Global Food Riots Protend Trouble for the US Dollar 

By: Chris_Galakoutis

On a trip to Canada recently I couldn’t help but notice the extensive media coverage paid to the worldwide food price inflation, as well as the riots breaking out in many countries over food shortages.

And of course the list of reasons given by the so-called ‘economists’ interviewed are completely devoid of the one all important reason fueling what may arguably become an epic food price inflation: the declining value of the US dollar.

Many countries around the world peg their currency to the dollar, either through what are called soft or hard pegs.

As I have written on numerous occasions, these countries are paying the price for their ‘loyalty’ by importing the inflation the US is creating. In order to support the US currency and keep theirs from appreciating, countries must create more of their own and sell it in the open market to buy dollars. This increased supply of their own currency fuels the inflationary conditions in their own countries.

Akin to a destructive typhoon that has hit shore in some and about to in others, the inflation monster wasn’t an issue so long as it was gestating and churning over open water after developing and departing US shores.

But as it starts to hit the many nations foolish enough to have invited the storm, the question that arises is how will the affected countries respond?

In my opinion, as this food crisis grows and civil unrest intensifies worldwide, all nations impacted by it will finally be forced to stand up and walk off this particular field of dreams.

For if it is one thing and one thing alone that all politicians understand it is power, and remaining in power. And in most places that means votes.

The question for the longest time has been ‘when,’ as in when will countries begin to un-peg from the dollar. That’s already happened in some places, but I believe is about to pick up pace as prices of not only food but also all basic necessities spiral out of control. The un-pegging will cause those foreign currencies to strengthen, bringing down domestic prices virtually overnight.

Authorities here in the US have, up until now, been able to ‘fool’ the people into believing there was no inflation, by working to bring down the cost of their big screen TV’s and other imported consumer electronics. By doing so, the rising costs of life’s necessities have been camouflaged, as it were, since the average consumer was left par for the course after all was said and done.

But in a slowing economy and home equity cash-out’s a thing of the past, the now frugal consumer is hurting, having to carry and service large debt while also feeling the full force of the price increases for everything from food, energy, health care and all other necessities that can not be outsourced on the cheap.

As this inflation spread it can therefore mean only one thing: countries will let go of their currency pegs sooner rather than later.

This will come as a complete and total shock to those currently calling for a massive dollar rally and corresponding collapse of gold and commodities prices.

It is why we have been picking up more of our favorite gold, silver and energy stocks this past week. Some of these stocks are trading it ridiculously low prices, a few approaching their cash on hand. It is these stocks that will have the most explosive moves to the upside in the months ahead.

The MurkyMarkets.com website by Christopher G Galakoutis is a running macroeconomic commentary on the state of the financial markets with emphasis on gold, silver, the currency markets and energy. Visitors to our new site are always welcome.

Link

US professor of international law to support Iran against Israel

A leading American professor of international law has voiced readiness to represent Iran in an international court on Israeli crimes.

“I am ready to represent Iran in an international tribunal for trying the Zionist regime on charges of genocide of Palestinians and the blockade in the Gaza Strip,” Francis Boyle, professor of law at the University of Illinois, told Fars News Agency.

According to the news agency, Boyle demanded his proposal to be submitted to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Professor Boyle accuses Israel of committing ‘Nuremberg offenses’ against the Palestinians.

Boyle has recently been calling for the impeachment of US President George W. Bush.

Boyle is author of Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations 1898-1921, and The Bosnian People Charge Genocide.

MK/DT

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=54883§ionid=351020101
link

Boyle on Wikipedia

Francis Anthony Boyle (born 1950) is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He also received a Ph. D. in political science from Harvard University.

Between 1988 and 1992 Boyle was a member of the board of Amnesty International USA. Boyle also charged that Amnesty’s staff had been infiltrated by US and UK security services (see Covert Action interview below) a claim hotly disputed by many in the human-rights community.

From 1991 to 1993, Boyle was a legal advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization. Boyle is currently a member of the Nobel Peace Prize for Governor George H. Ryan Committee.

Professor Boyle has also made controversial comments about the Middle East, accusing Israel of committing “Nuremberg offenses” against the Palestinians, an allusion to the actions of Nazi Germany.

more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Boyle
link

The Big Lie

Palestine, Palestinians and International Law

By Francis A. Boyle

I am not Arab. I am not Jewish. I am not Palestinian. I am not Israeli. I am Irish American. Our People have no proverbial “horse in this race.” What follows is to the best of my immediate recollection:

The Big Lie

Growing up in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s while strongly supporting the just struggle of African Americans for civil rights, I was brainwashed at school as well as by the mainstream news media and popular culture to be just as pro-Israel as everyone else in America. Then came the 1967 Middle East War. At that time, my assessment of the situation was that Israel had attacked these Arab countries first, stolen their lands, and then driven out their respective peoples from their homes. I then realized that everything I had been told about Israel was “The Big Lie.” Israel was Goliath, not David.

I resolved to study the Middle East in more detail in order to figure out what the Truth really was.

Of course by then I had already figured out that everything I was being told about the Vietnam War also constituted The Big Lie. The same was true for U.S. military intervention into Latin America after the Johnson administrations gratuitous invasion of the Dominican Republic. The same for the pie-in-the-sky “Camelot” peddled by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs invasion/fiasco and its self-induced Cuban Missile Crisis that was a near-miss for nuclear Armageddon. So I just added the Middle East to the list of international subjects that I needed to pay more attention to in my life.

Chicago

… By the end of Professor Binders course in the Winter of 1970, I had become convinced of three basic propositions: (1) that the world had inflicted a terrible injustice upon the Palestinian People in 1947-1948; (2) that there will be no peace in the Middle East until this injustice was somehow rectified; and (3) that the Palestinian People were entitled to an independent nation state of their own. I have publicly maintained these positions for the past three decades at great cost to myself.

In particular, I have been accused of being everything but a child molester because of my public support for the Palestinian People. I have seen every known principle of Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom violated in order to suppress the basic rights of the Palestinian People. In fact, there is no such thing as Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom in the United States of America when it comes to asserting the rights of the Palestinian People under international law.

… By comparison, Harvards Center for Middle East Studies was then basically operating as a front organization for the . and probably the Mossad as well. No point anyone wasting their time studying Middle East Politics at Harvard.

Nevertheless, I entered Harvard in September of 1971 in order to pursue a J.D. at the Harvard Law School and a . in Political Science at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government. The latter was the same doctoral program that had produced Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and numerous other Machiavellian war-mongers trained by Harvard to “manage” the U.S. global empire. In other words, Harvard trained me to be one of these American Imperial Managers: “There but for the Grace of God go I!”

