paul/Dennis Kucinich Ticket, or election boycott? 07/06/2007
NEW SCENARIO IN THE STORY BOARD OF FAKE GOVERNMENT-CREATED TERRORISM: THE MIDDLE-CLASS TERRORIST. (Jul. 5, 2007)
THE U.S. DEMONIZATION OF LIBYA UNRAVELS: PANEL CALLS FOR NEW TRIAL OF LOCKERBIE DEFENDANT (Posted Jul. 2, 2007)
On the pluses and minuses of GOOGLE BOOKS, Google's project to digitalize the world's libraries (Jul. 1. 2007).
YET ANOTHER PAGE IN THE FANTASY BOOK OF U.S. PRODUCED TERRORISM! Make-believe Indonesian 'Terrorist' supposedly hiding out in the Philippines.
GOVERNMENT MAY HAVE DESIGNED TERRORIST PLOT AGAINST KENNEDY AIRPORT! (June 3, 2007)
Recent letter from Connecticut US Representative Christopher Shays to the publisher of this website, and the editor's response.Recent letters to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Iran, Sudan, and the poisoning of a Russian in Great Britain.More excitement from the Philippines (About coconuts, and, "What the travel agencies do not want you to see!")PETER'S NEW YORK goes to the Philippines for rice harvesting! (April 18, 2007)OPEN LETTER TO THE UNITED STATES SENATORS FROM NEW YORK
"There is no justice in hanging Saddam Hussein, Barzan Hussein and Awad Hamad al-Bandar in their prison unless you also hang George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld from the nearest telephone pole, with or without their royal jewels intact."
- Conrado de Quiros, Philippine journalist
My reply to Mr. de Quiros's column, as published in the Philippine Daily InquirerPHILIPPINE HISTORY AND POLITICS: A RECENT DIALOGUE IN THE PRESS AND EMAILS INVOLVING THE FOUNDER OF THIS WEB SITE.Second letter to Nancy PelosiOpen letter to Nancy Pelosi on the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney
GOVT TO SEARCH FOREIGN NEWSPAPERS FOR "NEGATIVE OPINION"
EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!LAST FIG LEAF FALLS! BUSH'S ANTI-TERRORISM CAMPAIGNUNMASKED AS HIS LATEST FRAUD! New York Times finds the solution to the Iraq war......NOT!
FEATURE:
A SUMMER AT WORLD TRADE CENTER TWO,
AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE WORLD
© 1999 by Peter DuveenIt is five years since the disaster that took down the two office towers of the World Trade Center and a number of surrounding structures. Such was the fate of buildings that were controversial from the planning stages on, and that were often in financial trouble. For years it was hard to keep them rented out, technological marvels that they were. And the Trade Center towers supplanted numerous other structures that represented an important part of New York City life and history. While under construction, they left a virtual hole in lower Manhattan for many years, thus taking that real estate out of productive activity. All in all, the pluses were easily balanced by the minuses, and the final outcome–that they were taken out in an allegedly terrorist attack–cannot be a surprise. It is part of the their destiny, conceived as they were by the prince of taxpayer ripoffs and international affairs meddlers, David Rockefeller.Despite the fact that my childhood was impacted by these brutish structures having displaced the haunts in the city that I so loved to visit, I ended up working in them from time to time. In the summer of 1999, I did a stint for Fuji Bank, located on the 79th floor of the South Tower where, it so happens, the second aircraft found a place to snuggle its nose before emerging, albeit pulverized, at its exit point on the other side of the building. At that point, only a few remained on the floor, probably those who in the past did not take seriously the fire drills held periodically by Fuji, in which an entire floor of the company would evacuate the building. These stalwarts paid with their lives. The real heroes of 9/11 were those who had the presence of mind to leave the building as quickly as possible, for each of them were able to save one person–themselves.A view from the 79th Floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center © 1999 by Peter DuveenPart of the volumes of paper that were scattered about the New York City area in the aftermath of the disaster were papers that I handled or filed. While working there, I had an amiable boss named Michael. Michael’s department reported on the financial condition of hundreds of companies that Fuji Bank had lent money to, in order to assess the ability to these companies to pay back the loans or take on more debt. A lot of lovely people, both men and women, worked on the floor, and I had fallen into the task that summer of distributing material, preparing correspondence, and other such seemingly menial chores, and by doing so, earning some quick bucks to apply toward completing graduate school..During my stay there, I remember participating in a fire drill. The drills were taken seriously. The World Trade Center had been bombed once, and all of its occupants saw the building, and themselves, as future terrorist targets. As a result, when the day came that we were to practice an evacuation, everyone, as best as I could determine, participated.We gathered in the hallway, and then proceeded to walk down 79 flights and out the building into the fresh air. Later, when I heard that so many people had left the building unscathed on the day of 9/11, it didn’t surprise me, as the training had been so thorough, at least for those in Fuji Bank and on my floor in particular In fact, the 9-11 commission report mentions these drills in a positive light:Some civilians have told us that their evacuation on September 11 was greatly aided by changes and training implemented by the Port Authority in response to the 1993 bombing. But during these drills, civilians were not directed into the stairwells....Ah, but we were directed to the stairwells, because we walked down 79 flights of stairs!!!The 9-11 Commission, in another staff document, targets this question more specifically.In no case to our knowledge, did any tenant in the WTC practice a drill where the employees walked down the stairs and exited the building.Well, they cover themselves by adding “to our knowledge,” but it is interesting that this possibility was important enough to include in the document without actually finding out what had happened.Another view from the South Tower of the World