US Court forgives Israeli spies amid AIPAC heat

A US court has formally dropped espionage charges against two pro-Israeli lobbyists amid a scandal that had threatened to expose the extent of Israeli grip on US politics.

US District Judge T. S. Ellis on Monday dismissed all charges against former AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, three days after Justice Department prosecutors announced that handling the case would require the release of top secret military intelligence and should therefore be shelved.

Rosen and Weissman were indicted in 2005 for conspiring to obtain and leak classified information regarding Iran to the Israeli government and journalists from The Washington Post and other media outlets.

Pentagon expert Larry Franklin -- who pled guilty to passing restricted military intelligence to the two indicted lobbyists -- was sentenced in April to 12 years and seven months in prison.

AIPAC, billed as the most powerful lobbying group in Washington, has strived to distance itself from the spy case to escape further controversy for the sake of its reputation.

The controversy, however, was further fueled by revelations of the involvement of California representative Jane Harman -- a longtime member of the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who has access to highly classified security information.

Harman was reportedly overheard on a wiretapped phone conversation while agreeing to act on behalf of a suspected Israeli agent and persuade the Justice Department into reducing espionage charges against Rosen and Weissman.

The Israeli agent, in return, promised to smooth the way for Harman to become the next chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

According to a Congressional Quarterly report released on April 19, the FBI was poised to question Harman about the telephone call and her interactions with the suspected Israeli agent but US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez blocked efforts to launch an investigation.

Harman, who has denied any wrongdoing, has taken the matter up with AIPAC policymakers and has tried to turn the tables by accusing the US government of illegally recording her conversation -- a move that has shifted media attention away from AIPAC involvement in the spy case, also named the Lawrence Franklin affair.

In an address to the 2009 AIPAC policy conference on Monday, she chose to focus on the wiretapping rather than her bargaining deals with the suspected Israeli spy and called herself "a warrior on behalf of our Constitution and against abuse of power."

She went on to promise the heavyweight American politicians who had come to swear allegiance to Israel that she would "not quit on this, until I am absolutely sure that this never can happen to anyone else".

Baruch Weiss, the lawyer who helped cripple the US government's case against Rosen and Weissman, says the prosecution's loss is a "great victory" for Israel's friends.

This is not the first time pro-Israeli lobbyists charged with espionage escape trial in the US.

Stephen D. Bryen, a pro-Israel activist who played a key role in forging close ties between Israel and the Pentagon, was seen passing confidential documents to an Israeli Mossad agent in a restaurant in Washington.

Michael Saba, former executive director of the influential National Association of Arab Americans, who was witness to the security breach, promptly reported the incident to the Justice Department.

"After I reported this incident to the Justice Department, FBI and Justice Department investigators gathered sufficient evidence on Dr. Bryen's activities to recommend he be brought before an investigative grand jury for espionage," Saba explained in Armageddon Network

"The case was quietly closed, however, by Philip Heymann, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, a close personal friend and associate of Dr. Bryen's attorney. Bryen was never formally charged or made to account for his actions under oath," he added.

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Obama Supports Treaty Outlawing Gun Possession

As Lou Dobbs notes here, Obama is in favor of the ratifying CIFTA, the Inter-American Convention Against Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms. On its face, the treaty sounds reasonable because it would “prevent, combat, and eradicate the illicit manufacturing of and trafficking in firearms, ammunition, explosives, and other related materials” (emphasis added). However, upon reading the bill we discover the following:

Stressing the need, in peace processes and post-conflict situations, to achieve effective control of firearms, ammunition, explosives, and other related materials in order to prevent their entry into the illicit market.

Obama has promised Mexican President Felipe Calderon that he would urge the Senate to take up CIFTA. He is doing this under the cover of the drug cartel violence in Mexico. Obama and Calderon quoted a statistic echoed by the corporate media that 90% of the weapons seized in Mexican raids were purchased from U.S. gun shops and a reason why the U.S. needs to ratify this treaty. In fact, this is a lie — only a mere 17% of guns found at Mexico crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.

CIFTA would bury the Second Amendment under “pertinent resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly.” It would criminalize ammunition reloading (defined as explosives manufacture) and gun assembly (including firearm kits and presumably breaking down weapons for cleaning or transport).

Language contained in the CIFTA treaty insists it respects “the principles of sovereignty, nonintervention, and the juridical equality of states.” Not mentioned is the fact the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties has a superior rank to national laws. If the CIFTA treaty is ratified without exception, it would kill U.S. sovereignty and lead the way to destroying the Second Amendment.