For the next seven years at Harvard I was quite vocal in my support for the Palestinian People, including and especially their basic human rights, their right to self-determination, and their right to an independent nation state of their own. …

While in residence as an Associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CFIA) from 1976-1978, I also came into contact with Walid Khalidi. I was present for the dramatic off-the-record confrontation between him and Shimon Peres at the standing CFIA Seminar on “American Foreign Policy” then conducted by Stanley Hoffmann at their old headquarters on 6 Divinity Avenue. Peres refused to budge even one inch no matter how flexible Khalidi was. A harbinger for the Middle East Peace Negotiations over a decade later.

As a most loyal and grateful Harvard alumnus (J.D. magna cum laude, A.M., Ph.D.), I must nevertheless state that it is shameful and shameless that Harvard never granted a tenured full professorship to Walid Khalidi because he is a Palestinian despite the fact that he is universally recognized as one of the worlds foremost experts on the Middle East. This gets back to my previous observation that there is no point studying Middle East Politics at Harvard. ..

 
http://www.counterpunch.org/boylebiglie.html

A Secret Afghanistan Mission Prepares for War with Iran

Those predicting war with Iran or some Bush-Cheney October surprise attack on Tehran are constantly looking for signs of military preparations: a B-52 bomber that mistakenly takes off from North Dakota with nuclear-armed cruise missiles; a second or third aircraft carrier entering the Persian Gulf; a B-1 crashing in Qatar.

Since the most likely path to war with Iran is not Marines storming the beach but a strike on nuclear facilities and “regime” targets, signs such as these can often just be mirages. The true strike is not necessarily going to come with any warning, and the U.S. military has developed an entire system called “global strike” to implement such a preemptive strike.

A secret mission conducted last August over Afghanistan caught my eye because it tells us everything we need to know about the ability of the U.S. military to conduct a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack in Iran. It also tells us how useless such a strike might be.

On Aug. 12, 2007, four F-16CJ fighters took off on an 11-hour mission from Iraq to Eastern Afghanistan, crossing the airspace of six different nations, before dropping more than a dozen precision-guided bombs on Taliban targets. The crews of the record-breaking flight received the coveted Clarence MacKay Trophy for 2007, an award given annually for “the most meritorious flight” of the year.

The secret mission had never before been attempted, according to the Air Force, and the pilots were allotted a two-minute window of attack at the end of their 2,100-mile flight. The entire non-stop mission, which took 13 aerial refuelings, was the equivalent of flying from New York to Los Angeles and back.

The mission was a success, according to the Air Force: It resulted in “direct hits” that allowed coalition ground forces to “conduct raids on Taliban positions.”

However, a check of the news out of Afghanistan for the week of Aug. 12 reveals no real air strike of significance. On Aug. 12, the wire services reported fighting near the Pakistani border and the death of three U.S. soldiers and their Afghan interpreter from a roadside bomb. Further fighting was reported on Aug. 13 and Aug. 14, but no significant bombing missions in support of U.S. or Afghan forces. On Aug. 15, the Afghan government announced a large scale three-day operation in the area of Tora Bora, an operation launched in response to the killing of three U.S. soldiers by IED earlier that week. Officials said nearly 50 suspected Pakistani and Taliban militants were killed in air and ground operations. Coalition aircraft carried out two sorties to target the Taliban positions in that area, an Afghan official said.

I don’t doubt that the F-16CJ night mission was complicated and historic, as well as physically and mentally demanding. The crews, according to the Air Force, worked with new operating instructions and went into the unknown. The squadron commander had only 18 hours to plan and prepare for the attack. The mission was so secret, furthermore, it was not listed on the daily Air Tasking Order, the daily schedule distributed throughout the U.S. military, further complicating aerial refuelings and overflights.

If on Aug. 12, 2007, the United States had killed Osama bin Laden or scored some major victory in Afghanistan, one might fully appreciate the mission and the award of the MacKay Trophy. But I suspect that what was important here is that the mission went like clockwork, not that something important in Afghanistan was destroyed.

None of this is to besmirch the effort or the achievement. But if this was really a rehearsal to attack Iran, it was a mission where getting the airplanes over the target was more consequential than what was actually bombed.

Link

War With Iran Might Be Closer Than You Think

There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action. The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation. The White House contacted the Iranian government directly yesterday through a channel provided by the leadership of the Kurdish region in Iraq, which has traditionally had close ties to Tehran. The US demanded that Iran admit that it has been interfering in Iraq and also commit itself to taking steps to end the support of various militant groups. There was also a warning about interfering in Lebanon. The Iranian government reportedly responded quickly, restating its position that it would not discuss the matter until the US ceases its own meddling employing Iranian dissident groups. The perceived Iranian intransigence coupled with the Lebanese situation convinced the White House that some sort of unambiguous signal has to be sent to the Iranian leadership, presumably in the form of cruise missiles. It is to be presumed that the attack will be as “pinpoint” and limited as possible, intended to target only al-Qods and avoid civilian casualties. The decision to proceed with plans for an attack is not final. The President will still have to give the order to launch after all preparations are made.

Link

Sudan rebels say they entered Khartoum By Opheera McDoom

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - A Darfur rebel commander said on Saturday his JEM group had entered Khartoum and was aiming to take power in Sudan.

However, a security source denied that rebels had entered the city, telling Reuters that the situation was under control.

Khartoum was placed under an overnight curfew after fighting in the west of the capital.

Heavy gunfire was heard and helicopters and army vehicles headed towards the suburb of Omdurman, witnesses said. Artillery was heard later, becoming more frequent as the evening wore on.

The Darfur Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels said they had taken control of Omdurman which lies on the opposite bank of the River Nile from Khartoum.

“We are now trying to control Khartoum. God willing we will take power, it’s just a matter of time,” senior JEM commander Abdel Aziz el-Nur Ashr told Reuters by telephone.

“We have support from inside Khartoum even from within the armed forces.” It would be the first time a rebel group has entered Khartoum.

The security source told Reuters several JEM vehicles had been cornered in Omdurman, saying: “It’s under control.”

Darfur rebels fought battles with Sudan’s army in the North Kordofan province bordering Khartoum on Friday and Saturday, according to a local government official and witnesses.

The army said the curfew was to preserve the safety of the civilians and the situation was under control.

“We are announcing a curfew in the state of Khartoum from 5 p.m. (1400 GMT) until 6 a.m. starting from today May 10th, 2008,” an army spokesman said on state television.

Army helicopters flew overheard and roads were closed in Khartoum as the curfew began to take effect.

Khartoum airport was taken over by Sudan’s army. One witness said he saw three Egyptian fighter planes and one Egyptian army cargo plane landing at the airport. The witness said he could see the Egyptian flag on the side of the planes.

