2007 article on UN, NorthCom take-over in event of flu

U.S. under U.N. law in health emergency
Bush's SPP power grab sets stage for military to manage flu threats
By Jerome R. Corsi - WorldNetDaily - August 28, 2007

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America summit in Canada released a plan that establishes U.N. law along with regulations by the World Trade Organization and World Health Organization as supreme over U.S. law during a pandemic and sets the stage for militarizing the management of continental health emergencies.

The "North American Plan for Avian & Pandemic Influenza" was finalized at the SPP summit last week in Montebello, Quebec.

At the same time, the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, has created a webpage dedicated to avian flu and has been running exercises in preparation for the possible use of U.S. military forces in a continental domestic emergency involving avian flu or pandemic influenza.

With virtually no media attention, in 2005 President Bush shifted U.S. policy on avian flu and pandemic influenza, placing the country under international guidelines not specifically determined by domestic agencies.

The policy shift was formalized Sept. 14, 2005, when Bush announced a new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza to a High-Level Plenary Meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, in New York. [...]

WND could find no evidence the Bush administration presented the Influenza Partnership plan to Congress for oversight or approval.

The SPP plan for avian and pandemic influenza announced at the Canadian summit last week embraces the international control principles Bush first announced to the U.N. in his 2005 International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza declaration.

The SPP plan gives primacy for avian and pandemic influenza management to plans developed by the WHO, WTO, U.N. and NAFTA directives – not decisions made by U.S. agencies. [...]

Ron Paul on the "hysteria"

Economic news also buried under swine news

U.S. Economy: GDP Shrinks in Worst Slump in 50 Years
Bob Willis - Bloomberg - April 30, 2009

The U.S. economy plunged again in the first quarter, making this the worst recession in at least half a century.

Gross domestic product dropped at a 6.1 percent annual pace, weaker than forecast, after contracting at a 6.3 percent rate in the last three months of 2008, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. The report, which reflected a record slump in inventories and further declines in housing, came hours before Federal Reserve officials said the economy continued to contract at a “somewhat slower” pace. [...]

Senator: Bankers "own" the Congress (Flu story distracting from ongoing bankster heist)

Top Senate Democrat: bankers “own” the U.S. Congress
Glenn Greenwald - Salon - April 30, 2009

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: "And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis "own" the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is. [...]

Liability Protection for Vaccine Makers, Martial Law

The Great Swine Flu or the Great Flu Swindle?
Rady Ananda - OpEdNews - April 30, 2009

How serious should we take mainstream media’s hysteria about 0.00000189 of Mexico’s total population contracting swine flu? Is this a pandemic? By definition, it has to be geographically widespread (see Pandemic Nonsense: Flying Pig Flu).

In The last great swine flu epidemic, Patrick Di Justo shows that the 1976 epidemic that the government-media-CDC warned us about never occurred.

Excuse for Martial Law?

Some fear this latest flu outbreak will be used to impose martial law. In fact, the Massachusetts Senate just passed such a bill, 36-0. It goes to the House next. Martial law? Home invasions? Two siblings in Massachusetts did recently travel to Mexico and contract the swine flu. Neither are hospitalized and both are at home recovering.

The bill also protects from liability those who assist the government. So, if the vaccine is deadlier than the virus, Big Pharma can’t be sued, it seems. [...]

Fox News discusses suspension of rights

Amazing how calmly they announce that the First Amendment will just have to go.

Related: World Health Organization Expected to Declare Level 6 “Within Days”

Will NorthCom take over in Swine Flu Outbreak?

Matthew Rothschild - The Progressive - Thursday, April 30, 2009

The swine flu outbreak raises a lot of fears.

Here’s one you might not have thought of yet: The Pentagon may be taking over more and more of our civil society in this crisis.

Back in 2002, President Bush created NorthCom, the Pentagon’s Northern Command, which has jurisdiction over the United States.

And NorthCom has been running preparedness drills in the event of a flu pandemic for at least the past three years.

Making things more alarming, NorthCom got assigned its own fighting unit six months ago—the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, which had spent much of the last five years battling things out in Iraq.

The assignment of that fighting unit alarmed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “This is a radical departure from separation of civilian law enforcement and military authority and could, quite possibly, represent a violation of law,” said Mike German, ACLU national security policy counsel.

Testifying in March, General Victor Renuart, head of NorthCom, said it would provide “assistance in support of civil authorities” during an epidemic. And, he added, “when requested and approved by the Secretary of Defense or directed by the President, federal military forces will contribute to federal support.” But he boasted: “USNorthCom does not wait for that call to action.”

He noted that NorthCom has prepared for a flu outbreak from Mexico. “Because Mexico is our neighbor and disasters do not respect national boundaries, we are focused on developing and improving procedures to respond to potentially catastrophic events such as pandemic influenza outbreak, mass exposure to dangerous chemicals and materials, and natural disasters,” he testified.

NorthCom also has a “private sector cell,” Renuart said in a talk to the Heritage Foundation on August 20, 2008. “We have great participation from industry and from other organizations around the country.”

One private sector group that has worked with the FBI and Homeland Security on pandemics is InfraGard. This is group of more than 30,000 businesspeople who have special access to confidential FBI information and may be assigned special—and lethal—duties in times of an emergency (See “The FBI Deputizes Business”).

An InfraGard chapter held a meeting at NYU Medical Center on February 21, 2007 on “Pandemic Preparedness Planning: the Case for Public-Private Collaboration”.

InfraGard also participated in a conference entitled “Surviving the Pandemic,” held in Madison, Wisconsin, October 12, 2006. That conference was co-sponsored by the Southeast Wisconsin Homeland Security Partnership, two centers at the University of Wisconsin, the Madison Area Technical College, Alliant Energy, and American Family Insurance.

InfraGard wants to be a player in pandemic response. “Utilization of their expertise will help local communities prepare for a possible pandemic event to ensure minimal disruption and quick recovery,” one InfraGard press release stated.

Whether and how InfraGard and NorthCom might be working together in this swine flu outbreak is unclear.

Similarly, it is unclear what actions NorthCom might take if an all-out pandemic ensues.
One last concern: George W. Bush bestowed upon the Presidency enormous powers, essentially to be in charge of every branch of government, as well as state and local and tribal governments and the private sector, in the event of a “catastrophic emergency.” (See National Security Presidential Directive 51)

We’re in a public health emergency now. It’s not “catastrophic” yet. But it appears to be up to the President—and the President only—to make that determination, according to the directive.
Congress needs to hold hearings on NorthCom, InfraGard, and National Security Presidential Directive 51.

We must insist on our rights, even in emergencies.

~Related CIVICS NEWS Posts under the heading: Martial Law in America

A message to Republican Christians

CIVICS NEWS Comment: This is one of the best articles I've ever read. It should make Christians re-think their idolatrous relationship with political power. He takes the words right out of my mouth and says them better than I ever could. [You should know that when he refers to "democracy" he is talking about the attempt to form a majority coalition that will then coercively impose its will upon others.]

My Christian Brothers, Leave Government and Cleave Unto Liberty
Lew Rockwell.com - Jim Fedako - April 28, 2009

My Christian Brothers:

I do not understand why you are now so concerned about government. Nothing has changed. The US is still a democracy, ruled by the will of the majority, under a nominal constitution. And the US continues to have an imperial president, overseas wars and conflicts, and a strong internal state. Plus, this country has shown, time and again, the ability to transition peacefully from one ruling elite to another. Remember, you proudly cheered as our soldiers were sent to foreign lands in order to fight and kill for the very same political system you now question.