It should be noted that only the Senate needs to ratify the treaty. Article II, section 2, of the Constitution states that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.”

The United States was one of the first signatories to CIFTA in November, 1997. The Convention was transmitted to the Senate in June 1998 and to this day awaits the Senate’s advice and consent. 29 of the 34 OAS member states have ratified CIFTA. Only the US, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and St. Vincent & Grenadines have yet to do so.

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Lawsuit Charges Baxter Used Dangerous Ingredients In Vaccines To Increase Profits

Questions remain over company chosen to develop swine flu vaccine

A scandal dating from January 2008, that is continuing to unfold, raises more disturbing questions over the safety of U.S. pharmaceutical company Baxter International’s vaccines.

Last year Baxter recalled almost all of its injections of the blood thinning heparin drug in the US after some patients experienced extreme - and in some cases fatal - allergic reactions, after being administered the products.

There were similar recalls by other manufacturers of Chinese-sourced heparin in Denmark, Italy, France Germany and Japan, but initial investigations found that only Baxter’s heparin vaccines were tainted.

The FDA has accused two Chinese manufacturers of being responsible for the production and shipment of the tainted vaccines, suggesting that a cheaper synthetic heparin mimic, subsequently identified as over-sulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS), was used to decrease costs.

However, in January 2009 a new lawsuit was filed specifically against Baxter for it’s role in the scandal.

The allegation is that the pharmaceutical giant purposefully altered an ingredient in heparin that flowed through heparin syringes to patients, resulting in pain and suffering, and sometimes death, to those affected, reported legal website Lawyers and Settlements

Somewhat ironically, the natural ingredient in heparin that was substituted in order to cut costs was a substance extracted from cooked swine intestines.

The lawsuit notes that OSCS is not found in nature, and is not approved in the United States. It accuses Baxter of using a more dangerous ingredient to “reap greater profits as a result of utilizing cheap component parts.”

As we reported earlier this week, Baxter has been chosen by the WHO to head up efforts to produce a vaccine for the Mexican swine flu that is spreading throughout the U.S. and Europe.

The decision was made despite further revelations last month that vaccines contaminated with deadly live H5N1 avian flu virus were recently distributed to 18 countries by a lab at an Austrian branch of Baxter.

Initially, the company attempted to stonewall questions by invoking “trade secrets” and refused to reveal how the vaccines were contaminated with H5N1. After increased pressure they then claimed that pure H5N1 batches were sent by accident.

However, as we have highlighted, the probability of mixing a live virus biological weapon with vaccine material by accident is virtually impossible.

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Scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild

Genetic data indicate this outbreak won't be as deadly as that of 1918, or even the average winter.

As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

"Let's not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world," said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison.

His remarks Wednesday came the same day Texas authorities announced that a nearly 2-year-old boy with the virus had died in a Houston hospital Monday.

"Any time someone dies, it's heartbreaking for their families and friends," Olsen said. "But we do need to keep this in perspective."

Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could mutate at any point -- becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.

"This virus doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to kill like the 1918 virus," which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

When the current virus was first identified, the similarities between it and the 1918 flu seemed ominous.

Both arose in the spring at the tail end of the flu season. Both seemed to strike people who were young and healthy instead of the elderly and infants. Both were H1N1 strains, so called because they had the same types of two key proteins that are largely responsible for a virus' ability to infect and spread.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health published genetic sequence data Monday morning of flu samples isolated from patients in California and Texas, and thousands of scientists immediately began downloading the information. Comparisons to known killers -- such as the 1918 strain and the highly lethal H5N1 avian virus -- have since provided welcome news.

"There are certain characteristics, molecular signatures, which this virus lacks," said Peter Palese, a microbiologist and influenza expert at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. In particular, the swine flu lacks an amino acid that appears to increase the number of virus particles in the lungs and make the disease more deadly.

Scientists have identified several other differences between the current virus and its 1918 predecessor, but the significance of those differences is still unclear, said Dr. Scott Layne, an epidemiologist at the UCLA School of Public Health.

Ralph Tripp, an influenza expert at the University of Georgia, said that his early analysis of the virus' protein-making instructions suggested that people exposed to the 1957 flu pandemic -- which killed up to 2 million people worldwide -- may have some immunity to the new strain.

That could explain why older people have been spared in Mexico, where the swine flu has been most deadly.

The swine virus does appear able to spread easily among humans, which persuaded the WHO to boost its influenza pandemic alert level to phase 5, indicating that a worldwide outbreak of infection is very likely. And the CDC reported on its website that "a pattern of more severe illness associated with the virus may be emerging in the United States."