“IT’S ALL GREEN”

The shooting in Omdurman could be heard on the telephone of one resident who telephoned Reuters on Saturday.

“It’s all green here because of the military uniforms. There is a lot of army on the streets, security men and military trucks,” another witness in the suburb said.

Diplomatic missions held emergency meetings early on Saturday. They have been on alert since early Friday.

Khartoum houses the bulk of Sudan’s population with an estimated 8 million people living in the state. Despite civil wars ravaging Sudan’s peripheries for decades, the capital has remained a haven of safety with armed clashes unheard of.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million made homeless in five years of fighting in Darfur after mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms accusing central government of neglect.

New weapons and a loose military alliance with SLA Unity has turned JEM into the most threat to the Khartoum government on the ground in recent months.

JEM is led by Khalil Ibrahim. Ibrahim is distrusted by some who they say has an Islamist agenda and has his eye on power in Khartoum rather than the rights of Darfuris.

Earlier, JEM said it was strengthening its forces in Kordofan but not attacking government troops to avoid causing civilian casualties.

A local government official said the heavily armed rebels had scattered after an army counter-attack.

The army accused Chad on Saturday of backing the rebels. State minister for information, Kamal Obeid, called the events strange and unacceptable. Clearly flustered, he told state television that JEM was “paying the bill for Chad.”

Link

Khartoum under curfew after clashes

JEM is one of the biggest armed groups fighting government forces in Darfur province File: EPA

Curfew has been declared in Khartoum after government forces clashed with fighters from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in an area north of the Sudanese capital.

“Army forces are currently facing attack by rebels loyal to Khalil Ibrahim JEM leader in the north of Omdurman the capital’s twin city,” the Sudanese army said in a statement read on state television on Saturday.

The JEM website said that its fighters had taken control of Wadi Saidna air force base, about 16km north of Khartoum, although this has not been verified.
Anti-government fighters waged battles with Sudan’s army in the North Kordofan province bordering Khartoum on Friday and Saturday, according to a local government official.

The JEM said it was strengthening its forces in Kordofan but not attacking government troops to avoid causing civilian casualties.

The JEM has attacked government forces in Kordofan in the past in hit-and-run raids.

‘Heavy artillery fire’

Witnesses said that heavy fighting had been taking place for at least two hours in Omdurman.

Sadiq Babo Nimr, a local resident, told the AFP news agency by telephone that residents were hiding inside their homes amid heavy artillery fire.

“It’s just outside my flat, I can hear bombardment from very heavy artillery,” he said.

“We’re just lying down, there are stray bullets whistling around the building, my wife and children are very scared.”

ht tp://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/51DF8D2C-009B-4262-BCC2-C59F07219ABB.htm

The Darfur Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) entered Khartoum… is this the same Darfur were a genocide was taking place according to the west ?

Russia, China Criticize Britain Over Remarks On Iran

The British ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, John Duncan, came in for some sharp criticism from Russia and China for distorting reports about the decisions of G5 plus Germany on Iran’s nuclear program.

Chinese and Russian permanent representative at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Geneva said Monday that the statements by the British envoy do not reflect the views of China and Russia.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the foreign ministers of the U.S., Britain, Russia, China, France, and Germany agreed on Friday to offer Iran a new package of incentives for Tehran to halt uranium enrichment process.

Miliband said the group “reviewed and updated” an offer made to Iran in June 2006. Duncan’s comments are in line with Britain’s stance on Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors’ meetings.

However, Duncan claimed that the G5+1 group declared that Iran’s nuclear program has created “serious problems” and that the message to Iran is that it should live up to its commitments.

“Iran should either respond positively to the proposed incentives or it will face more punishment by the Security Council,” Duncan added.

But the Russian and Chinese ambassadors begged to differ with Duncan’s remarks.

The reality of the G5+1 meeting in London was just the opposite of what John Duncan depicted it as, Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov said adding that the G5+1 in London agreed, “to use political and diplomatic solution to resolve Iran’s nuclear issue” and therefore it was decided to propose a new package of incentives to Iran.

Antonov said every delegation is entitled to its own views but when they are talking on behalf of others about a sensitive issue like Iran’s nuclear program they should not “distort the realities.”

The Russian envoy reminded Britain that it has not been given a mission by the G5+1 group to make such statements in this meeting.

The Chinese ambassador Wang Chen corroborated Antonov’ statements, saying, “The participants at London meeting welcomed diplomatic solutions, therefore the British representative’s remarks are not consistent with the realities of the London meeting.”

Chen also expressed the hope that negotiations to Iran’s nuclear issue will be resumed soon and a comprehensive solution will be arrived.

link

Breaking News: Iran rejects nuclear inspections unless Israel also submits to international safeguards

ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS
AP News

An Iranian envoy said Monday his government will not submit to extensive nuclear inspections while Israel stays outside the global treaty to curb the spread of atomic weapons.

“The existing double standard shall not be tolerated anymore by non-nuclear-weapon states,” Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told a meeting of the 190 countries that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Nuclear safeguards are far from universal, he said, adding that more than 30 countries are still without a comprehensive safeguard agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure full cooperation with that U.N. body.

“Israel, with huge nuclear weapons activities, has not concluded” such an agreement or submitted its facilities to the IAEA’s safeguards, Soltanieh said.

Israel, which does not discuss whether it has atomic weapons, did not sign the nonproliferation treaty, which requires all signatories except the major powers to refrain from obtaining nuclear arms. India and Pakistan, which have developed nuclear weapons, also are not signatories.

Iran did sign the treaty and is under U.N. Security Council sanctions meant to pressure the Tehran government into allowing inspections that will ensure it isn’t developing nuclear weapons. Iran insists its atomic program is peaceful, with the sole goal of using reactors to generate electricity.

A U.S. envoy accused Iran of “provocative and destabilizing activities” and said its leaders were responsible for leading the country into the sanctions imposed by the Security Council.

“The path of defiance is also the path of isolation, of continuing and additional sanctions and of further stunted economic opportunities for a proud and sophisticated people already suffering from economic turmoil and mismanagement by its regime’s leaders,” said Christopher A. Ford, U.S. special representative for nuclear nonproliferation.

Ford said Iran joined North Korea and Syria in weakening the nonproliferation treaty.

“This treaty regime faces today the most serious tests it has ever faced: the ongoing nuclear weapons proliferation challenges presented by Iran, by North Korea and now by Syria,” Ford said.

Ford cited U.S. intelligence that North Korea was helping Syria in “secretly constructing a nuclear reactor that we believe was not intended for peaceful purposes.” Syria denied last week that it was working on an undeclared reactor, which purportedly was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike last September.

Soltanieh said nuclear-armed powers like the United States, Britain and France are practicing “nuclear apartheid” by denying or restricting peaceful atomic technology to countries like Iran.