Sure, your ideas are no longer in the majority, but democracies always have minority views. And, since you are now in the political minority, you can begin grassroots efforts to once again attain political power. It is possible that within two years, you can foist anew your agenda on the rest of the population – you can feed the Leviathan so that, when it is once again unchained by your enemies, it will turn on you with a vengeance.

For years, I’ve listened to you defend government. You play a game of verbal reasoning when you vote for government interventions and then wash your hands by stating, "We must follow the civil authorities." Conservative Christians are a significant portion of the electorate, not a majority, but a significant portion nonetheless. For years, you encouraged government to intervene in all aspects of life. Government agreed. And now, that very same power to intervene is being used against you. Did you really expect any other outcome?

In Romans, when Paul wrote about obeying the civil authorities, he meant obeying civil authorities with respect to issues within their purview. So, yes, Christians are not to engage in actions that violate property, etc., such as participating in food riots similar to those that were breaking out throughout Rome. But Paul never meant for Christians to act as Caesar in the polling station, or in political office, and then turn around and fall back on the cover of the civil authority.

As Christians, we believe that the family and marriage are godly institutions. But you encouraged government to intervene and disrupt those very same institutions. Where marriage and family exist under God, you fought the political fights to move them under the nominal authority of the state. A true apostasy. And now you are paying the wages of that sin.

I recently listened to a segment on American Family Radio that described waterboarding as nothing more than an effective method of interrogation. Torture? Absolutely not. No external marks and no blood, therefore no torture. That waterboarding was used in the Spanish Inquisition to punish and intimidate, and to force confessions, and that the psyche and mind are damaged or destroyed in the process, is of no concern, whatsoever.

The American myth of my youth was the image of the liberating American soldier handing chocolate to the children of our enemies. Torture was a tool of the totalitarian states. The great democracy – the US – lived under rules of law, with the same protections granted to all.

That myth is long gone; condensed into the stream of water that triggers a drowning reaction in the mind of the interrogated. Yet, my conservative Christians brothers, you do not even hesitate when distorting that myth. Where torture was a repulsive act of repression, it is now an essential duty in the home of the free – a Christian duty nonetheless.

My conservative Christian brothers, do you not recognize this: That very same technique will likely be used on you at some point in the future.

Ask yourselves this: While you deconstruct the act of waterboarding and stand behind it as just another means to the truth, will you be surprised when, during the next Inquisition, it’s you on a board, tilted slightly, with a government agent slowly opening the faucet? Will you be surprised?

Of course, you now cry a similar tune when lamenting the lost freedom of speech. You are in fear that the power you gave government will be turned against you. You fear – justifiably – that you will no longer be able to preach the Bible – as the Bible is no longer the truth of those in power – without facing legal threats, jail, or the waterboard.

But when you worship democracy – the golden calf of government – above God of the Bible, you should expect nothing else. You should not feign surprise as Aaron did when telling Moses that the calf just appeared out of the fire – that none of it was his creation, nor his handiwork.
Nevertheless, you still look to government as your solution. And you continue to choose the Republican Party as your unequally-yoked partner. Yet it was your Republicans who gladly arrogated more rights than you abrogated. They said that you would only be safe under a stronger state – and you believed.

So, you have exchanged freedom – such as the freedom to preach the Bible – for a false promise of security, much like our biblical forefathers exchanged the yoke of a king for the false promise of security from the neighboring nations.

Of course, they ended up trembling before Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, who said, "My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions." Just as, in the very same manner, you tremble today before the scorpions of Obama, son of Bush.

The issue is more than security. Just like Israelites desiring a king in order to impress neighboring nations, you look to an imperial president and expansive military to impress the countries of the world. You relish in a government that can stomp the planet in boots and uniforms, while seeing enemies at every turn.

We sometimes ask ourselves, "What would Jesus do?" I must ask, "Would Jesus cheer waterboarding as a means to the truth? Would He partner with the Republican Party, or any political party for that matter, in order to achieve worldly power? Would He partner with the state to save lives and win souls? Would He?"

My Christian Brothers, we have to break free from the state. We must stop looking to the next election and the Republican Party as our salvation. And we must stop using the sword of government for our purposes. "For all who take the sword will perish by the sword."

Note: While the left seeks to desensitize us to moral perversity, the right seeks to desensitize us to violence. And both seek to desensitize us to the evils of power.

April 28, 2009

Jim Fedako [send him mail] is a homeschooling father of six who lives in Lewis Center, OH, and maintains a blog: Anti-Positivist.

UN CRC: Parents can't protect children!

A great excerpt from a great article by Berit Kjos from 2005:

Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child uses manipulative and misleading language. According to Article 13, "The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers..."[8] In other words, parents have no authority to keep a child from reading a sexually explicit magazine or visiting pagan chat rooms on the Internet.

While parents lose their right to set safe boundaries for their children, the State assumes full power to "protect" the child from contrary parents and define the rules. Thus Article 13 concludes with: "This right may be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others; or for protection of national security or public order."

Keep in mind, "national security or public order" is based on the UN vision of social solidarity, a socialist oneness in which shared values are defined by globalist leaders. In their minds, anything less than solidarity in every community could stir conflict or incite violence. In this context, dissenters become foes; absolute beliefs or facts that clash with its vision of unity become threats; and the uncompromising truths of biblical Christianity become intolerable -- even dangerous -- to public safety.

Likewise, if parents restrict their child's "right to freedom of association" or their child's ambiguous rights to "privacy" or "conscience and religion" (Articles 14 -16), they would break the new rules and risk losing their child to the state's "protection" services. That's already happing in Europe. With our Supreme Court seeking guidelines from international decisions, it may soon happen here.[9] [See Ban truth -
Reap Tyranny]

Constitution is "narcissistic"...world govt should raise your kids

CIVICS NEWS Comment: Notice that the desire of American parents to take responsibility for raising their children, coupled with the fact that American parents are telling the New World Order to keep its hands off their families...is called..."narcissistic" (i.e. selfish). Raising children is not narcissistic. It's the opposite.

Also notice that this UN convention, if enforced, could prohibit parents from teaching the truth about the Bible and Jesus Christ to their children--because, under the convention, the children have the "right" to pursue other lifestyles and religious worldviews. And they're calling for ratification of this right now.

'Narcissistic Sovereignty’ Has Kept U.S. from Ratifying U.N. Treaty on Children’s Rights
CNS NEWS - Monday, November 24, 2008 - By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer



Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com)

Advocates for a United Nations treaty on children’s rights blamed American arrogance for it not being ratified by the United States, but critics charge signing onto the Convention on the Rights of the Child could mean international law trumping U.S. state and federal laws and the rights of parents to make decisions about raising and educating their children.

The treaty, adopted by the United Nations on Nov. 20, 1989, has been ratified by 193 countries. The United States and Somalia are the two countries that have not ratified it, groups that support ratification said at a press conference at the Capitol on Thursday.

“It might sound dismissive, but I think it has something to do with what I would call, and some other people call, narcissistic sovereignty,” Harold Cook, a non-governmental organization representative at the U.N. and a fellow with the American Psychological Association, told CNSNews.com.

But critics say national self-determination is at the heart of why the treaty should not be ratified.

“This would be one of the most invasive things we could do as far as the sovereignty of our nation,” Michael Smith, president of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, told CNSNews.com.

Smith said that if Congress ratifies the treaty, it would give the United Nations authority to object to federal and state laws that it thinks violate the treaty and give Congress the power to pass laws to make the country comply with its tenants – a fact advocates do not deny.