"We expect to see more cases, more hospitalizations, and, unfortunately, we are likely to see more deaths from the outbreak," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters Wednesday on her first day at work.

But certainly nothing that would dwarf a typical flu season. In the U.S., between 5% and 20% of the population becomes ill and 36,000 people die -- a mortality rate of between 0.24% and 0.96%.

Dirk Brockmann, a professor of engineering and applied mathematics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used a computer model of human travel patterns to predict how this swine flu virus would spread in the worst-case scenario, in which nothing is done to contain the disease.

After four weeks, almost 1,700 people in the U.S. would have symptoms, including 198 in Los Angeles, according to his model. That's just a fraction of the county's thousands of yearly flu victims.

Just because the virus is being identified in a growing number of places -- including Austria, Canada, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Spain and Britain -- doesn't mean it's spreading particularly quickly, Olsen said.

"You don't ever find anything that you don't look for," he said. "Now that diagnostic laboratories and physicians and other healthcare workers know to look for it, perhaps it's not surprising that you're going to see additional cases identified."

And a pandemic doesn't necessarily have a high fatality rate. Even in Mexico, the fatalities may simply reflect that hundreds of thousands of people have been infected. Since the symptoms of swine flu are identical to those of a normal flu, there's no way to know how many cases have evaded government health officials, St. Jude's Webby said.

As the virus adapts to its human hosts, it is likely to find ways of spreading more efficiently. But evolution also suggests it might become less dangerous, Olsen said.

"If it kills off all its potential hosts, you reach a point where the virus can't survive," he said. Working to calm public fears, U.S. officials on Wednesday repeatedly stressed the statistic of yearly flu deaths -- 36,000.

Sebelius and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano also rejected calls to close the borders, which several lawmakers reiterated Wednesday on Capitol Hill.

"We are making all of our decisions based on the science and the epidemiology," Napolitano said. "The CDC, the public health community and the World Health Organization all have said that closing out nation's borders is not merited here."

Though scientists have begun to relax about the initial toll, they're considerably less comfortable when taking into account the fall flu season. They remain haunted by the experience of 1918, when the relatively mild first wave of flu was followed several months later by a more aggressive wave.

The longer the virus survives, the more chances it has to mutate into a deadlier form.

"If this virus keep going through our summer," Palese said, "I would be very concerned."

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Pandemic of panic - After salmonella, bird flu, the Millennium Bug... should we actually be scared this time?

As Mexico City, the third largest in the world, grinds to a halt, the EU's health commissioner warns European travellers not to fly to anywhere in North or Central America unless their journey is absolutely necessary.

In Britain, where £50 million worth of face masks are on order, government ministers go into full crisis mode, holding emergency meetings in a Whitehall bunker and telling us they will soon be sending a leaflet on the dangers of Mexican swine flu to every home in the country.

As BBC presenters roll their lips round such words as 'pandemic' and 'Armageddon', we are gravely warned that this new flu strain could be as dangerous as the famous Spanish flu which, at the end of World War I, killed 50 million people.

It may be that swine flu has killed 159 people in Mexico itself - although it is still not certain that it was the cause of all those deaths. It may be that a young child has died in the U.S. after a family holiday in Mexico, which is a tragedy.

More cases may emerge among the 10,000 unfortunate Britons stranded in Mexico by this emergency, and more cases in Britain itself in addition to the three announced yesterday.

But are we sure that this extraordinary crisis is being kept in perspective? Don't we have the sense that we have seen this kind of panic before, which eventually turned out to have gone way over the top?

The moment which more than any might have set off a severe attack of deja vu came when the BBC Today programme wheeled on an expert from the World Health Organisation to tell us that '40 per cent' of us in Britain may catch swine flu - while another unnamed expert was quoted predicting that '1.2 million' Britons could die.

It is not long since, in 2005, an even more senior WHO official was telling us that, any time soon, a worldwide epidemic of Asian bird flu could kill '150 million people'. The actual death toll from bird flu to date is around 200, barely double the number already dead when that hysteria was at its height.

Only here and there in recent days, as Mexican flu rages through the headlines, have a handful of voices suggested that we should keep some sense of proportion on what is happening.

As California's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declares a state of emergency because 60-odd Californian schoolchildren have contracted Mexican flu, without any so far dying, it is pointed out that normal flu strains cause 36,000 deaths in America every year.

When a Scottish couple are rushed into an isolation ward after returning from their Mexican honeymoon with swine flu, Michael O'Leary, the boss of Ryanair, asks: 'Will the Edinburgh couple die? No. A couple of Strepsils will do the job.'