“Access of developing countries to peaceful nuclear materials and technologies has been continuously denied to the extent that they have had no choice than to acquire their requirements for peaceful uses of nuclear energy, including for medical and industrial applications, from open markets,” Soltanieh said.

This usually means the material is more expensive, poorer quality and less safe, he said.

Source: AP News
 

US, Iraq soldiers clash in Baghdad

May 05 2008

Baghdad - At least ten people were killed in overnight fighting between American forces and Shi’a militiamen in Baghdad, six of them in Sadr City, the US military said on Monday.

An Iraqi medic from Sadr City, the stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said that another 40 people, including women and children, were wounded in the clashes in the district.

A girls’ school which has been shut for more than a month because of the fighting was also damaged in overnight violence, they said.

The US military said six Shi’a militiamen were killed in Sadr City and four in Mansur, a mainly Sunni district of west Baghdad.

At around 10.00pm on Sunday, three militiamen were killed by a Hellfire missile as they prepared to launch a rocket, military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover said.

Twenty minutes later a US helicopter killed another militiaman who was planting a roadside bomb in Sadr City.

At around 1.00am on Monday, two more militiamen were killed after a roadside bomb struck a US military vehicle in the district, Stover said.

The four militiamen killed in Mansur died in a Hellfire missile strike at around 11.30pm on Sunday after they attacked US troops with small-arms fire.

Two Iraqi civilians were also wounded in the strike, Stover said.

Iraqi and American forces and Shi’a militiamen, mostly from Sadr’s Mahdi Army, have been battling each other since the government launched a crackdown on Shi’a militias on March 25.

Hundreds of people have been killed in the violence, which began in the southern port city of Basra and quickly spread to other Shi’a areas of the country - particularly Sadr City where the death toll has been the highest. - Sapa-AFP

Link

Food crisis leaves many Afghans desperate

Afghans pay for leftovers as global crisis sends bread price skyrocketing

MATTHEW PENNINGTON

Hungry Afghans looking for their next meal eye bread scraps piled up like heaps of trash at a Kabul market as a vendor weighs out fistfuls of the stale crusts on a scale. A Pashtun woman waits with an empty plastic sack.

She isn’t scavenging — she’s paying for leftovers that in better times were sold for feeding to sheep and cows. The woman said her household of 14 people had to give up fresh bread a month ago as the price spiraled out of reach.

Rising global food prices have hit few places as hard as Afghanistan, where the cost of wheat flour has shot up 75 percent in three months, fueling anger against the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai. In the volatile south, officials fear it could boost recruitment for the Taliban insurgency.

“Karzai is the king and this is my life,” wailed the Pashtun woman, who declined to give her name because of her conservative social code. “Since the Americans came here, nothing is cheap.”

The U.N. World Food Program, or WFP, warns that the situation for the poorest in Afghanistan is dire and deaths from malnutrition are likely to increase. Protests have broken out in at least one city.

Even middle-income professionals are struggling.

“People are not dying of starvation, per se, but that’s very rare these days. Usually people die from diseases they never should have died from but their bodies are weakened by hunger,” he said.

Even before the food crisis, U.N. data showed 54 percent of children under five in Afghanistan are stunted. An estimated 10,400 people die of nutritional deficiencies each year.

In two of the poorest provinces, Ghor and Badghis, communities are buckling under the double impact of the global food crisis and a drought that wiped out 70 percent of last year’s crop, said Mary Kate MacIsaac of the aid group World Vision.

“If they did have assets, they have been forced to sell them off,” she said. “People are desperate and living in greater fear of what’s to come if this year’s crop fails.”

Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but Commerce Minister Amin Farhang estimated that in 2007 Afghanistan produced 1.3 million tons less grain than the 6.6 million tons it requires each year.

Deputy Agriculture Minister Pir Mohammad Azizi said initial signs show the 2008 harvest will be worse because of insufficient rains in the early spring.

Because of its reliance on aid and imports to help fill its food deficit, Afghanistan is particularly vulnerable to rising international prices driven by growing demand from China and India and the use of grain to make bio-fuel.

The main source of Afghan food imports, Pakistan, is suffering its own wheat shortages and has imposed stiff controls on exports to Afghanistan, forcing prices higher.

Traders at Mandawi market, the main center for flour sellers in Kabul, blame ruthless businessmen for capitalizing on the shortages. They look back with some nostalgia on the Soviet-backed communist regime of the 1980s.

“In the past we had shortages but there were silos. The government had several months supply to cope with a food crisis. Now the government can’t even cope for a day,” said flour seller Sayed Hassan Agha, 64. “We are at the mercy of businessmen.”

With elections due next year and its popularity at rock bottom, the food crisis has political and security repercussions for Karzai’s government.

“There are lots of young men who are jobless, they have no income in their families and this economic situation makes them join the Taliban,” said Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi, chief of Zhari district, near the main southern city of Kandahar.

For the first time since the fall of the Islamist regime six years ago, the WFP has begun food distributions in Afghan cities, rather than just to rural areas.

That, and a government plan to use $50 million to buy flour for government employees and the poor, has helped reduce the price of a 110-pound sack of flour imported from Pakistan from $50 to $40 this week, Kabul traders say. Farhang predicted that after the May harvest prices would drop further.

But even if those hopes are realized, the economic realities in post-Taliban Afghanistan will remain harsh, a source of growing bitterness across the social spectrum.

Teachers have been staging strikes at the top high state schools in Kabul, demanding a hike in their $50 monthly salary, while desperate villagers migrate to the city seeking elusive work as laborers that pays $3 a day.

“Look at all these people here,” said Fateh Mohammed, 35, gesturing to a crowd of jobless, hollow-cheeked men in grimy prayer caps, outside a Kabul bakery. “They are here because their children are hungry.”

__

Link

US Navy research lab under microscope in Indonesia

JAKARTA (AFP) — The future of a major US Navy research laboratory in Indonesia is in doubt amid allegations, dismissed as “crazy” by US diplomats, of espionage and secret experiments.

Negotiations between Washington and Jakarta over the renewal of the operating contract of US Naval Medical Research Unit-2, or Namru-2, have stalled over a range of issues including diplomatic immunity for its US staff.

Established in Indonesia in 1970 and charged with researching infectious diseases of military importance, the facility employs 19 Americans and more than 100 Indonesians and is based in Indonesian health ministry grounds.

Its operations have attracted suspicion from a number of quarters in the world’s largest Muslim country, from anti-US religious hardliners to outspoken Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari and Defence Minister Juwono Sudarsono.

“We’ll conduct some checks on their presence in Indonesia,” Vice President Jusuf Kalla said after Friday prayers last week.