“Every national government in the world, except the United States, has developed in response to the Convention of the Rights of the Child official detailed national reports on how children are fairing in their country,” Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Association Center for Children and the Law, said at the press conference.

“And child protection and advocacy watchdog groups have been able to react to those reports by doing their own shadow reporting to the international committee on the rights of the child,” Davidson added.

But Austin Ruse, president of the conservative United Nations watchdog group Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, told CNSNews.com that the conventions reflect a worldview that rejects the idea of sovereign nations.

“They no longer want independent nations deciding what to do, but good citizens in a new international order,” Ruse said.

Ruse said that the very idea of children’s rights is “problematic,” because it sees children as having rights apart from their parents.

“It separates parents from their children,” Ruse told CNSNews.com. “The rights of children can only be seen in the context of the rights and responsibilities of the parents.”

Panelists at the news conference portrayed the convention as a way to help children in the United States whose needs are not being met, including every child having access to health care, good nutrition and safe living conditions.

“The convention’s articles on non-discrimination and adequate standard of living charge us to seek out exactly those children, families, and communities that live on the margins of society and design equitable policies that meet their needs,” said Dr. Jennifer Kasper, who represented the American Academy of Pediatrics at the press conference.

“It states explicitly that nations must not only actively protect children from discrimination, but they also must refrain from actions that may have a discrimination effect on some children.”

Ruse said the United States does not need to be regulated by those he describes as “radicals” on the U.N. committees that oversee such treaties.

“U.S. laws for protecting children are the best in the world,” Ruse said, “and we don’t need a treaty to help us.”

He also said Cook’s remarks about narcissism are a “smear” on the United States and show how his and other groups advocating ratification of the treaty want to promote a liberal global agenda.

“It’s a power grab, pure and simple, by radicals like him,” Ruse said.

Smith said the most dangerous thing about the convention is that rather than building stronger families, it could damage relationships by giving children “rights” to question their parents’ decisions on a range of issues, including discipline, religious training and education.

“It pits children against their parents,” Smith said.

When asked about the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the campaign trail, President-elect Barack Obama expressed a willingness to consider sending the treaty to Congress for ratification.

“It is embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land,” Obama said. “I will review this.”

Groups at the press conference expressed optimism about the new administration, including Meg Gardinier, acting chairwoman of the Campaign for the U.S. Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“We are very excited to think we are finally in a moment in time when the U.S. might very well join that ratification process and we can join the other 193 countries who are currently using this important rights treaty as a pivotal guide to improve the child’s survival, protection and development,” Gardinier said.

Government template for mass vaccination

Government “Template” for Mass Vaccination
Kurt Nimmo - Infowars - April 27, 2009



It’s called “ring vaccination” or “traced vaccination” — a round ‘em up and vaccinate program forced on the population by the government. DHS and FEMA have plans in place to accomplish this, as D. H. Williams wrote for the Daily Newscaster in February. An Indiana county municipal official in the vicinity of Chicago revealed a plan to “vaccinate the entire population within 48 hours” as part of a Hazard Mitigation Plan (YouTube clip below).

In 2006, a pastor came forward and told Alex Jones about a nationwide FEMA program designed to train religious leaders on how to pacify their flocks in the event of a national crisis. In addition to a declaration of martial law, property and firearm seizures, and forced relocation, the FEMA program envisions mass vaccinations. “In the event of an outbreak or a bio-terrorist attack, there’d be a mass vaccination… they have a program nationwide ‘Pills in People’s Palm In 48 Hours’,” an anonymous pastor told Jones.

In 2004, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, along with ten county health departments, organized a series of exercises designed to assist local health department officials to exercise plans to mass vaccinate entire communities. It was dubbed “Flu-X” and it encouraged participants to get a flu shot.

Now we have a “template” to be used for mass vaccination. In a document released by the Regional Counter Terrorism Task Forces, “specific dispensing site operational plans and standard operating procedures” for mass vaccination are put forward:

The dispensing of medications/vaccine is a core function of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) plan and preparedness. It is the most complex and challenging of all the functions since large numbers of persons must be provided medication/vaccine in just a few days when an event occurs. The key to survival for most people is to provide antibiotics/vaccine as soon as possible and/or before an individual begins to show any clinical symptoms. This plan describes the dispensing of medications to a large number of people for prophylaxis of asymptomatic individuals as well as treatment of symptomatic persons.

The SNS is the United States’ national repository of antibiotics, chemical antidotes, antitoxins, and who knows what else. It is jointly run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano mentioned the SNS stockpile when she declared the so-called Mexican swine flu outbreak a public health emergency.

[An Indiana county municipal official in the vicinity of Chicago reveals plan to “vaccinate the entire population within 48 hours” as part of a Hazard Mitigation Plan. ]

Forced druggings coming. Forced vaccination next?

FDA Approves Emergency Measures For “Mass Dosing” Of U.S. Citizens
Paul Joseph Watson - Prison Planet.com - Tuesday, April 28, 2009



The FDA has approved “emergency measures” to carry out “mass dosings” of U.S. citizens with antiviral drugs in the event of a widespread swine flu pandemic.

An Associated Press report states that the new powers would allow the drugs to be distributed to a “broader range of the population” than present measures allow.

The drugs, primarily Tamiflu and Relenza, would be “distributed to larger segments of the population without complying with the approved label requirements,” according to the report.

The announcement follows a similar directive issued last night, which would allow Tamiflu to be used to treat children under the age of 1 and to provide doses higher than originally approved for children over the age of 1.

As we reported this morning, a Time Magazine article prepares Americans to accept mandatory enforced vaccination and says that citizens should “trust” the government and “forgive” them if the vaccination itself results in deaths and injuries, as happened during the 1976 swine flu fiasco, when the U.S. government attempted to mass vaccinate the entire population.

History of US Govt. Bio-Warfare

Weaponizing Deadly Viruses: Historical Precedents
Kurt Nimmo - Prison Planet.com - Tuesday, April 28, 2009



Many people react with incredulity when the assertion is made that the so-called swine flu outbreak in Mexico may be manufactured crisis. And yet history is replete with examples of government using biological and chemical agents for political purpose.

As a primary example, consider the CIA’s secret war against Cuba and Fidel Castro.

In 1975, the Church Committee revealed a CIA memorandum listing deadly chemical agents and toxins then stockpiled at Fort Detrick. “These included anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, lethal snake venom, shellfish toxin, and half a dozen lethal food poisons, some of which, the committee learned, had been shipped in the early 1960s to Congo and to Cuba in unsuccessful CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro,” write Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way, Ocean Press, 2003, p. vii).

Schaap cites the work of Dr. Marc Lappé (Chemical and Biological Warfare: The Science of Public Death, Student Research Facility for East Bay Women for Peace and Science Students for Social Responsibility, 1969), who claims that the U.S. Army had a biological warfare agent prepared for use against Cuba at the time of the Missile Crisis in 1962, mostly likely Q fever (Coxiella burnetii, a bacterium that affects both humans and animals). In 1977, a Washington Post report confirmed that during this time the CIA maintained an “anticrop warfare” program.

In regard to swine flu, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on January 10, 1977, that CIA “operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.” The outbreak, the first time the disease hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. Cuba reacted to outbreak by slaughtering 500,000 pigs. An intelligence source told the newspaper “that early in 1971 he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the Panama Canal Zone. The CIA also operates a paramilitary training center for career personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick.” The source said he was given instructions to turn the container with the virus over to members of an anti-Castro group.