I have a particular reason for having cast a cautious eye on the familiar sight of the 'scare machine' being cranked up in recent days.

Two years ago, with a noted food safety expert, Dr Richard North, I wrote a book entitled Scared To Death, a detailed account of the chief scares which have regularly held us in thrall in recent decades.

Again and again since the food scares of the 1980s, we have seen these waves of hysteria rise and fall, over everything from salmonella in eggs and Asian bird flu to the Millennium Bug which was supposedly going to bring civilisation to a halt at midnight on December 31, 1999, as half the world's computers crashed and planes fell out of the sky.

That particular panic cost an estimated $300 billion, before it was discovered that the countries that hadn't spent fortunes on sorting out their computers fared no worse than those that had.

One of the benefits of analysing a whole series of scares is that it shows us how consistently they follow an identifiable pattern, from the moment when they begin with some scientific confusion to the time when it eventually becomes clear that any genuine threat had been inflated way beyond any relation to reality.

In all sorts of ways the current panic over swine flu is already fitting into that pattern, displaying features familiar from scares which have long since run their often highly expensive and damaging course.

The last occasion when our Government was panicked into sending a health warning to every household in the country, for instance, was in 1987, when Edwina Currie sent out such a pamphlet, Don't Die Of Ignorance, warning us of the terrifying threat of Aids.

No one can doubt that HIV/Aids has remained a serious problem, to date responsible for some 18,000 deaths in the UK. But back in the late 1980s we were being solemnly warned that, as early as 1990, we could expect the death toll to reach a million.
Compared with the 9,000 people who die in NHS hospitals every year just from MRSA and C.difficile, even those 18,000 deaths in 20 years can now be seen in a rather more sensible perspective.

It was Edwina Currie again who, in 1988, set off the panic over salmonella in eggs, which was supposedly going to kill thousands of people because the bacteria were somehow getting inside the eggs they ate for breakfast.

Few headlines greeted the Government's admission four years later that salmonella was not getting inside eggs after all, and that whatever else had caused a temporary rise in salmonella poisoning, it wasn't eggs.

In 1996, when the greatest food scare of all exploded over BSE, front-page headlines greeted the admission on Newsnight by the Government's chief scientist John Pattison that the death toll from CJD caught by eating beef could within a few years reach 500,000.

A year later, however, scarcely any attention at all was paid to Dr Pattison's confession that he had now revised his figure downwards to just '100' (indeed, it now seems highly likely that beef was not the cause of CJD at all),

Again and again we have seen this pattern repeating itself, from Sars and dioxins to the confusion between different types of asbestos, costing literally hundreds of billions of dollars in law suits alone.

The one lesson which comes out from them all, loud and clear, is that our modern world has become far too prone to getting these supposed threats out of all proportion.

Of course we should expect our governments to be watchful and prepared to meet any genuine threat to our health and well-being. But as history painfully shows, we have become far too quick to overreact to dangers which too often turn out either to have been wildly exaggerated or never to have existed at all.

Too many people seem to have a vested interest in talking up these panics beyond what the evidence can support, from scientists dependent on promoting scares for their funding to politicians who recklessly use scares to show their concern for our welfare. We in the media, it is only fair to add, are far from blameless in this respect.

What this latest panic should be telling us, in short, is that we should learn to be much more careful not to talk up scares beyond what the evidence is there to support. Stick to the facts, keep everything in proportion and don't give way to speculations which, a year or two later, may make us look very silly indeed.

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Fox News: Martial Law If It’s a Pandemic?

Legal analyst says Americans would be willing to give up rights

A segment on Fox News’ Fox and Friends this morning explored the issue of whether a swine flu pandemic could result in a declaration of martial law in America and a suspension of constitutional rights.

“If it becomes a pandemic, you could lose some simple rights - like going to the movies,” said host Steve Doocy, before introducing legal analyst Peter J. Johnson, Jr.

“People in our government need to start thinking about how, if this actually becomes a pandemic, how it’s going to affect our daily life and our rights,” said Johnson, before asking if people who try to escape quarantines or refuse mandatory vaccinations would face jail time.

Johnson added that Americans were willing to give up rights in order to “stay alive” but that an orderly discussion of how that would happen needs to take place.

Closing schools, closing the border, forcibly quarantining Americans and eliminating the right to freely assemble, including preventing people from going to shopping malls, were all mentioned as possibilities.

“What about legislatures? What about the U.S. Congress? What about courts of law? What about not impaneling juries because we don’t want to have public assemblies?” asked Johnson.