Supari, whose ministry has worked with the US laboratory on projects including malaria research and bird flu early warning systems, has thrown fuel on to the diplomatic fire.

“Until today there have been no significantly useful results for the people (from Namru-2’s research),” she said last month.

“Problems with contagious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever are still relatively the same… My people ask me why is there a health laboratory working together with a foreign military?”

Some parliamentarians have demanded the laboratory’s operating contract, which expired in 2005, be torn up and its facilities taken over by Jakarta.

Parliamentary foreign affairs commissioner Mutamimul Ula called Thursday for an “investigation into allegations that Namru-2 staffers were involved in intelligence operations.”

“There is this flavour of intelligence activities… This can’t be avoided in the eyes of the public. It is part of the defence organism of a foreign country,” Ula said.

The controversy and the delays in the renewal of the contract appear to be causing a degree of angst among US officials in the departments of health and state, reflecting the importance Washington attaches to the facility.

Namru-2 has been a major point of US-Indonesian cooperation over the years, including times when relations over other issues were strained. US President George W. Bush mentioned the facility in a joint statement with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono when he visited Jakarta in 2006.

Apparently stung by the latest whirlwind of allegations, some of which stretch back several years, the US embassy has issued a statement entitled “The Truth About Namru-2.”

“There’s been rumours over the last 10 years that we had to respond to,” US embassy deputy chief of mission John A. Heffern told AFP.

“It’s just crazy,” he said of the allegations of spying and secret experiments, adding that Namru-2 was “totally unclassified, totally transparent.”

“If the Indonesian ministry of health wants the raw data, it’s totally open to them,” he said.

“Hopefully we will resume our negotiations. This doesn’t help.”

Sticking points in the negotiations have included the US’s insistence that all American staff at the laboratory be given diplomatic immunity.

Complicating matters is a separate dispute between Washington and Jakarta over bird flu samples.

Jakarta is insisting on “the recognition of sovereign rights of states over their biological resources,” and fears the flu samples will be used by foreign companies to make vaccines, which will be too expensive for Indonesians.

US officials have slammed the position, with US Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recently stressing the importance of international cooperation to tackle the bird flu threat.

“The United States has very important relationships here in Indonesia, that involve joint work in laboratories in various levels of research, and we have pledged to continue that,” Leavitt said after meeting Yudhoyono last month.

Indonesia has the highest number of human bird flu victims, with 108 people known to have died in the sprawling archipelago from the disease.

The World Health Organisation, which has designated Namru-2 as a Collaborating Centre on disease research, has warned that Indonesia is putting its own population in danger by failing to share its samples.

Israel, aligned with US for Iran war

Israel has tacitly aligned itself with Washington, raising the specter of a war on Iran even if it has to go ‘alone with the problem’.

In a Friday interview with the Yediot Aharonot, senior Israeli minister Ehud Barak made his newest accusations against Iran, claiming that Tehran is attempting to develop a nuclear bomb in two years.

“It’s possible that it may take another two years, maybe four …it’s all the same if international pressure and other possibilities don’t stop the process,” claimed the official.

Barak then threatened Iran, suggesting that Israel is fully prepared to launch a military attack on Tehran but refrained to elaborate on the subject.

“Israel is the strongest country in the entire region, even at a range of 1,500 kilometers,” Barak continued. Israel is ‘prepared to be alone with the problem’.

His comments follow a burst of media speculation that the Tuesday entry of a second US aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, in what the Pentagon had termed a ‘reminder’ of US power, was a tacit declaration of war on Iran.

Israel has been preparing for war for several months now. It recently launched a five-day preparation operation to ‘test emergency response’ against what it calls ‘raining missiles’ from countries like Iran and Syria.

This is while the Islamic Republic has never waged war on any other country and comments used by Israeli officials to demonize Tehran have been clearly manipulated to their benefit and according to Iran have been ‘taken out of context’.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=54039§ionid=351020101

Critic accuses Hollywood of vilifying Arabs

BEIRUT (Reuters) - American films and TV dramas shot since the September 11 attacks have reinforced screen images of Arabs and Muslims as fanatics and villains, ingraining harmful stereotypes, argues an author on the subject.

In his book “Guilty — Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11″, Jack Shaheen praises some post-September 11 films for offering a more sympathetic image of Arabs and Muslims, who he argues have been castigated for decades by Hollywood.

But he says that too many have portrayed them in ever darker shades, criticizing films including “The Kingdom” (2007) and “The Four Feathers” (2002) and condemning the creation of a new “Arab-American bogeyman” in TV dramas such as “24″.

“In the United States, you can say anything you want about Islam and Arabs and get away with it. In other words, as someone said, ‘You can hit an Arab free’,” said Shaheen — also author of “Reel Bad Arabs — How Hollywood Vilifies a People”.

Shaheen, an American of Lebanese descent, has examined the treatment of Arabs and Muslims in some 1,000 films, including more than 100 shot since September 11.

From action movies such as “True Lies” (1994) to comedies including “Father of the Bride Part II” (1995) and Disney’s animated “Aladdin” (1992), Shaheen identifies films that have perpetuated damaging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims.

“The images have remained primarily fixed and have only been changed in the sense that they have become more vindictive and damaging,” he told Reuters in an interview in Beirut.

“What enables these images to persist and prevail? One of the primary reasons is silence,” said Shaheen, a retired professor of mass communications who worked as a consultant on “Syriana” (2005) and “Three Kings” (1999).

“There’s nobody in authority, no political leader, no Hollywood personality who has taken a stand and said that demonizing Arabs and Muslims is the same as demonizing Jews or blacks or Asians or any other racial or ethnic group.”

“SELECTIVE FRAMING OF RADICALS”

In “Guilty”, Shaheen credits films including “Babel” (2006) and “Rendition” (2007) for “more complex, even-handed Arab portraits”. But “very few people are listening”, he said.

“It’s been very difficult, it’s like being a salmon trying to swim upstream.

“What is done is selective framing of radicals: people saying ‘death to America’. You cannot deny the reality — there are people who really want to kill Americans. But those are basically the only images we see.”

He describes last year’s “The Kingdom” — an action movie about FBI agents hunting terrorists in Saudi Arabia — as one of the most damaging depictions of Arabs of recent times in which “even Arab children cannot be trusted”.

Shaheen also charts a new trend of turning American Arabs and Muslims into “the new bogey person” and criticizes the TV drama “24″ for its “vicious images of loathsome Muslim Americans as well as Americans with Arab roots”.

Hollywood’s depiction of Arabs has eased the path for U.S. administration policy, he argues. Decades of portraying Arabs and Muslims as the enemy “made it that much easier for us to go into Iraq”, he said. “There were very few people protesting.