In 1980, described as “the year of the plagues” by Schaap, “Cuba was beset with disasters. Another African swine fever epidemic hit; the tobacco crop was decimated by blue mold; and the sugarcane crops were hit with a particularly damaging rust disease.”

By 1981, the Cuban population was targeted with hemorrhagic dengue fever, a devastating disease transmitted by mosquitoes. “From May to October 1981 there were well over 300,000 reported cases, with 158 fatalities, 101 involving children under 15. At the peak of the epidemic, in early July, more than 10,000 cases per day were being reported. More than a third of the reported victims required hospitalization. By mid-October, after a massive campaign to eradicate Aedes aegypti [mosquito], the epidemic was over,” writes Schaap. “The history of the secret war against Cuba and the virulence of this dengue epidemic were enough to generate serious suspicions that the United States had a hand in the dengue epidemic of 1981. But there is much more support for those suspicions than a healthy distrust of U.S. intentions regarding Cuba.”

After interviewing officials from the Pan American Health Organization and of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, Schaap states that he believes the “epidemic was artificially induced.”

The epidemic began with the simultaneous discovery in May 1981 of three cases of hemorrhagic dengue caused by a type 2 virus. The cases arose in three widely separated parts of Cuba: Cienfuegos, Camagiiey, and Havana. It is extremely unusual that such an epidemic would commence in three different localities at once. None of the initial victims had ever traveled out of the country; for that matter, none of them had recently been away from home. None had had recent contact with international travelers. Moreover, a study of persons arriving in Cuba in the month of May from known dengue areas found only a dozen such passengers (from Vietnam and Laos), all of whom were checked by the Institute of Tropical Medicine and found free of the disease. Somehow, infected mosquitoes had appeared in three provinces of Cuba at the same time. Somehow, the fever spread at an astonishing rate. There appears to be no other explanation but the artificial introduction of infected mosquitoes.

Researchers believe the Mexican swine flu outbreak may also be “artificially induced.” First, the Mexican outbreak occurred outside of the normal flu season (influenza usually obeys a regularly re-occurring time period – in temperate climate zones, the flu season will typically begin in the late fall and peak in mid- to late winter, while in tropical zones flu seasons appear to be less pronounced, with year-round isolation of the virus). Second, the genetic makeup of the fast-spreading H1N1 strain of influenza — including genetic elements from bird flu, swine flu and human flu covering three continents — appears to be man-made.

“What seems suspicious to me is the hybrid origin of the viral fragments found in H1N1 influenza,” writes Mike Adams. These viral fragments include human influenza, bird flu from North America, and swine flu from Europe and Asia.

This is rather astonishing to realize, because for this to have been a natural combination of viral fragments, it means an infected bird from North America would have had to infect pigs in Europe, then be re-infected by those some pigs with an unlikely cross-species mutation that allowed the bird to carry it again, then that bird would have had to fly to Asia and infected pigs there, and those Asian pigs then mutated the virus once again (while preserving the European swine and bird flu elements) to become human transmittable, and then a human would have had to catch that virus from the Asian pigs — in Mexico! — and spread it to others.

At present, there is little evidence the virus was created in a U.S. lab and deliberately unleashed on an unsuspecting Mexican public. However, there is plenty of evidence the U.S. military and the CIA have used biological agents in the past, including “tests” on the American people.

“More than 200 experiments were carried out in U.S. rural areas to test the spread of non-lethal germs,” writes Joe Allen. “These tests were also carried out in San Francisco in 1950 and in New York in 1966. While the cover for these tests was to study a ‘defense’ against biochemical warfare, U.S. war planners wanted this knowledge for offensive use against an enemy population,” for instance livestock and people in Cuba, as mentioned above.

At the height of Cold War insanity, the U.S. government gave a free hand for its scientists to experiment on anything that could possibly further its military prowess. The CIA experimented with LSD for “mind control.” At Fort Detrick, scientists studied the possibility of spreading yellow fever and plague with insects. Anti-crop bombs were built for the United States Air Force to be used in the Third World.

It appears this insanity did not stop with the Cold War. Last week, the Frederick News Post reported Army criminal investigators are looking into the possibility that disease samples are missing from biolabs at Fort Detrick.

Finally, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has reported that “a top scientist for the United Nations, who has examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS victims, [and] concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission ‘vectors’ that suggest that the new flu strain has been genetically-manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon. The UN expert believes that Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and the current A-H1N1 swine flu virus are biological warfare agents.”

Again, at this time, there is no definitive evidence indicating the Mexican virus is a bioweapon. However, there is plenty of factual evidence pointing to the fact the U.S. government (and other governments) have developed biological weapons and have used them against target populations.

Ron Paul on the 1976 swine flu scare

The vaccines that the government pushed killed more people than the flu last time. [Just imagine what it would be like this time considering the fact that Baxter Pharmaceutical, the company being tasked with creating a vaccine, was recently caught putting live bird flu virus into its vaccinations.]

Torture is only ok if America does it.

The Case for Torturing Lt. Chase Nielsen
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - Casey Khan - April 26, 2009



Gene Healy brings up the ironically interesting torture case of the American Air Corps Lieutenant Chase Nielsen who testified against his Japanese captors on the horrors of waterboarding. Many of these captors were later hanged, and as such, Healy rightly quips "maybe we owe an apology to the Japanese soldiers we prosecuted."

Given the current state of American moral bearings, an apology to these Japanese torturers is the least we could do. After all, these soldiers of the Rising Sun were really just trying to defend their homeland, and gather intelligence from bomber crewmen like Lt. Nielsen. Lt. Nielsen was a navigator on a B-25, and as such would have had provided significant intelligence information to the Japanese. Of course, while Japan had no idea that they were a few years away from being nuked by the Americans, their torture of the young navigator could have yielded all sorts of information that might have prevented the obliteration bombing and murder of Japan's two great Christian cities. Lt. Nielsen was later a part of "the first group to be organized, equipped and trained for atomic warfare" after World War II, therefore, he might have been privy as a young lieutenant to information on the Manhattan Project. Therefore, the soldier who tortured Nielsen was just a Japanese version of Jack Bauer, a patriotic samurai doing the best he could to save Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So, if you're for interrogation torture, is it a universal ethic of torture? If so, then the Japanese were completely justified, since they were hit with more than one smoking gun mushroom cloud. Or is the torture ethic based solely on some tribal ideal where America can be made the exception? [...]
__________________________

Update: M. Manachain sends along this interesting blog by Andrew Sullivan noting that [Reagan] signed a bill defining torture and offering no exceptions to it whatsoever.

1. "...torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession..."

2. "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
What say you conservatives now against the Almighty and Infallible Authority of Reagan?

I was recently interviewed by Religious Liberty.TV about my book

Interview: Scott Ritsema talks about his new book “The Way, the Truth and the Sword”

Religious Liberty.TV - Michael Peabody - April 24, 2009



Scott Ritsema tackles the current controversy surrounding issues of faith and political power in his new book, The Way, the Truth and the Sword: A New Christian Civics in an Age of Coercive Power. I recently caught up with him to discuss the book, which is available online at http://www.lulu.com/content/3160866

RLTV: Your book has a fascinating take on current events. Can you give us a hint on what The Way, the Truth, and the Sword about?