Trade Center © 1999 by Peter DuveenIn a sense, the fact that the building had been virtually evacuated in a short time, saving the overwhelming majority of people below the points where the planes hit each building, was a story that was glossed over in the press. The press, oddly, did not want to emphasize how the “terrorists” had been cheated of inflicting the terrible casualty numbers that was undoubtedly their intention. Yes, it seemed that every effort was made to underscore the death toll, and neglect those who had survived.At the time of the disaster, I was a reporter at an upstate New York newspaper, and I was fixated by the possibility of estimating the casualties by considering the number of people that commonly occupied the buildings during the summer months, and the number of floors that were damaged. Having participated in an evacuation exercise in one of the towers, I was also focused on the story of how successful the evacuation effort was. But the media ignored this, and the small paper that I worked on had no direct coverage of the World Trade Center disaster.Then there was the well-known story of how people were told to go back to work after the first plane struck the North Tower, and how some Fuji employees borded the elevators to return to their desks, and to a certain death only moments later as the second plane struck. This ghastly episode was reported in the New York Times. Whose voice it was over the loud speaker that directed people to return to work is one of the great unanswered questions.Then we know that after the collapse of the towers, then Environmental Protection Agency director Christy Todd Whitman told those working at the disaster site that the air was perfectly safe to breathe. Of course this goes against everything even children know. Anyone who takes such a comment seriously almost deserves whatever happens to them. But then again, sometimes such comments are just enough to disarm a legitimate concern and prevent even concerned people from taking proper precautions.Then again, the fire and police departments rushed personnel to the site, without recognizing the danger to their own men and women.In the end, it occurred to me that there was this unstated desire to have the World Trade Center disaster appear as horrible as possible, even if it meant packing people into it, even if it meant damaging the workers that were trying to help in the search for bodies and the cleanup. Even if it meant covering up the fact that many thousands of people were successfully evacuated from the buildings before they collapsed.To this may be added many other interesting facts relating to the 9/11 disaster, such as:That the list of terrorist suspects suddenly appeared almost immediately after the disaster happened. If the government knew who the suspects were so quickly, doesn’t that beg the question of whether they could have stopped it?That the towers themselves fell, collapsed, virtually disappeared into a pile of rubble, a truly unbelievable and startling event.That Dick Cheney announced that the world would never be the same after 9/11, a script he has repeated up to the present day. Who is he to tell us that the world will never be the same? How does he know the future, unless he intended to use this event as a pretext to mold it to conform to some unstated policy goals?One could go on, but there are sites already devoted to this type of analysis, and I would direct the reader to these sites and encourage the reader to investigate them. POSTED 9/11/2006
Public Policy
Is the U.S. Justice Department scapegoating Lynne Stewart for their own role in instigating 9-11?
Letter to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
The New York Times watch
More bogus thought-crime charges leveled against Moslems in latest government case
Masri's name joins a long list of Islamic clerics convicted of thought crimes
Leadership Academy for New York City Public School Principals outed!
Jan 3 '06 NYT readers sound off against private donations to the public sector
Jan 11. '06 Bush Justice Department Implements Kidnapping of Korean National in Mexico
Jan 12 '06 NYT: Fishing expedition against Brooklyn Pol?; Iran and nuclear enrichment
Jan 12 '06 NYT: Islamic clerics fair game for prosecution and persecution
Jan 13 '06 NYT Tale of Two theories: Iraq wants to build a bomb, or the West wants control of its oil
Connecticut Art Scene
Three recent exhibitions
Feature Archives
January 1, 2006 - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART - WHAT IS MODERN?
Sat. May 30, 2004 New York, NY - IS GLOBAL WARMING REAL OR A HOAX?
Museum of Brooklyn Art and Culture: a project of PD Studios, March 1 (2006) opening
Links
Siberian Coffee Pipeline Co. Flexi-Planner Time Management Museum of Brooklyn Art and CultureThe NEST Building, home of PD Studios and the Museum of Brooklyn Art and Culture in Bridgeport, Connecticut
Glackens Chandelier
The parlor of the Henshaw family of State Street, Brooklyn Heights
Henshaw handwritten genealogical notes
Comments? Send to the attention of the editor and publisher of this website, Peter Duveen, pduveen@yahoo.com
Copyright 2004-2006 by Peter Duveen
View of New Jersey as seen from the 79th floor of the second of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Copyright 1999 by Peter Duveen.News from a native New YorkerDisclaimer: The views expressed here, unless otherwise stated, reflect only those of the publisher of this web site, and should not be misconstrued to be the views of any other person, corporation or business entity, organization, institution, municipality or nation-state. Email your comments to the attention of the Editor, Peter Duveen, at pduveen@yahoo.com. COMMENTS ARE WELCOME AND MAY BE POSTED.
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Also check out new postings for the Museum of Brooklyn Art and Culture: "Culinary Archeology I"
Millions have perished in Afghanistan and Iraq and hundreds of thousands have either lost their lives, been maimed, detained, tortured and humiliated as a result of the war on terror. That war has become the biggest excuse in human history to break the law and carry out summary justice. It has been turned into the largest lynching party ever carried out by a posse of outlaws pretending to uphold the law.