“The images help enforce policy,” he said. “As the policy becomes more even-handed, perhaps films will reflect that.

“Plato said: ‘Those who tell the stories rule society’. Nothing has changed, and the story tellers of today have a tremendous impact on the world as we perceive it.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSL0132230620080501?sp=true

America’s Germ Warfare Capabilities developed

 in secret in US Corporate Labs

Sherwood Ross

The costliest, most grandiose research scheme ever attempted having germ warfare capability is going forward under President Bush and in apparent defiance of international treaties such as the Geneva Convention of 1925 that bans biological agents.

And this program, involving some of the world’s deadliest and most loathsome pathogens, many of which could trigger plagues and epidemics, is being conducted largely in secret without adequate oversight and in flagrant contempt of NIH’s own rules.

113 UNIVERSITIES, VA HOSPITALS, PHARMACEUTICAL HOUSES CHARGED WITH REFUSING TO REVEAL BIOTECH RESEARCH OPS AS REQUIRED BY LAW

Some 113 university, government, hospital and corporate laboratories engaged in research often with potential to be used for germ warfare have refused to disclose their operations to the public as required by Federal rules, a nonprofit watchdog agency has charged.

Instead of shutting their operations down, however, the National Institutes of Health(NIH), of Bethesda, Md., the government agency tasked with oversight of these laboratories, allows them to continue to operate, a peculiar stance for an entity that describes itself as “the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation.”

From California to New Jersey and from Boston to San Antonio, often in the heart of major centers of population, biological warfare labs lavishly financed with their share of about $20-billion by the Bush administration since 2001 are literally crawling with deadly germs from Spanish flu to plague to anthrax to tularemia to rift valley fever. Reportedly, in some of the laboratories security is lax and safety procedures inadequate to protect the public from exposure to deadly pathogens.

Under U.S. law, recipients of Federal funds for biotech research must comply with guidelines issued by the NIH. These include making available to the public the minutes of the labs’ Institutional Biosafety Committees(IBC)meetings, describing their operations and plans. In a number of instances, these IBC’s have never bothered to hold a meeting. In other cases, the minutes they furnish are devoid of substance.

Basically, their operations in many cases are being kept secret, according to watchdog Sunshine Project of Austin, Tex., a nonprofit that attempts to protect the public from the risks of biotechnology experiments. The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention(BWC), which the US signed, prohibits research on offensive biological weapons. If the work is performed in secret, however, weapons designed for offensive use could be concealed. In the 1930s, the Japanese military masked its secret germ warfare scheme as a water purification project.

As the government-funded labs engage in “dual-use research,” (pathogen research having both offensive and defensive applications), Sunshine’s Edward Hammond reports he “has encountered grave problems with the system.” These include “risky experiments approved with dubious safety precautions and/or inadequate IBC review, dysfunctional and otherwise noncompliant committees, and other types of biosafety problems.”

Francis Boyle, an international legal expert at the University of Illinois, Champaign , puts it more bluntly. He called the in-house university committees “a joke and a fraud” that provide “no protection to anyone.” Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by Congress, states the Pentagon “is now gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare” pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted “without public knowledge and review” in 2002.

Last November 7th, Hammond lodged a complaint with Dr. Amy Patterson, director of the Office of Biotechnology Activities at NIH, citing 113 institutions “for non-compliance with the NIH Guidelines,” specifically for refusing to honor requests for IBC meeting minutes.

“Honoring these requests is not only mandatory under the NIH Guidelines that you are charged with enforcing (but) transparency is also a moral duty of institutions that conduct research, such as rDNA and select agent work that could endanger the public,” Hammond added. He wrote Patterson, “Failing prompt compliance by these institutions we note that your office must do its duty under NIH Guidelines and terminate funding.”

NIH’s Dr. Patterson apparently had troubles of her own obtaining information from labs on the Federal payroll. On Dec. 6, 2004, she issued a “reminder” to universities engaged in research that stated “compliance with the NIH Guidelines is critical to the safe conduct of research and to the fulfillment of an institutional commitment to the protection of staff, the environment, and public health.”

Since 9/11, biotech houses, military laboratories, and State and private universities across America, and others sited in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, have collectively lapped up record sums in Federal R&D dollars.

How big is this enterprise? At just one venue, the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research(SFBR) in San Antonio, Tex., there are 6,000 caged chimpanzees, baboons, and other primates, Sunshine reports, whose upkeep alone costs U.S. taxpayers $6-million annually. SFBR genetically engineers monkeys and harbors some of the world’s most dangerous viruses such as Ebola and Lassa, authorities state.

Again, the Battelle National Biodefense Institute(BNBI) of Columbus, Ohio, has just received a $250-million, five-year award from the Department of Homeland Security to run the new biodefense analysis center under construction at Fort Detrick, Md., according to The Washington Post of December 25, 2006. Earlier, on July 30th of last year, The Post reported much of what transpires at the center may never be publicly known as the Bush administration “intends to operate the facility largely in secret.” Battelle also does not maintain an effective IBC, Sunshine charges.

“Some of the resarch falls within what many arms-control experts say is a legal gray zone, skirting the edges of an international treaty outlawing the production of even small amounts of biological weapons,” The Post reported. “The administration dismisses these concerns, however, insisting that the work…is purely defensive and thus fully legal. It has rejected calls for oversight by independent observers outside the (Homeland Security) Department’s network of government scientists and contractors.”

The paper quoted Milton Leitenberg, a weapons expert at the University of Maryland stating, “If we saw others doing this kind of research, we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty. You can’t go around the world yelling about Iranian and North Korean programs —about which we know very little —when we’ve got all this going on.”

The Post reported the operation would encompass about 160,000 gross square feet of working area and accommodate a staff of about 120. The Post noted, “Fort Detrick’s history as the incubator of germ warfare research casts a long shadow over the new lab. When the fort held the Pentagon’s very highly classified and long abandoned biological warfare program, it was a magnet for antiwar protests in the Vietnam War era.” In such labs, scientists can create new strains of disease for which those attacked would have no ready defense. Such weapons, once loosed, are notoriously difficult to control, and could ignite epidemics to sicken and terrify civilian populations.

Hammond believes there are about 400 bioweapons agents labs across the U.S., some of which encounter unexpected difficulty when they try to comply with the law. David Perlin, president of the Public Health Research Institute(PHRI) of Newark, N.J., told Sunshine the FBI requested PHRI to enter into an agreement with them to “not publicly disclose which specific select agent pathogens and/or strains are stored at our facility.”