SR: The Way, the Truth and the Sword is about the church’s unholy alliance with state power. It is about Satan’s tempting offer for us to rule the kingdoms of the world, which has lured us away from the kingdom of God and toward coercive human governments. Whether the subject is militarism, dominion theology, Christian Zionism, the Social Gospel, the moral crusading of the religious right, or the social crusading of the religious left, all attempts on the part of Christians to utilize government power as a means to advance an agenda come under criticism.
But the book doesn’t merely critique, it also sets out to form a framework for how Christians should view, and operate within, the civic realm. [...]

[CIVICS NEWS Comment: Read the rest of the interview at Religious Liberty.TV Your positive comments at the bottom of the RLTV post would be very much appreciated. Thanks to Michael Peabody, a fine Christian lawyer and a role model, for doing this interview. It is highly recommended that you frequent his fine Christian website, Religious Liberty.TV. Because, when we celebrate freedom of conscience and religious liberty, rather than using the violent power of the state to manipulate peoples' behavior, then we are showing the world what God is like. It's a beautiful thing.]

9/11 "mastermind" also "confessed" to non-crimes

Self-Confessed 9/11 "Mastermind" Also Falsely Confessed to Crimes He Didn't Commit
Washington's Blog - Thursday, April 23, 2009



As the Washington Post writes of Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaida:

President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Okay, maybe they got that one wrong.

But certainly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession that he was the mastermind of 9/11 proves his guilt, right?

Well, as the Telegraph notes today:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in one month, and “confessed” to murdering the journalist Daniel Pearl, which he did not. There could hardly be more compelling evidence that such techniques are neither swift, nor efficient, nor reliable.

If one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's major confessions (Pearl murder) was false, why should we believe his confession about 9/11?After all, tough-as-nails Navy Seals usually become hysterical when waterboarded once in training sessions. After 183 waterboarding sessions in a month, I wouldn't be surprised if KSM also confessed to murdering Lincoln and Kennedy.

Note: I am not saying that KSM did or didn't have anything to do with 9/11 (I have no idea). I am saying that nothing that the government said about 9/11 should be accepted without independent verification, and that torture does not constitute independent verification. Indeed, given that the government used techniques which were developed especially for producing false confessions, the assumption must be that any confessions were, in fact, false.

Top Interrogation Experts Agree: Torture Doesn’t Work

Washington’s Blog - Friday, April 24, 2009

Apologists for torture say that it was a “necessarily evil” to stop future terror attacks.
However, the top interrogation experts all say torture that doesn’t work:

Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 says:

“Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

--A declassified FBI e-mail dated May 10, 2004, regarding interrogation at Guantanamo states “[we] explained to [the Department of Defense], FBI has been successful for many years obtaining confessions via non-confrontational interviewing techniques.” (see also this)
Brigadier General David R. Irvine, retired Army Reserve strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner interrogation and military law for 18 years with the Sixth Army Intelligence School, says torture doesn’t work.

--A former FBI interrogator — who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects — says categorically that torture does not help collect intelligence. On the other hand he says that torture actually turns people into terrorists.

--A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, says:

“The administration’s claims of having ‘saved thousands of Americans’ can be
dismissed out of hand because credible evidence has never been offered — not
even an authoritative leak of any major terrorist operation interdicted based on
information gathered from these interrogations in the past seven years. … It is
irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would
convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful
purpose.

This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that
torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture
creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly
neutralize.”

--The FBI interrogators who actually interviewed some of the 9/11 suspects say torture didn’t work.

--A former US Air Force interrogator said that information obtained from torture is unreliable, and that torture just creates more terrorists.

--The number 2 terrorism expert for the State Department says torture doesn’t work, and just creates more terrorists.

The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously found that torture doesn’t work.

Still don’t believe it? These people also say torture doesn’t produce usable intelligence:

Former high-level CIA official Bob Baer said “And torture — I just don’t think it really works … you don’t get the truth. What happens when you torture people is, they figure out what you want to hear and they tell you.”

Rear Admiral (ret.) John Hutson, former Judge Advocate General for the Navy, said “Another objection is that torture doesn’t work. All the literature and experts say that if we really want usable information, we should go exactly the opposite way and try to gain the trust and confidence of the prisoners.”

Michael Scheuer, formerly a senior CIA official in the Counter-Terrorism Center, said “I personally think that any information gotten through extreme methods of torture would probably be pretty useless because it would be someone telling you what you wanted to hear.”
Dan Coleman, one of the FBI agents assigned to the 9/11 suspects held at Guantanamo said “Brutalization doesn’t work. We know that."

Many other professional interrogators say the same thing (see this, this, and this).

In fact, top American World War 2 interrogators got more information without torture than those who use torture are getting today. And the head of Britian’s wartime interrogation center in London said:

“Violence is taboo. Not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.”

Indeed, a high-level Special Ops interrogator said that torture by Americans of innocent Iraqis is the main reason that foreign fighters started fighting against Americans in Iraq in the first place.

And - according to the experts - torture is unnecessary even to prevent “ticking time bombs” from exploding (see this, this and this).

And Dick Cheney’s claim that waterboarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed stopped a terror attack on L.A.? As the Chicago Tribune notes:

The Bush administration claimed that the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed helped foil a planned 2002 attack on Los Angeles — forgetting that he wasn’t captured until 2003. (see this confirmation from the BBC: “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed … was captured in Pakistan in 2003″).

Indeed, when long-time FBI director Mueller was asked whether any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through “enhanced techniques”, he responded “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

And if you believe that the military was pushing for “enhanced interrogation”, think again (and see this).

People who steal the most money (and they're really understating it significantly)

The tortured logic of the torture memos

Fox News' excellent constitutionalist judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano's insightful comments on the recent release of the torture memos and the ongoing debate about torture:

This is not rocket science and it is not art. Everyone knows torture when they see it; and no amount of twisted logic can detract from its illegal horror, its moral antipathy, and its attack at core American values.

Napolitano then points out the complete lack of credibility of the author of the memos:

The bias in favor of permitting torture may easily be concluded from a footnote in one of the memos. In that footnote, the author, now-federal judge Jay Bybee, declines to characterize such notorious medieval torture techniques as the thumbscrew and the rack as “torture.” With that incredible mindset, he proceeds to do his Orwellian best to define away such terms as “pain,” “suffering,” and "inhumane” in such a way as to require that the interrogators produce near death experiences in order to have their behavior come under the proscriptions of the federal statute prohibiting torture, and the Convention (treaty) Against Torture, which was negotiated by and signed in behalf of the U.S. by President George H.W. Bush.

Napolitano describes the astounding conclusions of the memos:

The logic in the memos is simple: The government may utilize the ten procedures inquired about (all of which were publicly known except confinement in a coffin, bound and gagged, and in the presence of insects), so long as no one dies or comes close to death. This conclusion is startling in the case of walling (banging a detainee’s head against a solid but moveable wall) and waterboarding (near drowning) since the federal government’s own physicians, cited in the memos themselves, have concluded that both techniques are always a near occasion of death. The conclusion is also startling since it fails to account for numerous federal and state prosecutions, and prosecutions in Thailand — where these torture sessions apparently occurred — that have defined torture according to its generally accepted meaning: “Any intentionally inflicted cruel or inhumane or degrading treatment, unauthorized by a court of law, perpetrated for the punishment of the victim, to extract statements from the victim, or to gratify the perpetrator.”

Cheney told torturers "push harder" to get false intel

Cheney pushed torture techniques to find Iraq, Qaeda tie: report
Raw Story - Wednesday, April 22, 2009

At the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration used torture techniques against suspected terrorists in part of an effort to establish a tie between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, according to a report Wednesday.