--Osama Al Sharif
EARLY 9-11 REPORTAGE REVEALS SURPRISESColumnist Robert Novak among the first to use the phrase "inside job" in connection with the events of September 11, 2001Mohamed Atta's mug gets full play on the New York Post's back page. The U.S. government storyline featuring 19 "terrorists" from the Middle East was taking shape within a day of Sept. 11, 2001.By Peter DuveenPETER'S NEW YORK, December 27, 2008--Married as we seem to be to the digital age, it is a great comfort to be able to occasionally resort to "hard copy," tangible pieces of inked paper upon which much of the literary wealth of the world is recorded. Recently, while searching my "hard copy" archives, I came across some issues of the New York Times and New York Post published within days of the events of September 11, 2001. It is interesting to observe that what are often referred to by defenders of the government's 9-11 storyline as "conspiracy theories" were first articulated by mainstream commentators and experts.What follows are a few snippets of 9-11 related material gleaned from these early accounts.Interestingly, columnist Robert Novak was among the first to use the phrase "inside job" in connection with the events of 9-11. New York Post, Sept. 13, page 59"Beyond Pearl Harbor"by Robert D. NovakNovak's first sentence:Security experts and airline officials agree privately that the simultaneous hijacking of four jetliners was an "inside job," probably indicating complicity beyond malfeasance.He continues further down:In the rage and mourning following Tuesday's disaster, few officials wanted to dwell on how a 10-year hiatus of airline hijackings in this country could be followed by four in one hour. At a minimum, the blame can be put on ill-trained, incompetent personnel performing the screening of passengers. At the worst, security experts fear collusion with terrorists, possibly even extending to the cockpit. This is a subject that the airlines are loathe to discuss.In the last paragraph, Novak reports:Stratfor.com, the private intelligence company, reported Tuesday, "The big winner today, intentionally or not, is the state of Israel."The following article indicates there was time to spare to intercept a plane headed toward the Pentagon.The New York Times, Sept. 13, 2001, p. A5"Controllers Say Flow of Information on Hijacked Planes' Course Was Slow and Uneven"by Matthew L. WaldWASHINGTON, Sept. 12 - The controllers assigned to United Airlines Flight 175 on Tuesday suspected that it had been hijacked as it flew off its assigned route, But they did not learn that another plane had been hijacked and had hit the World Trade Center until a minute or two before Flight 175 struck the center, people involved in the air traffic systems said.In contrast, controllers at the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center had much more warning that something was wrong. Those controllers, who handled American Airlines Flight 77, which dived into the Pentagon, knew about the hijacking of the first plane to crash, even before it hit the World Trade Center, those involved said. That was more than an hour before they watched another hijacked plane, United Flight 93, cross their radar screen on its way to the Pentagon.Advance knowledge made no apparent difference in the response; nobody intercepted the plane."We issue control instructions," one controller said. "Any procedures beyond that point don't lie with us."Those procedures would, in fact, lie with the Air Force....[etc].So-called "debunkers" who make their living or idle away their time hounding critics of the government's 9-11 storyline, often disparage comparisons between the collapses of the World Trade Center towers and controlled demolitions. Here's an interesting citation that addresses the issue only days after 9-11:The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2001, pgs. B1, B8Engineers Say Buildings Near Trade Center Held Up Wellby Eric Lipton and James Glanz...the twin towers had collapsed almost straight downward, a circumstance that the engineers said might have reduced the death toll from the terrorist attack."It's like controlled demolition," said Matthys Levy, a founding partner at Weidlinger Associates, a structural engineering firm in New York. Mr. Levy, the co-author of "Why Buildings Fall Down" (Norton, 1992), said the collapse of the towers was "an uncontrolled demolition project but it acted like a controlled demolition project."The following interesting passage is related to ability of the World Trade Center towers to withstand the impact of an airliner:New York Post, Sept. 13, 2001, p. 18"Shocked experts ask: Who dropped the ball?"by Bob DroginOne unanswered question is whether the attackers read trial transcripts and studies of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. "One of the things we learned was the engineers who built it designed it to withstand the crash from a Boeing 707," said John Parachini, executive director of the Washington office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. "The crash today was a [757], which is a bigger plane."Here's another passage that some might find of interest regarding the same topic:The New York Times, Sept. 18, 2001, F1, 7"Defending Skyscrapers Against Terror"by Kenneth ChangNo one designs a skyscraper to withstand the direct hit of a fully fueled 767, and construction engineers agree that such an attack would have doomed almost any high-rise. An article describing how easy it is to fly a commercial jet into the World Trade Center towers from distant points:New York Post, Sept. 13, 2001, pgs. 34-35"AIMING' A JET IS 'VERY VERY EASY" (this was a banner headline over two pages)"757s and 767's perfect picks for 'weapons"[taken from Reuters]Taking control of a big airliner and flying it into as precise a target as the World Trade Center is easier than most people would imagine, aviation experts said today. "It's very, very easy to aim the plane," said a senior captain with a U.S. carrier. "It's not very difficult to get the experience you need. In three months, you can get a pilot's license."Here's a few passages regarding the health effects of 9-11 and warnings about the same:The New York Times, Sept. 18, page F2"Dust is a Problem, but the Risk Seems Small"by Andrew C. Revkin"We haven't found anything that is alarming to us," said Mary Mears, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency....Overall, though, officials said the only significant health risk remained near the destruction. Workers