Those who tend to dismiss NIH’s laxity about enforcing its own regulations have only to recall the October, 2001, anthrax attacks on Congress and the media. The deadly strain released is believed to have come from a U.S. germ warfare lab at Fort Detrick although there is no certainty as the FBI has never solved the murders. Since then, the vast proliferation of such labs by the Bush administration has educated many new employees — in some cases undergraduate students — in germ warfare ops. Four employees at Fort Detrick are known to have died after performing lab work.

Lack of transparencey is cause for concern if only because of the history of secret CIA and Pentagon experiments in germ warfare that used the American people as guinea pigs. In “ Rogue State,” (Common Courage Press) reporter William Blum noted those agencies over two decades “conducted tests in the open air in the United States, exposing millions of Americans to large clouds of possibly dangerous bacteria and chemical particles.”

Between 1949 and 1969, the Army tested the spread of dangerous chemical and bacterial organisms over 239 U.S. populated areas including San Francisco , New York and Chicago with no warnings to the public or regard for the health consequences, Blum wrote. The Pentagon even sprayed navy warships to test the impact of germ warfare on U.S. sailors.

Even deadlier cocktails were secretly provided to dictator Saddam Hussein for his war of aggression against Iran. Washington denied supplying them but as Robert Fisk reported in Great Britain’s “The Independent” last December 31st, “prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq,” including anthrax. Fisk gives this eye-witness account of what he saw on a military hospital train carrying stricken men from the front back to Tehran:

“I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their lungs — the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the windows— and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja.”

Thus, the Reagan administration, which escalated germ warfare research and allowed the sale of the pathogens to Hussein, took its place in the dark annals of military history along with Italy under Benito Mussolini, whose aviators dumped mustard gas on the Ethiopians and Japan under Emperor Hirohito, whose Imperial Army’s germ warfare attacks killed thousands of Chinese civilians.

Because of their comparative cheapness to manufacture, biological weapons have been dubbed “the poor man’s nuclear bomb.” Yet their potential may be even deadlier. Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Biotech Century”(Penguin), noted a government study in 1993 found “the release of just 200 pounds of anthrax spores from a plane over Washington DC could kill as many as three-million people.”

The secret operations of the labs’ would be less ominous if the Bush administration hadn’t led the fight to demolish the international inspection system. Jackie Cabasso, executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, Oakland, Calif., warned, “Last year (2001), the U.S. single-handedly blew apart an international system for inspections of these kinds of (biological) laboratories, a system that would have made great strides toward ensuring that biodefense labs aren’t abused for offensive purposes. Having thumbed our nose at the world, the US is now massively expanding its biodefense program, mostly in secretive facilities.”

According to Boyle, President Bush “sabotaged the Verification Protocol for the BWC” as it was on the verge of conclusion and success. He said the U.S. “fully intended to get back into the research, development and testing of illegal and criminal offensive biowarfare programs.”

Boyle is the author of “Biowarfare and Terrorism,” Clarity Press. And Elisa Harris, former arms control official under President Clinton, told The New York Times in 2003 “It (the administration’s actions) will raise concerns in other capitals in part because the United States has fought tooth and nail to prevent the international community from strengthening the germ treaty.”

Among pharmaceutical houses not in compliance with NIH disclosure requirements are Abbott Laboratories of Abbott Park and Worchester, Agencourt Bioscience Corp.; Antibody Science, Inc.; BASF Plant Science, Bristol-Myers Squibb and its Pharmaceutical Research Institute of Connecticut; Centocor, Inc.; Chiron; Discovery Genomics Inc.; DuPont Central Research and Development; Embrex, Inc.; Genentech, Inc., Genzyme Corp. of Cambridge and Framingham, Mass.; GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Inc. and its Rahway, N.J., research site; Integral Molecular; Introgen Therapeutics; L2 Diagnostics LLC; Merck & Co. Inc., West Point; Merck Research Laboratories, Rahway, N.J.; Meridian Bioscience Inc.; Monsanto Co. Mystic, Conn., research; New Link Genetics; NovaFlora, Inc.; NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals; OSI Pharmaceuticals; Pfizer Inc., and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals of St. Louis, Roche Bioscience, Schering-Plough Research Institute; SelectX Pharmaceuticals; Serono Research Institution; Third Wave Technologies; and Vaxin, Inc. Federal entities involved include the Center for Disease Control, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, VA hospitals in Stratton, Va.; the Jerry Pettis Memorial hospital and the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. Also, the Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Plum Island Animal Disease Center of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Navy Medical Research Center.

Other fund recipients include AERAS Global TB Vaccine Foundation, Battelle, CBR Institute for Biomedical Research, Inc.; Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Children’s National Medical Center, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Columbus Children’s Research Institute, Hadassah Medical Organization, Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration, and Scripps Clinic.

Among universities in non-compliance: Alabama A&M, Albany Medical College, Ball State, Brigham Young, Bucknell, Central Michigan, Drexel College of Medicine, Hackensack University Medical Center, Hunter College, Indiana State University, Purdue University, Loma Linda, Missouri State, New York Medical College, and Queens College of City University of New York.

Also, Rider, Rockefeller University, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, South Dakota State University, St. John’s University, State University of New York at Binghamton, Brockport, and Buffalo; Towson, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School(UMDNJ), and University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. Also, the universities of Arizona, California at San Francisco, Maryland, Massachusetts, Miami, Fla.; Mississippi; Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Southern Mississippi, Texas at Arlington and San Antonio, Tulsa, Utah State, Wake Forest, Washington University in St. Louis, Western Kentucky and Wilkes.

Foreign institutions include the University of Sydney, Australia; the University of British Columbia , and University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa . This listing covers most, but not all, of the names submitted to NIH by the Sunshine Project. Three years ago, Sunshine said if it had to pick the labs with the worst biosafety record-keeping, he would choose Princeton University, the University of Texas Southwestern at Dallas; the University of Vermont at Burlington and the University of Delaware at Newark.

Sunshine’s Hammond said there has yet to be any formal response to his letter of last November from NIH. He added, “I doubt I will ever get one.” The NIH was asked to respond to the charges contained in this article but has yet not done so.

In sum, the costliest, most grandiose research scheme ever attempted having germ warfare capability is going forward today under President Bush and in apparent defiance of international treaties such as the Geneva Convention of 1925 that bans biological agents. What’s more, where once the use of germ warfare was an isolated happenstance — such as when an English general in 1767 gave smallpox-laced blankets to the Indians that decimated their tribes — research in this grim area today suggests it has been elevated to an instrument of national policy. And this program, involving some of the world’s deadliest and most loathsome pathogens, many of which could trigger plagues and epidemics, is being conducted largely in secret without adequate oversight and in flagrant contempt of NIH’s own rules. Why?

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/01/359455.html?c=on#c163983

High-Level Officials Warn of Fake Terror

A variety of current and former high-level officials have recently warned that the Bush administration is attempting to instill a dictatorship in America, and will itself carry out a fake terrorist attack in order to obtain one.