“Plus the possibility of martial law, but that’s a whole other conversation,” added Doocy, with Johnson responding, “not going there”.

Watch the clip below:

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Don’t Fall For the Old Divide And Conquer Trick

The powers-that-be are trying to distract us from the looting of our wallets by the big banks by creating a left-versus-right, us-versus-them drama.

You know, the old divide-and-conquer schtick.

Americans from across the political spectrum are furious at the financial elite who have robbed us blind, and their enablers in government.

While at the moment, conservatives are getting more press, those on the left are just as angry. For example, leading progressive Glenn Greenwald wrote an essay entitled “The virtues of public anger and the need for more” cheering the fact that Americans are starting to get in touch with their righteous anger at being ripped off.

Liberals have launched their own version of the tea party protests calling for the big banks to be broken up.

And many leading economists and policy experts have thunderously railed against Obama’s continuation of Bush’s cover-up-the-truth, too-big-to-fail, stick-it-to-the-taxpayers approach to the economic crisis.

On the conservative side of the aisle, Ron Paul’s media coordinator said that the mainstream Republican party has tried to hijack the tea party movement and has “co-opted” its message. He warns against letting the movement be diverted:

It’s important the people at the grassroots level stick to our guns and say no when they try to co-opt our message…

Bringing in someone like Gingrich takes away from the message. Newt Gingrich enabled George W. Bush, he enabled the big spending…

And as Michael Rivero has written:

Beware this “left wing versus right wing” dichotomy. This is an attempt to trick us into arguing with each other instead of uniting against the common cause of our problems…

The only real divide is the one mentioned at the very top of this article. The one percent that owns it all against the 99% of us being driven into poverty. The poor against the oligarchs.

To my friends on both the left and the right, I urge you to remember that folks on the other side of the aisle are not the problem. As honest people on both the left and the right agree, the real problems are:

• Lack of honest disclosure about the shenanigans of the financial giants

• Failing to prosecute the criminal actions of those companies and their big wigs

• Failing to break up zombie insolvent companies

• Slipping trillions of dollars into the hands of the richest and most powerful companies under the table

• Gaming the numbers

• And continuing to pursue failed economic policies even after they’ve been proven counterproductive

If we fall for the divide and conquer strategy, where idiots on both sides try to focus our anger on the “other team” instead of the real culprits, we will get distracted, lose direction, and thus became easy to ignore and control. Then the powers-that-be will be able to continue pickpocketing us for years to come.

See this and this.

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Obama Cites Debunked Claim That Most Guns in Mexico Come From U.S.

“A demand for these drugs in the United States is what is helping keep these cartels in business … more than 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States,” President Barack Obama said Thursday. However, Fox News debunked this claim weeks ago: “It’s just not true. In fact, it’s not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.”

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Obama shields CIA officers over US ‘torture’

US President Barack Obama has assured CIA agents involved in tough terror interrogations they will not be prosecuted as he released graphic memos detailing methods approved by the Bush White House.

In documents published Thursday, George W. Bush-era legal officials argued that the tactics such as simulated drowning, face slapping, the use of insects to scare prisoners and sleep deprivation did not amount to torture.

"This is a time for reflection, not retribution," Obama said.

"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

The four memos offered a stunning glimpse inside the covert interrogation program introduced after the September 11 attacks in 2001, which critics say amounted to torture, and Obama said undermined America's moral authority.

The documents argued that a long list of coercive techniques did not equal torture since they did not inflict severe mental or physical pain.

Detailing methods used to question Al-Qaeda terror suspects, the memos reveal the use of dietary manipulation, forced nudity, facial and abdominal slaps, and the use of confined or "stress positions" for suspects.

In one technique known as "walling," interrogators could push a suspect against a false wall, so his shoulder blades make a slamming noise and lead him to think the impact is greater than in reality.

The memos also show interrogators asked for a ruling on whether the placing of a harmless insect in a cramped box with Al-Qaeda terror suspect Abu Zubaydah -- who had a bug phobia -- equated to torture.

The technique "certainly does not cause physical pain" and therefore could not be termed as torture and should be permissible, one of the memos said.

Similarly, techniques including waterboarding or simulated drowning, walling and sleep deprivation also fell short of torture, the memos said.

Another memo details a "prototypical interrogation," which begins with a detainee stripped of his clothes, shackled and hooded, "with the walling collar over his head and around his neck."

Human rights groups reacted with dismay to Obama's decision to shield interrogators from prosecution.