“The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist,” McClatchy Newspaper’s Jonathan Landay writes.

“Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003,” he adds. “No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.”

The push apparently came from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who were adamant about making a connection, McClatchy Newspaper’s Jonathan Landy writes.

“Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal,” Landay says, but a former senior intelligence official “familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official is quoted as saying.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11),” the official adds. “But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was in this period that the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times.

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” the senior official continued.

Slash population to save the world: green lobbyist

The Age - Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Related CIVICS NEWS Posts:
~Culture of Death, Abortion, Eugenics, Environmental Anti-Humanism

Australia should consider having a one-child policy to protect the planet, an environmental lobby group says.

Sustainable Population Australia says slashing the world’s population is the only way to avoid “environmental suicide”.

National president Sandra Kanck wants Australia’s population of almost 22 million reduced to seven million to tackle climate change.

And restricting each couple to one baby, as China does, is “one way of assisting to reduce the population”.

“It’s something we need to throw into the mix,” the former Democrats parliamentarian told AAP.

More people means more coal-fired electricity, cars, houses, water use and food production, all of which increase greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

Ms Kanck, who has one child herself, expects her campaign will receive a hostile reaction. [...]

CIA again falsely claims torture prevented attacks

You might have read in the news that torturing people has prevented terrorist attacks on Los Angeles and thus "saved lives." This is the latest government spin, attempting to defend their inhumane treatment of detainees. Well, in reality, this is the same recycled and debunked story that the Bush regime put out years ago. There was no terror attack prevented.

Paul Watson details the hoax: CIA Ludicrously Claims Torture Prevented Debunked L.A. Terror Plot.

Obama's national service agenda takes the first step

Obama's first national "service" bill, the "GIVE Act" has passed.

AP reports,

Calling on Americans to volunteer, President Barack Obama signed a $5.7 billion national service bill Tuesday that triples the size of the AmeriCorps service program over the next eight years and expands ways for students to earn money for college. [...]

The service law expands ways for students and seniors to earn money for college through their volunteer work. It aims to foster and fulfill people's desire to make a difference, such as by mentoring children, cleaning up parks or buildings and weatherizing homes for the poor.

This is the first step in the direction of fulfilling the agenda laid out in Rahm Emmanuel's creepily-titled book, The Plan. They have a comprehensive blueprint for conscripting Americans to serve the state. We've reported on the subject here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

It should be noted that this is not a volunteer program, as the government-media partnership is announcing. How is it a volunteer program if you are earning money from the government for your work? And where did the government get that money from to begin with. This is not volunteerism, but it is a system of theft and redistribution. Ultimately, if the people don't stop it, it leads to a system of compulsory national service: The Plan.

Strip searched for giving an ibuprofen to a friend

We are actually having a debate about this in the nation's highest court. A 13-year-old girl gave an ibuprofen to a classmate in school, and the school did a complete strip search of the girl. Unbelievable.

Government thug attacks the free press

Paul Watson comments,

It’s becoming a disturbingly familiar scene in America - aggressive, overbearing and mentally unstable cops who think that it is an arrestable offense not to obey their every order - harassing citizens who have done absolutely nothing wrong. [...]

As the video shows, despite the fact that the reporters start to back away towards their truck, the cop runs after them after one of them dares to speak - reminding the officer that America is supposed to be a free country with freedom of the press and that the cameraman “can shoot if he wants to”.

The cop then grabs Hunt by his pants and threatens to arrest him, shouting, “I gave you an order,” with the reporter protesting, “I didn’t do anything.”

Presumably, the cop thinks that it is illegal and therefore an arrestable offense not to follow any order given by a police officer - or even worse - because the reporters were actually following his order - the cop thinks its an arrestable offense merely to verbally disagree with a police officer.

Yes, we are really this clueless and distracted

U.S. used Chinese Communist torture techniques to illicit false confessions

Senate report: Bush admin. solicited torture ‘wish list,’ ordered ‘communist’ tactics
Stephen Webster and Diane Sweet - Raw Story - Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Sen. Levin recommends Holder appoint a ‘distinguished individual or individuals’ to ‘establish accountability of high-level officials’

Related CIVICS NEWS Posts:
~The CIA is using the very same techniques that we used to train our soldiers to ENDURE from communist thugs; also discussed in the NYT under the title, "Soviet-Style Torture becomes 'Interrogation'"
~IMPORTANT: The record on US government torture

A report by the Senate Armed Services Committee released Tuesday night says that torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison and approved by officials in the George W. Bush administration were applied only after soliciting a “wish list” from interrogators.

President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. This act, the committee found, cleared the way for a new interrogation program to be developed in-part based on “Chinese communist” tactics used against Americans during the Korean War, mainly to elicit false confessions for propaganda purposes.

The committee’s report was made available in Dec. 2008, but was delayed by the Pentagon’s declassification program. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) concluded that the findings were enough to warrant serious consideration by the Department of Justice.

“There is still the question, however, of whether high level officials who approved and authorized those policies should be held accountable,” he wrote. “I have recommended to Attorney General Holder that he select a distinguished individual or individuals – either inside or outside the Justice Department, such as retired federal judges – to look at the volumes of evidence relating to treatment of detainees, including evidence in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report, and to recommend what steps, if any, should be taken to establish accountability of high-level officials – including lawyers.”

The tactics, such as waterboarding, body slapping, the use of dogs and insects, prolonged standing, sleep deprivation and forced sexual humiliation are all part of the Navy’s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) program.

“In SERE training, U.S. troops are briefly exposed, in a highly controlled setting, to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions,” the report reads. “The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. Until recently, the Navy SERE school also used waterboarding.

‘The purpose of the SERE program is to provide U.S. troops who might be captured a taste of the treatment they might face so that they might have a better chance of surviving captivity and resisting abusive and coercive interrogations.”

SERE is operated by the “Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA),” the report says. “…An agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.”

“The Committee’s investigation revealed that, following Secretary Rumsfeld’s authorization, senior staff at GTMO drafted a standard operating procedure (SOP) for the use of SERE techniques, including stress positions, forcibly stripping detainees, slapping, and ‘walling’ them,” the committee found. “That SOP stated that ‘The premise behind this is that the interrogation tactics used at U.S. military SERE schools are appropriate for use in real-world interrogations.’ Weeks later, in January 2003, trainers from the Navy SERE school traveled to GTMO and provided training to interrogators on the use of SERE techniques on detainees.”

Another Citizen Dies From Police Electro-Shock Torture

Another Citizen Dies From Police Electro-Shock Torture
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - William Grigg - 4/20/09



What's missing from the following headline: "Fort Worth Man Dead After Police Use Taser"?

The missing word, of course, is "killed" -- as in the phrase, "killed by police."

The parents of Michael Jacobs, Jr., a 24-year-old man who suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, called the police for assistance last Saturday when their son went off his medication and became difficult to control. When the officers arrived they briefly tried to convince Jacobs to go to a local hospital.

Then, according to the official account, the situation "escalated," resulting in the use of Johnny Law's favorite lethal toy, the taser.

Details of this atrocity are sketchy, but Jacobs' parents insist that the police needlessly employed lethal force.

"He was laying flat on his stomach like that, shaking, and he was foaming out the mouth," recalled Charlotte Jacobs, describing the fatal assault on her son. "I came out and said, 'Ya'll are killing him.'"

According to the distraught parents, the police were as lax in seeking medical attention for their son as they were eager to deploy the taser.