FBI agents, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and The Washington Post and Rolling Stone have all stated that the administration has issued terror alerts based on scant intelligence in order to rally people around the flag when the administration was suffering in the polls. This implies — as an initial matter only — that the administration will play fast and loose with the facts in order to instill fear for political purposes

More to the point, a former prominent republican congressman stated that the U.S. is close to becoming a totalitarian society and that the Bush administration is using fear to try to ensure that this happens.

General Tommy Franks stated that if another terrorist attack occurs in the United States “the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government”.

Current U.S. Congressman Ron Paul stated, the government “is determined to have martial law”, and that the government is hoping to get the people “fearful enough that they will accept the man on the white horse”

And Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said “if there is another terror attack, “I believe the president will get what he wants”, which will include a dictatorship.

Terror on U.S. Citizens by American Government?

But would the government actually kills its own people to instill sufficient fear so that it can get what it wants? Read what the following very smart people are saying, and then judge for yourself:

A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents, stated that if there was another major attack in the U.S., it would lead to martial law. He went on to say:

“We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want.”

The former CIA analyst would not put it past the government to “play fast and loose” with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag

The former assistant secretary of treasury in the Reagan administration, called the “Father of Reaganomics”, who is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and, said:

“Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging “terrorist” attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?” He goes on to say:

If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the “unitary executive” at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush’s declaration of “national emergency” and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.

A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives’ Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel’s complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.

Think about it. If another 9/11-type “security failure” were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has “a gut feeling” that America will soon be hit hard?

A member of the British Parliament stated that “there is a very real danger” that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically

A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation.

President Carter recently impliedly acknowledged the risk of staged provocation in order to start a war against Iran.

Former Senator Gary Hart warned Americans that the White House might create a “Gulf of Tonkin” or “remember the Maine” type incident to justify war against Iran (starting at 7:15 minutes)

The former UN Weapons Inspector, an American, who stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government.

And an allegedly-leaked GOP memo touts a new terror attack as a way to reverse the party’s decline.

No way, That’s Nuts

Sounds nuts, right?

Sorry to have to tell you, but “false flag terror” — that is, state-sponsored terrorism, blamed on the “bad guys” of choice — is an age-old trick which has been used by governments around the world for thousands of years to consolidate power and create support from their people. See this article on the Reichstag fire, and this article on the perennial ploy of those grabbing power.

But even recent events provide a glimpse into the world of false flag terror:

The well-respected former Indonesian president believes that the government may have had a role in the Bali bombings (see also this video).

And Americans dressed as Arabs have apparently been setting off car bombs in Iraq (apparently, when it was discovered that some of the cars used in Iraqi bombings recently came from the U.S., the cover story became American cars were involved in car bombings only because they had recently been stolen from the U.S. and then shipped to Iraq — but does it make sense that Iraqi insurgents would steal cars in the U.S. and ship them all the way to Iraq?)

Similarly, Britain’s false flag attacks in Iraq made the news. And the press has acknowledged that the death of the lead investigator into the Basra incident was mysterious.

And the former director of the National Security Agency said “By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation”(the audio is here)

History proves that the officials’ warnings of a terror attack by our own government are well-founded.

Link

Have Mossad death squads been activated in the USA?

List of Suicides by whistle blowers or those that knew things

Numerous cases of females in Iraq are not included.

1 DC Madame….: had clients with the Pentagon and Govt
I heard her with my own ears tell Alex Jones
that if she is ever found dead, it wasn’t suicide and that she would never do that:

LISTEN to Deborah Palfrey, the so-called D.C. Madam,
who tells Alex Jones she would never commit suicide!

Link to download the mp3 here, look for “Click Here To Download”

http://myfreefilehosting.com/f/31b808f62a_0.87MB

Debra Jean Palfrey was murdered.

2 Lt. Col. Marshall A. Gutierrez Iraqi/Kuwait procurement officer: http://iraq.pigstye.net/article.php/GutierrezMarshallA

3 Abdulrahman,US citizen, contractor whistle-blower: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071108005625&newsLang=en

4 Charles D. Riechers - Air Force- Ret. d: 10/07 suicide Boeing Tanker Deal: Still no autopsy report:
http://www.af.mil/bios/bio.asp?bioID=9396

5 Col. Theodore S. Westhusing
General Dave Petraeus: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/77313 /

6 Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil (re Westhusing letter to Maj. Gen. Fil on May 28, 2005),: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_S._Westhusing

7 Darleen Druyun , http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1004/100104g1.htm

8 Brandy Britton who worked for the DC madam : http://www.examiner.com/a-714063~Accused_D_CmadamBritton_worked_for_her.html

9 Clifford Baxter, Enron executive: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/25/enron.suicide/index.html

10. David Kelly, British Weapons Expert on WMDs : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly

11. James Hatfield, wrote book on George Bush and his crimes : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hatfield

12 Gary Webb, a prize-winning American investigative journalist, on Iran Contra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb

13 Margie Schoedinger (1965?-2003) was an American woman who filed a civil suit against former Texas governor and current U.S. President George W. Bush in 2002, alleging that Bush had sexually assaulted her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margie_Schoedinger

list compiled at:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=3232050

Condition of Riad Hamad’s Body Contrary to Suicide

http://www.infowars.com/?p=1651

U.S. Marines Invade Manhattan, New York!

“US, EU responsible for explosive food prices”

Global Research,
The Hindu

New York (PTI): The US and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by encouraging use of food crops to produce bio-fuels and thus contributing to an “explosive rise” in global food prices, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food has said.

Jean Ziegler held fuel policies pursued by the US and the EU to be main causes for the current worldwide food crisis.

Last year the US used a third of its corn crop to create bio-fuels, while the European Union is planning to have 10 per cent of its need supplied by bio-fuels, he said and called for a for a five-year moratorium on the production of bio-fuels.

Ziegler also said that speculation on international markets was behind 30 per cent increase in food prices. Besides, hedge funds are also making huge profits from raw materials markets and called for new financial regulations to prevent such speculation.

The Special Rapporteur, in a press conference, warned of worsening food riots and a “horrifying” increase in deaths by starvation.

Meanwhile, speaking in Rome, a nutritionist with the UN World Food Programme (WFP), said that “global price rises mean that food is literally being taken out of the mouths of hungry children whose parents can no longer afford to feed them.”

Andrew Thorne-Lyman said that even temporarily depriving children of the nutrients can leave permanent scars in terms of stunting their physical growth and intellectual potential.

Families in the developing world are “finding their buying power has been slashed by food price rises, meaning that they can buy less food or food which isn’t as nutritious,” he added.

Link