there should wear masks and protective gear and clean their shoes before heading home, they said.Some officials expressed frustration because many of the workers--most of them hard-bitten construction workers--were ignoring their recommendations.And from the same article:Many officials and experts added that decomposing bodies of victims of the attacks posed no danger.And:Agency officials and independent experts tried to quell rumors about other hazards, including the possibility that the fires might have turned freon from air-conditioners into a poisonous gas called phosgene.The chemical reaction that generates phosgene is possible in extremely hot flames, but not in fires like those still burning, agency officials said. Any gas generated by the initial inferno has dissipated, they said.Back to the The New York Times. "Truthers," as critics of the U.S. government's 9-11 storyline are sometimes referred to, often speak of the total collapse of a third major office tower at the World Trade Center complex, Building 7. But there was another, later, collapse, that of the remainder of the the south tower, in the late afternoon of Sept. 12The New York Times, Sept. 13, 2008, p. A12"As Remnants Collapse, Workers Run For Cover,"by Jennifer Steinhauer:The stalagmite remnants of the fallen World Trade Center towers collapsed even further yesterday, sending rumbling debris and clouds of smoke billowing again through lower Manhattan and prompting rescue workers to flee from the site of the destruction.Further down:The seeming aftershocks began about about (sic) 5 p.m. yesterday, while workers ploddingly cut through twisted steel and heavy forklifts moved rubble across the plaza in front of the fallen towers....First came a rumble, then one firefighter yelled: ":That part will go! We are waiting for it to collapse." Moments later, the remaining floors of the south tower of the World Trade Center fell to the ground in a heap of rubble.Rescue workers and medical personnel bolted up Broadway and Church street, away from flying debris, concrete and smoke as ambulances began to scream from all directions, responding to the new collapse."Everyone started running," said a red Cross worker from Rockland County, who stopped at last at Canal and Broadway. "We were told there was more danger of another building falling. Everyone ran and ran--kept going and didn't look back.""I started running, and I didn't look back," Mr. Schwartz said. "And I'm not going back. I'm going home because it's too dangerous here."And:Frantic calls to the police and Fire Department workers came from all directions, with reports of swaying buildings at John Street and the intersection of Greenwich and liberty Streets.Over at the West Side Highway, hundreds of people, frightened of falling debris, raced south away from what the believed to be a collapsing building. They pushed past police barricades and dodged rescue equipment that were hastily being thrown into reverse. Many searched for a car to dive behind.Firefighters and police officers led the stampede, struggling to race along streets thick with dust, empty water bottles, bits of metal and wire. Firefighters in heavy bunker gear yelled at colleagues, who stood looking toward a rolling pillar of smoke to move. "Get out of here!" screamed one investigator. "Run! Run!"The fashioning of an archetypal 9-11 villain and the storyline of the passenger revolt on Flight 93 were already taking shape the day after the "attacks." The New York Post, reporting on Sept. 13 (about the events of Sept. 12, of course), devotes its entire back page to a portrait of Mohamed Atta. The caption describes Atta's expression as "The face of utter hatred," and tells us that his name "was listed on a passenger manifest for one of the four death planes.""In Phone Calls From Airplane, Passengers Said They Were Trying to Thwart Hijackers" (The New York Times, Sept. 13, A21) by Jodi Wilgoren and Edward Wong identifies at least one source for the saga of Flight 93 that would later form the basis for a movie."I would conclude there was a struggle, and a heroic individual decided they were going to die anyway and, 'Let's bring the plane down here,'" Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., was quoted as saying in the above-cited article, only a day after 9-11.The same article identifies Lyzbeth Glick and Deena Burnett and Alice Hogland as three individuals who said they received phone calls from passengers on Flight 93. Another passenger, Lauren Grandcolas, left a message on an answering machine, while still another placed a call to an emergency switchboard, the article quotes sources as saying.Turning to graphics, we have some of the earliest photos of the damaged Pentagon building in Arlington, Va. appearing in the next day's press. Government sources alleged that a "terrorist" caused the damage by flying a commercial airliner into the building. However, the photos are not what one might expect for a crash site. The absence of aircraft debris is striking. The most plausible explanation is that the Pentagon was not hit by an airliner.The absence of aircraft debris in this photo of the damaged section of the Pentagon taken on Sept. 11, 2008 and used to illustrate a New York Times article the following day, is striking, in light of the government contention that an airliner struck the building. On the bright side, we have Rep, Peter DeFazio, D.-Ore., questioning so-called "anti-terrorist" legislation already in the works by the time the anthrax scare hit the country in October of 2001. "This could be the Gulf of Tonkin resolution for civil liberties, instead of a measure meant to fight terrorism," DeFazio was quoted as saying in an article in the New York Post for October 13, 2001, page 7. One sane voice in a sea of predatory spin and political opportunism.
An exchange on immigration
Peter's New York exchanges views on Alex Jones's www.infowars.com website
GOOGLE BOOKS AND THE END OF HISTORYIs Google Books scanning in the entire written opus of the world in preparation for some cataclysmic event?
SILVERSTEIN SUFFERS SETBACK IN 9-11 SUIT AGAINST AIRLINES
FORMER PAKISTANI INTEL CHIEF: MUMBAI EVENTS ORCHESTRATED TO DRAW INDIA INTO MIDEAST CONFLICTSTrio turn 9-11 issues into a blockbuster for local theater
Peter Duveen Photo
An audience questions Loose Change Final Cut producer Korey Rowe after a screening of the film Nov. 25, 2008 at the Charles R. Wood Theater
in Glens Falls, New York. The film was the largest draw of any ever shown at the theater.