"The Department of Justice appears to be offering a get-out-of-jail-free card to individuals who, by US Attorney General Eric Holder's own estimation, were involved in acts of torture," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International.

In a statement, Obama said the tactics adopted by the administration of his predecessor "undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer."

He said he was releasing the documents to avoid "an inaccurate accounting of the past," which would "fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States."

"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," he said in a statement.

"The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world," he said.

Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence, said the torture memos must be read in the context of the "horror" of the September 11 attacks.

"Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing," he said. "But we will absolutely defend those who relied on these memos and those guidelines."

He pledged, however, that Washington would not use similar methods in the future.

A federal court had given the government until Thursday to either turn over the memos in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union or explain why they cannot be released.

While slamming Obama's decision not to prosecute those carrying out the tactics, Human Rights Watch welcomed the possibility that those at the top of the chain of command could face justice.

"Notably, the president left open the possibility of prosecuting those higher up the chain who wrote the opinions and authorized the CIA to use abusive interrogation techniques and torture," the group said in a statement.

The memos were authored by Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, who at the time were lawyers for Bush's Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel. Bybee is currently a federal judge.

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The New World Order Is Taking Over the Patriot and Truth Movements

We all know that there are infiltrators into the various patriot movements. Old news. But that is not what I discuss in this article. I may be wrong, but I think something far more serious is going on: I think that the biggest, strongest patriot movements (Alex Jones and the Truth Movement, Campaign for Liberty, etc.) are about to completely damaged or hijacked so that they no longer exist, and are completely destroyed. This is the New World Order tactic, so none of us should be surprised, just like I was not surprised when the Ron Paul Presidential run was run off the road and taken over almost effortlessly, it seems, before the first votes in New Hampshire were cast. So let’s get into this issue…

If Ann Coulter is so ‘awake’ now, endorsing Ron Paul and stating that he was right about everything, why won’t she then talk about the things that Ron Paul discusses: the Fed, Codex Alimentarius, the North American Union, the WTO and IMF, what the Second Amendment really is all about, and so on? There is something funny going on here… and I think I know what. If Glen Beck is such a patriot and such a rebel of the mass media now, also promoting Ron Paul, why can’t his research team, after searching for over a week as Beck said, simply find any of the dozens of news articles in Newsweek, the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, and so on, about the massive FEMA camps all over? Answer: he’s lying. Why is the mass media moving into our territory now, discussing some of the same issues we Truthers and patriots discuss, all of a sudden? If this keeps up, even as Alex Jones hinted at last week, his radio show “could become passé”. In other words, the movement will be hijacked from Jones, Ron Paul, and other leaders in the genuine patriot movements by the mass media (and the New World Order that controls the mass media), and the mass media will have control of them, just as they almost effortlessly took over the Ron Paul Presidential run’s momentum in the days before the New Hampshire Primary. Let me explain what I think is really going on.

Consider these facts:

1. All of a sudden, starting around late last fall, right when the stock market crash was going on, with a vengeance, the mass corporatist media began telling us that there is a New World Order and a coming world government. And since then, the mass media tells us either that this New World Order and coming world government is great, or they would tell us that it’s bad and it’s only about the bankers—they don’t tell us, for example, that it’s project of the occultist and militaristic corporatists behind the scenes, or that it traces back to Hitler—I didn’t hear Beck cover that story!

2. That same mass media is telling us that the old system is the cause of the economic collapse, and “oh no [‘wink wink], the people might revolt against it (against system and/or the bankers)”.

That “old system” referred to in 2 is, we are told by the thought-controlling mass media, not the country the Founders set up for us, but rather:

3. our current system of government (which is far from the libertarian Founders’ government, and which is now actually a corporatist system where the government is a ceremonial government, like the Roman Congress was in ancient Rome),

4. the banks (but not the globalist banks, IMF, etc.),

5. capitalism (sure we never really have had it in the past 150 years—instead we’ve only had corporatism—but what traces of capitalism we’ve had are now being castigated [‘GM’s failed business model’, etc.] or called nonexistent by the mass media, needing to be replaced by socialistic systems, such as with the NewsWeek cover story: “We Are All Socialists Now”)

And there are other odd things going on, such as

6. Ann Coulter, who has been unwavering and incredibly rabid and virulent in her pro-war hate for Middle Eastern people, all of a sudden is supporting the most anti-war presidential candidate in decades, saying he was right all along—um… did I hear that right?