"They didn't work fast enough," Charlotte Jacobs insists. "They let him lay there 20 or 30 minutes before they called the ambulance back."

When it was first made available to police over a decade ago, the taser was described as a non-lethal alternative to a firearm. Most police departments have official policies specifying that tasers are to be used only in those circumstances in which the use of firearms would also be appropriate.

In practice, however, police increasingly use tasers as instruments of "pain compliance," even in situations that don't involve criminal suspects.

The officers who killed Michael Jacobs -- a troubled young man never accused of a crime -- are on paid vacation (aka "administrative leave") while their department and the compliant local press find a way to package this act of criminal homicide as a tragic but necessary use of force. [...]

Willard is right. It's Fascism!

Feds spied on Tea Party demonstrators

Source: FBI Spied On Tea Party Protesters Nationwide
COINTELPRO tactics in force as federal government intensifies Bushist police state under Obama administration

Paul Joseph Watson - Prison Planet.com - Monday, April 20, 2009

Related CIVICS NEWS Post:
~Obama's First 100 Days: Bush on Steroids

The FBI were spying on Tea Party protesters nationwide during last week’s demonstrations as part of a covert program conducted without the knowledge of local law enforcement, according to a source named as a current FBI agent.

The Northeast Intelligence Network reports that a concerned unnamed FBI agent risked his career in blowing the whistle on the fact that Tea Party protesters were subject to covert surveillance.

The FBI agent allegedly told Doug Haggman, “The Department of Homeland Security Intelligence Assessment that is receiving so much attention is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and the true patriotic citizens of this country are on the Titanic. This is what bothers me. But is goes far beyond that assessment. There have been very significant changes made over the last few years that redirect the focus and assets of the intelligence community internally. These changes have greatly accelerated under this administration, and the threats have been redefined to include those who used to be patriots. It’s not only chilling but absolutely insulting to God-fearing Americans.”

The source claims that a single page FBI directive was dispatched from FBI headquarters in Washington DC on March 23 requesting that Special Agents in Charge (SACs) “verify the date, time and location of each TEA Party within their region and supply that information to FBI headquarters in Washington.”

Agents were then instructed to compile information on the organizers of the different protests and also send the information back to FBI headquarters. On April 6, they were subsequently asked to conduct covert surveillance and data collection of the protesters attending the Tea Party demonstrations. Surveillance was to be performed from “discreet fixed or mobile positions” and was to be performed “independently and outside of the purview of local law enforcement,” according to the source.

Although the level of detail collected from each operation is unclear, the information was reportedly submitted to Washington, where, “at the level of the National Security Branch (NSB), this information was to “include the office of the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), and integrated with a restricted access database, one that reportedly is accessible to only two agencies” [of the 14 agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community, according to the source.

“The implications to the citizens of the U.S. are ominous. It seems that there is a hostile political agenda coming from Washington that characterizes the supporters of our constitutional freedoms as threats to our domestic security, which is totally absurd. The redirection, the refocusing of domestic threats from al Qaeda cells to ‘flag waving right-wingers’ is something that has gone from a murmur a few years ago to a roar today.”

The notion that the FBI would be conducting covert surveillance and building databases on attendants of the Tea Party protests is thoroughly disturbing if not unsurprising. Indeed, before any major political event the FBI prosecutes aggressive surveillance of political groups to the point of harassment and beyond. Before the 2004 Republican Convention, the FBI initiated a nationwide campaign to track down leaders of protest groups and interrogate them, as “part of a national effort to chill dissent in this country,” according to William Dobbs, the spokesman for United for Peace and Justice.

Not long after 9/11, the FBI returned to tactics that were first made infamous during the days of J. Edgar Hoover, by collecting extensive information on anti-war and other protest groups. To highlight the non-partisan threat of the police state, the FBI is now treating so-called “right-wingers” and conservatives with the same disdain. Basically anyone who seeks to exercise their constitutional rights to peaceably assemble and express free speech is considered a threat and even a potential terrorist, as a recent Homeland Security directive implied.

From 1956 to 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program worked to monitor and disrupt protest movements across America as part of an effort to stifle dissent. FBI Director Hoover ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders. The final report of the Church Committee, which was tasked with investigating the legality of the program, concluded that the FBI had performed “unsavory and vicious tactics” in undertaking “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”

As we reported last week, The Maryland National Guard was put on alert in anticipation of the nationwide Tea Party protests, while a Homeland Security spokesman refused to deny that protesters would be under surveillance from the DHS.

The Maryland National Guard issued a Force Protection Advisory on April 11 which warned the National Guard to be on alert during the Tea Party protests because Guardsmen and Guard facilities might become “targets of opportunity.” The contact point for the document was listed as the Antiterrorism Program Coordinator.

The advisory was almost exactly the same as a United States Army Reserve Command Force Protection Advisory that was issued last November before the nationwide End the Fed protests, warning that protesters were congregating across the country to demonstrate against the private Federal Reserve.

During an interview on the Roger Hedgecock Show before last week’s demonstrations, Sean Smith, Assistant Secretary of DHS for Public Affairs, refused to deny that Homeland Security officials would be spying on Tea Party protesters when pressed by Hedgecock.

“Is the department sending people to video or record in any way the Tea Parties?” asked Hedgecock during the interview.

“Um, I can’t speak to sort of things that are law enforcement sensitive. Um, so I can’t speak to any current law enforcement operations,” responded Smith.

FBI surveillance of Tea Party protesters highlights the fact that the architecture of the police state, which was massively expanded under George W. Bush, has not been dismantled or relaxed by an Obama administration that promised “change,” and if anything has only grown bigger.

The Obama administration’s announcement that the illegal warrantless surveillance of American citizens, a program initiated under Bush, will continue and in fact intensify under Obama, is another shining example of the fact that - no matter who is in power and no matter the political persuasion of those being watched - all Americans who have the temerity to exercise constitutional rights are considered dangerous and worthy of being targeted by the federal government with surveillance tools supposedly introduced to fight terrorists.

Ron Paul on the Constitutional right of secession and the Pledge of Allegiance

The Pledge of Allegiance is more Socialist than you thought
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - David Kramer - 4/20/09

When Ron Paul points out towards the end of this video that the Pledge of Allegiance was created by Socialist Francis Bellamy, he wasn't just being provocative. I had forgotten that the original Bellamy salute to the United States flag when reciting the Pledge was the EXACT SAME ONE that the National Socialists (Nazis) used to salute Hitler (and the Italians used for Fascist Mussolini, for that matter). The salute was changed to placing one's hand over one's heart only after we entered World War II.