Author calls for formation of truth and reconciliation commission to heal wounds of 9-11
Shays: election fraud implicated in loss of congressional seatFormer SEC chief: Paulson to stay in new administrationRon Paul: "Bailout" bill could trigger a major depression
Return to the gold standard, not a bailout, will cure the nation’s economic ills
LETTER TO CHRISTOPHER SHAYS ON HIS RECENT TRIP TO THE MIDDLE EAST A matter of Rape-Speak: The New York Times on SerbiaFORMER U.S. SENATOR HART URGES PARTY TO SOFTEN STANCE ON RUSSIARon Paul: physical opposition to government may become necessaryThe Olson and Ivins cases: suicide or murder?Fort Detrick biowar center connected with employee fatalities, 2001 anthrax mailingsWelcome?...hmmmm..well.....can I take a rain check on that?Russian masterstroke protects Iran, American public
SLAM DUNK!
Government and the Associated Press try to pre-empt anthrax inquiry
LETTER TO REPRESENTATIVE KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND (D-N.Y.) REGARDING REP. DENNIS KUCINICH'S ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT
AUTHOR CLAIMS HIGH SPEED AND HARD MASONRY SHREDDED COMMERCIAL FLIGHT THAT HIT THE PENTAGONChallenger at book signing questions how human remains could be identified
A member of the audience nonchalantly challenges authors Patrick Creed and Rick Newman with questions about the alleged aircraft impact
at the Pentagon on 9-11 at the Borders Books and Music store in Fairfax, Virginia, in June.
House votes to approve FISA revisionDem leadership leaves its party behind in supporting compromise
HELICOPTERS AMONG US
Helicopters and military aircraft are an increasing presence in rural areas.
LETTER TO THE POST-STAR OF GLENS FALLS, NEW YORK REGARDING RICHARD GAGE'S PRESENTATION ON THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER OFFICE TOWERS ON 9-11, AND A RESPONSE FROM A READERLETTER TO REP. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND REGARDING REP. DENNIS KUCINICH'S ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT, AND GILLIBRAND'S RESPONSE Gravel: Cheney and Bush should be tried for war crimesSupports NYC initiative for new 9-11 probeCHARGES DISMISSED AGAINST "F BUSH" PROTESTERNEW YORK CITY BALLOT INITITATIVE COULD BRING 9-11 UNDER RENEWED SCRUTINY
Campaign for 30,000 signatures outlined during rally at St. Mark's Church, the Bowery
NEW INVESTIGATION NEEDED TO PREVENT ANOTHER "9-11", SAYS ARCHITECT
Peter Duveen Photo
Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Gage urges the public
to push for a new investigation into the collapses of the World Trade Center towers.
CONTRACTOR FORCE IN IRAQ COULD REPLACE REDEPLOYED GI'S: REP. KAPTUR
Don't know if Bin Laden is alive or dead: foreign policy expert
Relief chief in denial over falling dollar's effect on food shortages
U.S. uses world food woes to push trade agenda
Former CIA honcho calls the 9-11 Commission "disastrous"
Pradeep Kaphle in Nepal:
Journalist threatened to be killed
International Media Mission-Nepal Election Monitoring Mission
Ralph Nader supports new 9-11 investigationPradeep Kaphle in NepalMaoists threaten seizure of FM radio stationREP. GILLIBRAND: LOOMING BUSH VETO BLOCKS TROOPS' RETURN FROM IRAQ Peter Duveen photoRep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY): "Troops are being pushed to the breaking point."Glens Falls, New YorkLone protester arrested for anti-Bush placardPolice action constitutes challenge to freedom of speechCLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL POST-STAR ARTICLES (2)THE 19TH CENTURY ROOTS OF 9-11Could the 100-year-old ideas of a French political philosopher be the impetus for the Bush Administration's record of cruelty and deceit?Congressman challenges secret House sessionOn illegal searches and seizures 80 years agoIn a blast from the past, G. Herbert Henshaw fills us in (posthumously) on flagrant government violations of the fourth amendment circa 1927 that led to the deaths of hundreds of American citizensDispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalATTACKERS BREAK ARM OF NEWSPAPER DISTRIBUTORAlbany NotebookU.S. could take action against Iran as early as April, former weapons inspector warns.Scott Ritter: U.S. "continues to articulate a policy of regime change" for Iran.From Pradeep Kaphle in NepalJOURNALISTS ATTACKED BY GOVERNMENT POLICE FORCEWORLD TRADE CENTER STEEL DEFORMATIONHere are some pictures of a steel beam that was deformed from either stress, high temperature, or both, due to the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers. Click on the image for a larger image.These exhibits are from a display at the New York State Museum at Albany, New York.Dispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalJOURNALISTS' VEHICLES VANDALIZED, NEWSPAPERS BURNEDLetter to Nancy Pelosi congratulating House Democrats on their defeat of legislation to reauthorize F.I.S.A.PETER'S NEW YORK, February 17, 2008. The House of Representatives defeated the Senate version of a bill that would have reauthorized spying on Americans without proper judicial oversight. The legislation would also have given amnesty to telecommunications companies for cooperating with the Bush administration to illegally spy on Americans. Dispatch from Pradeep Kaphle