There are other examples, but these are all stunning, and they are quite new in the mass media. Is any of this making any sense? Because it’s really confusing me—Anne Coulter has never used reason, but now suddenly she wants to? I think it’s all sounding more like the old “wolf in sheep’s clothing” than anything else. To understanding the conclusions I am going to bring out in this article, you will have to interconnect all these points, 1-6, at once. Let’s continue…

We are being told in the mass media in various ways that these systems (1-3) have failed us, that’s really the problem, and those systems need to be changed (eradicated) in one way or another. But all this (and so much more) has been going on all along for centuries—the banks robbing us, etc.—so why now does the mass media all-at-once decide to announce a few of these tid-bits to us that they’ve covered up for decades? If the mass media suddenly wants to tell us how the banks have ripped us all off, well why didn’t they tell us that in 1913, the 1980s, or maybe even just in 2007? And why not tell us that Obama supported it all? But more importantly, why all-at-once, right at this particular point in time, are we getting these few tid-bits from the mass media? Answer: look what it is doing to the patriot movements; it’s becoming them.

Now, also consider that the mass media is telling us a few more things simultaneously, in addition to 1-6:

7. world government is the solution to the failed systems and to the economic collapse, and

8. The “conspiracy people” were right about a all along.

Now, notice, again, that 1-8 are all happening at once! Coincidence? Hard to believe. The robots and extremists of the mass media (Beck, Hannity, Savage, Limbaugh, Coulter, O’Reilly, and others.) have been such robotic and unfathomable traitors through the years that they can only be carrying out an agenda now too, not trying to report news, attract an audience, or keep their ratings high. Why else would they bring all this up at the very same time? Perhaps Alex Jones is correct, and these propagandists are suddenly just worried about their ratings and their competition from the alternative media. This may be true, but as I said, my theory is that there’s something more serious going on.

Here’s the issue: the New World Order wants worldwide rioting, mass death, economic collapse, sacrifice of lower minions and freemasons of the New World Order, compliance with the climate change laws and servitude, and a set up of a Brave New World, all over the course of the next decade or decades. What better way is there to do this than to shock and clean-the-slate of the populace of the world (often called “shock doctrine,” as a recent book discussed) to get them ready for big changes and compliance with a new world, right when the populace is getting desperate and un-thought-out due to their desperation and increasing poverty, than by introducing them with information about how evil the world leaders are and world system is (but all along keeping the real completely unseen master corporatists out of the picture)? Answer: you merely implement 1-8, where a key element in that and to cause revolt is to hijack the real patriot movements with the vacuous, uninformed, undirected, and undisciplined false “patriotism” of Beck, Coulter, and the rest, by simply taking over their discussions, as seems to be starting right now with Coulter, Beck, and others. There! That’s the issue, and it could easily result in a quick total hijacking of the power the patriot movements have accumulated.

Proof that the New World Order wants to use the Truth Movement and similar movements for the aforementioned aims was possibly even seen last weekend when some news agencies said that the Pittsburgh police shooting was due to the shooter listening to the words of Glen Beck and Alex Jones (notice how those two were coupled together), not because of, for example, the violent tendencies of the shooter (he was accused of assaulting a girlfriend in the past), his economic hardships, or some other cause. As if Alex Jones has ever promoted violence against police, rather than mild civil disobedience, and/or taking over the government by the people (the latter being the often-mentioned trademarked “Alex Jones solution” to the New World Order takeover of the country). (Also note that if this is true, there also may be an additional divide-and-conquer maneuver already being set up as 1-8 are implemented: set the revolting parts of the populace against the non-revolting parts.) If Ann Coulter is so “awake” and patriotic now, why doesn’t she point out that alcohol and Big Pharma kills hundreds of thousands each year, many times what violence does, or violence with guns, and not listening to Alex Jones or Glen Beck? Answer: because she’s carrying out the typical Big Media agenda that she’s ordered to. Nothing new.

Now, also remember before 9/11, when Alex Jones predicted it a few weeks before? He was able to do that because the mass media—the mouthpiece and brainwashing device of the New World Order—was telling us it was going to happen. Doesn’t it seem like the mass media is again telling us something here, also, when you interconnect points 1-8? They are telling us that 1-8 will happen, that the old world and our current way of life will be destroyed, that We the People will destroy it with our riots, with our contributing to the economic problems, and through our adherence to the old system of government (described above), so that the new communism will inevitably set in—it’s all the fault of We the People. Now where have we heard this sort of a story before! (Hint: after World War II, we were told that the war was caused by the mass madness of the world citizenry, not by the New World Order, and thus Truman had to set up all those mental health acts that he did in order that We the People could be cured of our irrationalism.)