Jefferson on the BushObama regime's debt

What Would Jefferson Think?
Lew Rockwell.com Blog - Thomas DiLorenzo -4/20/09



About the explosion of government debt during the BushObama regime(s). Here's what:

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds . . . [we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our mis-managers to account to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers . . . . And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another] till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automotons of misery . . . . And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

--July 12, 1816 letter from Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval

Obama's First 100 Days: Bush on Steroids

Obama’s First 100 Days: Worse Than Even We Predicted
From protecting Bush officials who ordered torture from prosecution, to maintaining and expanding the American empire, to warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, all have remained and intensified under Obama

Paul Joseph Watson - Prison Planet.com - Monday, April 20, 2009

Related CIVICS NEWS Posts: (STORY CONTINUES BELOW...)
~Bush-style torture, murder continue under Obama
~Obama expanding destruction of 4th Amendment
~Turley: Obama's criminal obstruction of war crimes
~UN investigator: Obama broke International law
~Liberal, Madow, exposes Obama's "New" and "Worse" Gitmo
~Imperialist Obama out-neoconning the neo-cons
~Obama to continue Bush-McCain amnesty plan
~Obama a disaster on civil liberties
~Obama continues to escalate and widen Bush's wars
~Obama detention policy no different from Bush's
~Obama to increase killings
~Why isn't the anti-war community going after Obama like they did Bush?
~Can we torture? "Yes we can!"
~Lawyer says Gitmo abuse worse since Obama
~Obama to leave Bush crimes un-investigated
~Obama protects Bush torture secrets, threatens UK
~Obama continues the merging of churches and state
~Obama and AG Holder to roll back 2nd Amendment
~Obama's $1.8 Trillion budget deficit in perspective
~Obama calls for "largest tax increase" in history of US

As President Barack Obama approaches his first 100 days in office, the corporate media prepares a new round of fawning idolatry about the Obama administration’s “achievements,” yet a summary glance at what Obama has actually done in that short time with regard to expanding the Bush police state and the Neo-Con empire is worse than even we predicted.

The day after Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States in November last year, we challenged Obama supporters and the administration itself to follow through on the rhetoric of “change” by starting to dismantle the architecture of the Bush police state and beginning to roll back the unwieldy morass of the American empire. Obama has done neither, and in fact his every action has been about ensuring the Bush police state remains in place, that the people who put it in place are protected from prosecution, and that the empire continues to expand.

We presented Obama and his supporters with a series of issues on which to make progress. While we did not expect Obama to accomplish much in his first few months in office, we at least challenged the new President to take the first steps in reversing eight years of what was a de facto dictatorship and plotting the course for the “change” that was so consistently promised.
We asked the following questions of an Obama presidency:

- Will Obama support Dennis Kucinich’s efforts to bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney and others for deceiving the country into a war or will he protect them against such charges like Nancy Pelosi has done?

In April 2008, Obama promised that as President he would ask his Attorney General to “immediately review” potential war crimes that occurred under the Bush White House. Obama or his Attorney General have done no such thing, and every noise they have made suggests that top Neo-Cons will be protected from deceiving America into a war.

Similarly we asked:

- Will Obama bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney and others for authorizing torture and will the torture of suspects under U.S. detention, a complete violation of both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, cease under an Obama administration?

As we found out last week, the answer was a resounding NO. Upon the release of the torture memos, Obama’s right-hand man, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, told ABC News that top Bush administration officials “should not be prosecuted either and that’s not the place that we go.” In addition, Obama’s statement that accompanied the release of the torture memos stated, “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

So no retribution for the people who ordered the torture, and no retribution to the people who carried it out, thus setting the precedent that future administrations are free to order torture - safe in the knowledge that they will face no consequences whatsoever.

- Will Obama withdraw American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan without sending them away again to bomb another broken-backed third world country?

The answer again is a resounding NO. Upon taking office, Obama announced that he would be sending another 17,000, and eventually perhaps as many as 30,000, extra troops to Afghanistan.

Regarding Iraq, after the “withdrawal” of U.S. troops in 19 months, a timescale that has since been put back again, “Mr. Obama plans to leave behind a “residual force” of tens of thousands of troops to continue training Iraqi security forces, hunt down foreign terrorist cells and guard American institutions,” reported the New York Times.

In terms of bombing another broken-backed third world country, Obama has beefed the U.S. military role in Pakistan beyond that pursued by the Bush administration and “expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan,” according to the New York TImes, with an increase in missile attacks by drone aircraft.

Meanwhile, Obama’s war chest demands came to a total of around $800 billion in war funds and subsidiary costs just to cover the rest of 2009.

Does any of this sound like a move towards bringing the troops home and rolling back the American empire, as Obama promised before he was elected?

- Will Obama end the warrantless secret surveillance and phone-taps of American citizens?

You’ll be shocked the learn that the answer was a resounding NO. Earlier this month, “The Obama administration formally adopted the Bush administration’s position that the courts cannot judge the legality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) warrantless wiretapping program,” reported the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration’s cover-up of the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a ’secret’ that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again.”

- Will Obama cease his support for the Bush-administration backed banker bailouts, hated by the majority of Americans, and target the real cause of the problem - the Federal Reserve - or will he continue to give taxpayers’ money to banks who are merely hoarding it all for themselves?

Obama’s zealous push for more bailouts, along with increased power for the Federal Reserve and the implementation of global regulations that will effectively end any notion of a free market was perhaps the defining issue of his first 100 days as President. Obama has vigorously promoted the same financial policies that were introduced by the Bush administration in its final few months.

- Will Obama repeal Patriot Acts I and II as well as reversing Bush’s signing statement and acknowledging the repeal of the John Warner Defense Authorization Act? Will Obama seek to continue the militarization of America and preparations for martial law through Northcom and the secret government or will he dismantle the police state that has been constructed over the last eight years by the Bush administration?

Despite initial rhetoric about reversing Bush’s infamous signing statements, Obama himself stated that he will continue to use signing statements. The Patriot Act and its additions as well as the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, both core planks of the Bush police state, remain firmly in place, with no sign of any reversal.

Regarding militarization through Northcom, weeks after Obama’s election victory it was announced that, “The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.” Militarization of law enforcement and troops being used domestically in preparation for martial law is continuing apace under the Obama administration.

- Will Obama follow through on his rhetorical support for the second amendment or will he seek to ban guns as he did in Illinois?

Despite Obama promising that he was not interested in going after the second amendment before his election, one of his first actions was to appoint the rabidly anti-gun Eric Holder as his Attorney General. Obama has also falsely blamed the drug war crisis in Mexico on American gun shops. The leaked Obama gun ban list would make millions of Americans criminals for owning weapons such certain types of rifles or pistols. Anti-gun legislation has found its way into stimulus and other unrelated bills as pork barrel. The first steps of the Obama administration with regard to gun control have resulted in record firearm and ammunition purchases across the country.

Upon Obama’s election we made a cynical but unfortunately accurate prediction of how the much vaunted promise of “change” would actually manifest itself. The fact is that the “change” began and ended on the day Obama won the election.

- Illegal warrantless surveillance and wiretapping of American citizens will continue under Obama.
- Top Bush administration officials who ordered torture and those that carried it out will be protected from prosecution under Obama.
- Top Bush administration officials who deceived America into a war will be protected from prosecution under Obama.
- The expansion of the military empire through continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and further military incursions into Pakistan will continue and expand under Obama.
- Banker bailouts, reckless spending, inflation of currency through overprinting and global regulations stifling the free market, all of which were initiated under Bush, will continue under Obama.
- The militarization of the United States and the architecture of the police state that was set up under Bush will be preserved and expanded under Obama.
- The attack on the second amendment right to bear arms will continue under Obama.

“The egregious spending will continue, government will balloon in size, American soldiers will be used as cannon fodder for more interventionist wars of the military-industrial complex, U.S. citizens will continue to have their phone calls tapped and their rights curtailed,” we forecast last year, “and the Federal Reserve will continue to rule the financial system with an iron fist while the middle class is squeezed out of existence.”

Who can deny that all those things have only intensified under the Obama administration?
The honeymoon is over - Barack Obama has proven himself to be nothing more than we predicted all along - another stooge for the global banking syndicate that has controlled every U.S. president since JFK, and nothing more than a black face on the new world order - sworn to continue and intensify the same agenda that the Bush-Clinton-Bush dynasty advanced before him.