NEPALESE JOURNALIST BADLY INJURED IN BLADE ATTACKRon Paul floats "March on Washington"PETER'S NEW YORK, February 12, 2008--In a message to his supporters, presidential contender Ron Paul said today that he would organize a march on Washington, to occur some time before the Republican primary. Paul said it would be a way of getting his message out, and would demonstrate the widespread support he has enjoyed but that has not always been reflected in polls or election results.Paul indicated that he would stay in the presidential race, in spite of the time he insists on devoting to his local congressional race. Paul is being challenged in the Republican primary for his congressional seat. REFLECTIONS ON CURRENT U.S. POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ITS JUSTIFICATION OR LACK THEREOFNepalese Media Harassed in two incidents (2/4/2008)From Nepal: Bomb hurled targeting FM station (1/31/2008)THE POPULAR MOVEMENT OF RON PAULPhoto ©2008 by Junalyn DuveenRon Paul's grass-roots support in upstate New YorkUseful tips and hints for the householdHOW TO CATCH A MOUSE WITH CHOCOLATE MILKDispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalNepalese Journalists attacked, mistreatedDispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalJOURNALIST ATTACKEDDispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalStatement by the International Press Freedom and Freedom of Expression mission to Nepal Kathmandu, Thursday, 17 January 2008Dispatch from Pradeep Kaphle in NepalALERT: TIBETAN JOURNALIST MURDERED (1/14/2008)More thoughts about 9-11WAYS OF VIEWING THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWERSELECTION FRAUD: THE BIG ISSUE IN THE 2008 ELECTION CYCLE- VOTE COUNT FRAUD DETECTED IN NEW HAMPSHIREREFLECTIONS ON 9-11AMERICAN PLANNERS CONSIDERED USING RADIOLOGICAL "DIRTY BOMB" DURING WORLD WAR IIJOURNALISM UNDER SIEGE AROUND THE WORLD! CLICK HERE TO READ THE LATEST OF PRADEEP KAPHLE'S DISPATCHES ON THE ABUSE OF JOURNALISTS IN NEPALPANEL INVESTIGATES ABDUCTION OF NEPALESE JOURNALISTby Pradeep Kaphle (courtesy of Peter's New York)NEWS FROM NEPAL: JOURNALIST MURDERED, ALLEGEDLY BY MAOISTS - DISPATCH BY PRADEEP KAPHLE (11/5/2007)RON PAUL AND DENNIS KUCINICH SINGLED OUT FOR THE MEDIA'S COLD SHOULDER. DOES THE MEDIA MANIPULATE ELECTIONS?On 9-11 Truth protest:"I think these demonstrators are all into restroom gay sex."
--Geraldo Rivera
Geraldo Rivera attempting to broadcast his show from outside Fox News while demonstrators chant and rant.Geraldo Rivera broadcast disrupted by protestors outside Fox News headquarters. Radio commentator and documentarian Alex Jones arrested and released. Sept. 9, 2007 NEWS-BITS FROM PETER'S NEW YORK - AUGUST 29, 2007· American Elections are controlled by the Media· Maliki's friendly relations with Iran do not bode him well· US antsy over possible acquittal of Philippine pres on corruption chargesBUSH/CHENEY/PELOSI: COMRADES IN ARMSMARCHING ORDERS FROM THE TRIUMVIRATE: FULL STEAM AHEAD08/19/2007“This administration, and its Democratic fellowtravelers such as Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, andmany more, are part of a ruthless gang that has takenover our government.”SOUNDS RADICAL? VETERAN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER HELEN THOMAS DOESN'T THINK SO.08/19/2007DIRTY BOMB IS A CIA HOAX, AND NEW YORKERS, YOU ARE THE TARGET!ADMINISTRATION'S WAR PLANS IN MIDDLE EAST, CRACKDOWN ON DOMESTIC CRITICS, ARE FULL STEAM AHEAD!08/10/2007NEWS FLASH!AIRLINES SUE CIA AND FBI TO SHOW GOVERNMENT FAILURES WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR 9-11 08/08/07 Official's remarks indicate danger of ASEAN becoming "elitist."08/08/07FORCED LABOR USED TO CONSTRUCTAMERICAN EMBASSY IN IRAQ08/08/07Associated Press uses Fed propaganda to bias future jury in so-called JFK bomb plot caseHelps spread Bush Administration's foreign-policy rehtoric against Iran 08/07/07AS IN THE PHILIPPINES, SO IN AMERICA: ASEAN AND ITS COUNTER-PART, THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION 08/05/2007New letter to Nancy Pelosi, speaker, US House of Representatives (Aug. 2, 2007)EXTRA!SHAYS REVEALS MAJOR U.S. INTEREST IN IRAQ IS OILAPOLOGIZES FOR WAR, BUT WANTS TO KEEP TROOP PRESENCE (Aug. 1. 2007)A SPECIAL REPORT FROM PETER'S NEW YORK:MORE ZOMBIES TO STAFF OUR PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS?YES!IF THENATIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE ACADEMY LEGISLATION IS PASSED July 26, 2007THE NEWSFOR JULY 28, 2007Pelosi promoted bill to support recommendations of the bogus 9-11 CommissionThere are penalties for bugging out. Are you listening, Korea?Doctor in Australia freed, with apologies, after his detention for a bogus connection with the latest FAKE London terrorist attackNow those 500 children you were talking aboutFOR JULY 27, 2007Obama refuses to sign on to "one upmanship" diplomacy of war-mongering ClintonMore "Chatter"FOR JULY 25, 2007New ID''s issued to legal "illegal" immigrantsThe US-Iran "Talk Down"Is Pakistan next in Bush's fantasmagora of horrors?"We're WINNING!".......... NOT!The Democratic candidate show on CNN"Chatter": What it means on this websiteIMPEACHMENT LIGHT? SOME FAVOR A SLAP ON THE WRIST 07/22/20079-11 a controlled demolition? Read this! 07/18/2007
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES RESTART THE COLD WAR WITH RUSSIA 07/18/2007
What it means when Bush says "We can win this war" (It's the bases, stupid!") 7/14/2007THE NEW STORYBOARD OF FAKE TERRORISM (again?)7/11/2007
THE NEW STORYBOARD OF FAKE TERRORISM (CONTINUED) 7/8/2007The Storyboard Revisited; A Cornered Administration;, and Al Queda still trumped up as the poster child of international terrorism 7/7/200745 PERCENT OF AMERICANS WANT BUSH IMPEACHED, 54 PERCENT WANT CHENEY IMPEACHED: POLLRESOLUTION TO IMPEACH MR. RICHARD B. CHENEY, VP OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, HAS BEEN INTRODUCED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. Posted 07/07/2007
Ron Paul/Dennis Kucinich Ticket, or election boycott? 07/06/2007