So, the mass media, again, is merely telling us what is going to happen, that it’s all our fault. So, let me summarize: it is clear to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the corporatist New World Order is now using what most of us think of as the most hard-core of the patriot movements in order to carry out their agenda. LET ME SAY THAT IN DIFFERENT WORDS SO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM GETTING ACROSS TO YOU:

The real patriot movements are getting so large, so powerful, so pervasive, that the New World Order has no choice but to fully hijack these movements if they are to carry out their planned Brave New World agendas. More specifically: the New World Order is going to make our Truth and Patriot movements their primary tools of operation to carry out Eugenics and so forth.

That’s my theory, and my prediction.

How, you might ask, will it all work? Well, if you want to get a revolt going, why not disclose false flag terror (such as Michael Savage started to do recently for the first time on his radio show where he foretold Obama’s upcoming Reichstag)? That sure would do it if the mass media went that far and all-at-once got this the real-ness of false flag terror into the minds of the sappy and unfocussed citizenry, shocking them to the core by totally upsetting their established belief system, all right when that citizenry was destitute, in a depression, filled with bird flu epidemic fears, with millions living tent cities, hungry and cold, and so on, as is most likely going to be the case this fall or winter. Was Savage’s recent comment a prelude to this?

It is quite obvious the New World Order is pushing for violence, as Alex Jones has been pointing out. The New World Order, through our city, state and Federal governments, is pushing the populace so hard now, more and more each day, with impossible taxation (who can pay all the taxes as we fall into massive depression?), with crazy new laws (banning home-schooling, etc.), police taserings, making home gardens illegal (just like the King in the book Robin Hood banned hunting deer), announcing that the bankers are robbing us, announcing that the government is not helping the economic crisis but is fuelling it (of course they don’t disclose all the details with this), and most importantly, getting ready to remove the Second Amendment and all of the Constitution. They are creating a system where we are not Americans, but where we are all living like the slaves on the plantations in the 1800s, where only revolt (violence) could follow, because it is being pre-planned, and our movements are going to be used to fuel the violent revolts, unless we wake up to this possibility and start discussing these issues with urgency. Don’t forget how quickly the Ron Paul Presidential run was hijacked!

So what does the New World Order want with all the rioting? Well, there are several things. Firstly, this is part of the New World Order’s religious festival: spread as much mayhem, panic, misery and pure blood chaos as possible—this is a ‘work of art’ to the New World Order; it is like listening to Beethoven to them. Some of you may find this difficult to understand, but they attain their religious experience by this “theater”, as they often call it (remember Iraq was called a “theater” around the time of Shock and Awe? Notice the word “Awe” there, also).

If you still have trouble believing this, then ask yourself a question: What is the New World Order waiting for in killing billions? They’ve had super technology to kill as many of us as they want to for decades. They are building up our numbers in order to slaughter us, because the slaughter itself is their art, their high, just like the ancient hallucinatory ballgame (the ‘pitzlawal’, as it’s called by the Maya) of death-entertainment was for the Mayan shaman kings, a little like the ancient Roman gladiator fights, and a lot like the carnage in Iraq. What is beautiful to the New World Order is a world of deformed, sickened, ultra-violent, unintelligent desperate people, like the Island of Dr. Moreau. That’s the religious festival of the New World Order, and the aforementioned rioting is a key issue involved. If we want to be free, to be kings of ourselves, we have to realize this, to know the enemy as best we can, or else we will just go along the pitzlawal we are all currently caught in. The way to be kings of ourselves is to become intelligent, knowledgeable, deeply and genuinely religious, and self-sufficient in the way the Indians used to be—that’s the sort of civil disobedience we need, and which Henry David Thoreau lived when he wrote his influenial book on civil disobedience.

Ok, so a New World Order religious festival is the first point of the rioting. Another is that the rioting is the way to transform the nation into a shock state, and thus bring about an entry of the Brave New World. The old world has to be destroyed in order to set up the new world, and that means that our minds, our memories, our ways of life, and our peaceful day-to-day lifestyles of American comfort, the security for our families, and so on, all have to be destroyed, sending us into a mass state of shock (“shock doctrine”). I think a lot of people in our movement are oblivious to this intention, this plan, this hijacking of our movement. But isn’t that what they always do?

So, what should we do? Do we panic and start fighting with all the other patriots and Truthers for every little thing we disagree over? I disagree with other Truthers about many ideas, so should I fight with them about that constantly? Or should I fight the enemy? We of course must focus on the fight. But what is the fight? The fight is the fight for truth. But what is the truth? The truth is what we can experience and see with our eyes, right in front of our face. And what we see is the destruction of the Constitution and of the nation we live in.

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