NEW SCENARIO IN THE STORY BOARD OF FAKE GOVERNMENT-CREATED TERRORISM: THE MIDDLE-CLASS TERRORIST. (Jul. 5, 2007)
THE U.S. DEMONIZATION OF LIBYA UNRAVELS: PANEL CALLS FOR NEW TRIAL OF LOCKERBIE DEFENDANT (Posted Jul. 2, 2007)
On the pluses and minuses of GOOGLE BOOKS, Google's project to digitalize the world's libraries (Jul. 1. 2007).
YET ANOTHER PAGE IN THE FANTASY BOOK OF U.S. PRODUCED TERRORISM! Make-believe Indonesian 'Terrorist' supposedly hiding out in the Philippines.
GOVERNMENT MAY HAVE DESIGNED TERRORIST PLOT AGAINST KENNEDY AIRPORT! (June 3, 2007)
Recent letter from Connecticut US Representative Christopher Shays to the publisher of this website, and the editor's response.Recent letters to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Iran, Sudan, and the poisoning of a Russian in Great Britain.More excitement from the Philippines (About coconuts, and, "What the travel agencies do not want you to see!")PETER'S NEW YORK goes to the Philippines for rice harvesting! (April 18, 2007)OPEN LETTER TO THE UNITED STATES SENATORS FROM NEW YORK
"There is no justice in hanging Saddam Hussein, Barzan Hussein and Awad Hamad al-Bandar in their prison unless you also hang George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld from the nearest telephone pole, with or without their royal jewels intact."
- Conrado de Quiros, Philippine journalist
My reply to Mr. de Quiros's column, as published in the Philippine Daily InquirerPHILIPPINE HISTORY AND POLITICS: A RECENT DIALOGUE IN THE PRESS AND EMAILS INVOLVING THE FOUNDER OF THIS WEB SITE.Second letter to Nancy PelosiOpen letter to Nancy Pelosi on the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney
GOVT TO SEARCH FOREIGN NEWSPAPERS FOR "NEGATIVE OPINION"
EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!LAST FIG LEAF FALLS! BUSH'S ANTI-TERRORISM CAMPAIGNUNMASKED AS HIS LATEST FRAUD! New York Times finds the solution to the Iraq war......NOT!
FEATURE:
A SUMMER AT WORLD TRADE CENTER TWO,
AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE WORLD
© 1999 by Peter DuveenIt is five years since the disaster that took down the two office towers of the World Trade Center and a number of surrounding structures. Such was the fate of buildings that were controversial from the planning stages on, and that were often in financial trouble. For years it was hard to keep them rented out, technological marvels that they were. And the Trade Center towers supplanted numerous other structures that represented an important part of New York City life and history. While under construction, they left a virtual hole in lower Manhattan for many years, thus taking that real estate out of productive activity. All in all, the pluses were easily balanced by the minuses, and the final outcome–that they were taken out in an allegedly terrorist attack–cannot be a surprise. It is part of the their destiny, conceived as they were by the prince of taxpayer ripoffs and international affairs meddlers, David Rockefeller.Despite the fact that my childhood was impacted by these brutish structures having displaced the haunts in the city that I so loved to visit, I ended up working in them from time to time. In the summer of 1999, I did a stint for Fuji Bank, located on the 79th floor of the South Tower where, it so happens, the second aircraft found a place to snuggle its nose before emerging, albeit pulverized, at its exit point on the other side of the building. At that point, only a few remained on the floor, probably those who in the past did not take seriously the fire drills held periodically by Fuji, in which an entire floor of the company would evacuate the building. These stalwarts paid with their lives. The real heroes of 9/11 were those who had the presence of mind to leave the building as quickly as possible, for each of them were able to save one person–themselves.A view from the 79th Floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center © 1999 by Peter DuveenPart of the volumes of paper that were scattered about the New York City area in the aftermath of the disaster were papers that I handled or filed. While working there, I had an amiable boss named Michael. Michael’s department reported on the financial condition of hundreds of companies that Fuji Bank had lent money to, in order to assess the ability to these companies to pay back the loans or take on more debt. A lot of lovely people, both men and women, worked on the floor, and I had fallen into the task that summer of distributing material, preparing correspondence, and other such seemingly menial chores, and by doing so, earning some quick bucks to apply toward completing graduate school..During my stay there, I remember participating in a fire drill. The drills were taken seriously. The World Trade Center had been bombed once, and all of its occupants saw the building, and themselves, as future terrorist targets. As a result, when the day came that we were to practice an evacuation, everyone, as best as I could determine, participated.We gathered in the hallway, and then proceeded to walk down 79 flights and out the building into the fresh air. Later, when I heard that so many people had left the building unscathed on the day of 9/11, it didn’t surprise me, as the training had been so thorough, at least for those in Fuji Bank and on my floor in particular In fact, the 9-11 commission report mentions these drills in a positive light:Some civilians have told us that their evacuation on September 11 was greatly aided by changes and training implemented by the Port Authority in response to the 1993 bombing. But during these drills, civilians were not directed into the stairwells....Ah, but we were directed to the stairwells, because we walked down 79 flights of stairs!!!The 9-11 Commission, in another staff document, targets this question more specifically.In no case to our knowledge, did any tenant in the WTC practice a drill where the employees walked down the stairs and exited the building.Well, they cover themselves by adding “to our knowledge,” but it is interesting that this possibility was important enough to include in the document without actually finding out what had happened.Another view from the South Tower of the World Trade Center © 1999 by Peter DuveenIn a sense, the fact that the building had been virtually evacuated in a short time, saving the overwhelming majority of people below the points where the planes hit each building, was a story that was glossed over in the press. The press, oddly, did not want to emphasize how the “terrorists” had been cheated of inflicting the terrible casualty numbers that was undoubtedly their intention. Yes, it seemed that every effort was made to underscore the death toll, and neglect those who had survived.At the time of the disaster, I was a reporter at an upstate New York newspaper, and I was fixated by the possibility of estimating the casualties by considering the number of people that commonly occupied the buildings during the summer months, and the number of floors that were damaged. Having participated in an evacuation exercise in one of the towers, I was also focused on the story of how successful the evacuation effort was. But the media ignored this, and the small paper that I worked on had no direct coverage of the World Trade Center disaster.Then there was the well-known story of how people were told to go back to work after the first plane struck the North Tower, and how some Fuji employees borded the elevators to return to their desks, and to a certain death only moments later as the second plane struck. This ghastly episode was reported in the New York Times. Whose voice it was over the loud speaker that directed people to return to work is one of the great unanswered questions.Then we know that after the collapse of the towers, then Environmental Protection Agency director Christy Todd Whitman told those working at the disaster site that the air was perfectly safe to breathe. Of course this goes against everything even children know. Anyone who takes such a comment seriously almost deserves whatever happens to them. But then again, sometimes such comments are just enough to disarm a legitimate concern and prevent even concerned people from taking proper precautions.Then again, the fire and police departments rushed personnel to the site, without recognizing the danger to their own men and women.In the end, it occurred to me that there was this unstated desire to have the World Trade Center disaster appear as horrible as possible, even if it meant packing people into it, even if it meant damaging the workers that were trying to help in the search for bodies and the cleanup. Even if it meant covering up the fact that many thousands of people were successfully evacuated from the buildings before they collapsed.To this may be added many other interesting facts relating to the 9/11 disaster, such as:That the list of terrorist suspects suddenly appeared almost immediately after the disaster happened. If the government knew who the suspects were so quickly, doesn’t that beg the question of whether they could have stopped it?That the towers themselves fell, collapsed, virtually disappeared into a pile of rubble, a truly unbelievable and startling event.That Dick Cheney announced that the world would never be the same after 9/11, a script he has repeated up to the present day. Who is he to tell us that the world will never be the same? How does he know the future, unless he intended to use this event as a pretext to mold it to conform to some unstated policy goals?One could go on, but there are sites already devoted to this type of analysis, and I would direct the reader to these sites and encourage the reader to investigate them. POSTED 9/11/2006
Public Policy
Is the U.S. Justice Department scapegoating Lynne Stewart for their own role in instigating 9-11?
Letter to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
The New York Times watch
More bogus thought-crime charges leveled against Moslems in latest government case
Masri's name joins a long list of Islamic clerics convicted of thought crimes
Leadership Academy for New York City Public School Principals outed!
Jan 3 '06 NYT readers sound off against private donations to the public sector
Jan 11. '06 Bush Justice Department Implements Kidnapping of Korean National in Mexico
Jan 12 '06 NYT: Fishing expedition against Brooklyn Pol?; Iran and nuclear enrichment
Jan 12 '06 NYT: Islamic clerics fair game for prosecution and persecution
Jan 13 '06 NYT Tale of Two theories: Iraq wants to build a bomb, or the West wants control of its oil
Connecticut Art Scene
Three recent exhibitions
Feature Archives
January 1, 2006 - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART - WHAT IS MODERN?
Sat. May 30, 2004 New York, NY - IS GLOBAL WARMING REAL OR A HOAX?
Museum of Brooklyn Art and Culture: a project of PD Studios, March 1 (2006) opening
Links
Siberian Coffee Pipeline Co. Flexi-Planner Time Management Museum of Brooklyn Art and CultureThe NEST Building, home of PD Studios and the Museum of Brooklyn Art and Culture in Bridgeport, Connecticut
Glackens Chandelier
The parlor of the Henshaw family of State Street, Brooklyn Heights
Henshaw handwritten genealogical notes
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