UFOS at close sight: The Solway Firth photograph, 1964

When I was a kid, I remember seeing this photo in a UFO book. It was since lost in the foggy recesses of my memory, but the June 2005 issue of Fortean Times has a short article about the photo and the circumstances surrounding it.

There's a resonance to this photo that I simply can't explain.

If it wasn't for that damn Holocaust...

(Washington Post story, registration required)

"You have to make a distinction between the science and the technological applications," says Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and director of the Human Biotechnology Governance Project. "It's probably true that in terms of the basic science, it's pretty hard to stop that. It's not one guy in a laboratory somewhere. But not everything that is scientifically possible will actually be technologically implemented and used on a large scale. In the case of human cloning, there's an abstract possibility that people will want to do that, but the number of people who are going to want to take the risk is going to be awfully small."

Taboos will play an important role, Fukuyama says. "We could really speed up the whole process of drug improvement if we did not have all the rules on human experimentation. If companies were allowed to use clinical trials in Third World countries, paying a lot of poor people to take risks that you wouldn't take in a developed country, we could speed up technology quickly. But because of the Holocaust-- "

Uh, yeah, Francis. That lousy Holocaust -- preventing exploitative human experimentation since WWII! Why can't we just forget that crap? Paging Dr. Mengele!

Newsweak and the the Toilet Paper Koran

What a sniveling bunch of gutless cowards.

Newsweek magazine is the latest media outlet to drop its pants for the Bush Cabal, bending over and spreading its cheeks for a hard, right wing ass fuck in the family tradition of pious spousal-rape proponent Dr. W. David Hager.

Scott McClellan, White house spokesninny, is now suggesting that the magazine "Work to help repair the damage that has been done," [by reporting on the Koran-as-toilet-paper incident] because "Our United States military goes out of its way to treat the holy Koran with great care and respect."

Yeah, and Jeff Gannon is a hard-hitting journalist.

Dan Rather was the most infamous victim of Rovian PSYOPS crucifixion -- after being slipped an irresistable (and bogus) document, most likely by a GOP operative, he ran with it and became the poster boy of Bush-bashing liberal journalists. Never mind that the allegations in the fake document remain undisputed, that Bush's service record was abysmal, and that the coddling he received from his superiors was highly suspect -- the clever ruse worked its magic on a dumbed down populace and a cowering press corps. Goodbye, Dan, we won't miss you -- those who refuse to stand and fight the lying bastards get no sympathy from me.

So... Newsweek was fed some information that its military sources are now conveniently unable (or unwilling) to authenticate. Big fucking deal. Even if this particular Koran/toilet incident cannot be authenticated by the magazine's unnamed Pentagon source, desecration of the Koran as a "softening-up" tactic has been asserted on scores of occasions. And it is certainly far less repulsive and humiliating than other documented abuses.

One record of the religious humiliation of prisoners in Afghanistan and Guantanamo has been on the record since early 2004, as documented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (link).

The behaviour of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it. It is clear to me that the conditions in our cells and our general treatment were designed by the officers in charge of the interrogation process to “soften us up”’.

And if that isn't enough, this USA Today article points out that 65 lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court contend that American soldiers have desecrated the Koran.

And who can forget this "creatively" abusive incident -- confirmed by the Pentagon's own inquiry:

The [Pentagon] inquiry uncovered numerous instances in which female interrogators, using dye, pretended to spread menstrual blood on Muslim men, the official said. Separately, in court papers and public statements, three detainees say that women smeared them with blood.

And further:

Church's report found that interrogators used sexual tactics and harassment to shock or offend Muslim prisoners, the senior Pentagon official said. The official said that the military would not condone "sexual activity" during interrogation, but that good interrogators "take initiative and are a little creative."

Even detainee lawyers doubted that interrogators would spread menstrual blood on prisoners when a recently released British detainee first made the allegation in early 2004. A month ago, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed it had verbally reprimanded one female interrogator who, in early 2003, had smeared red dye from a marker on a detainee's shirt and told him it was blood.

In a yet-to-be-published book, former Army translator Erik Saar said he had seen a female interrogator smear red dye on a Saudi man's face, telling him it was blood. Saar's account was first reported by the Associated Press last month. One lawyer, Marc Falkoff, said in an interview that when a Yemeni client told him a few weeks ago about an incident involving menstrual blood, "I almost didn't even write it down." He said: "It seemed crazy, like something out of a horror movie or a John Waters film. Now, it doesn't seem ludicrous at all.


No, it doesn't.

It's clear that the Newsweek brouhaha is simply another clever psychological operation aimed at scapegoating the media and framing the reports of abuse as "liberal propaganda." Newsweek slinks into the shadows, its tail between its knees, the Wingnut blogs spread talk of the hideous liberal treason, and the White House -- culpable in every incident of prisoner abuse -- demands that the magazine make amends for daring to print the real truth.

Brilliant work, Karl. Another masterful coup.

One by one, the mouthpieces of the Fourth Estate have been reduced to helpless whelps sucking on their master's rancid teats.

And that's a real desecration.

Franklin Cover-Up: Pedophile Conspiracy Update

Franklin coverup update.

Dr. Hager's Family Values

Anal rape as a wholesome Christian value?

9/11 blogger: Proper Release of Griffin in Madison

VIDEO

David Ray Griffin takes a critical look at the official 9/11 Commission Report. Professor Griffin argues that 'omissions and distortions' in the report amount to a cover-up by government officials and says that the available evidence suggests that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Professor Griffin covers topics he says have been inadequately answered by the commission. These include questions surrounding the attack on the Pentagon, the way in which the World Trade Center towers collapsed, and the behavior of President Bush and his Secret Service detail following notification that a second plane had hit the WTC. The talk was hosted by the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth (www.mujca.com) and took place at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Includes Q&A.

t r u t h o u t - FOCUS | EPA on Threshold of Human Testing

Poisoning kids for profit... with the tacit permission of the EPA.

There is one word for this kind of atrocity: Evil. Pure and simple. It doesn't get more clearcut than that.

--

EPA on Threshold of Brave New World Of Human Testing

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

Monday 09 May 2005

EPA Invites Industry to Mimic Practices of Discontinued CHEERS Study.

Washington, DC - In the wake of the recent cancellation of the CHEERS study in which parents were to be paid to expose their infant children to pesticides, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing a new policy that encourages the same type of human dosing studies by industry. Today EPA closes public comment on its "no safeguards" policy of accepting all human subject experiments submitted by industry, according to a filing today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Under its new policy, EPA would accept all human chemical dosing studies "unless there is clear evidence that the conduct of these studies was fundamentally unethical… or was significantly deficient relative to the ethical standards prevailing at the time the study was conducted." Since industry is not required to disclose the conditions under which experiments were conducted, it is not clear how EPA will ever learn of "fundamentally unethical" practices. Moreover, EPA is unwilling to define what ethical lapses would disqualify an industry submission from being used for regulatory purposes.

"The Bush Administration is setting the ethical bar so low that only the most sleazy cannot limbo under it," stated PEER Program Director Rebecca Roose. "The basic problem is this: the safeguards that apply to experiments involving development of drugs to help people are far more stringent than EPA's standards for experiments to determine how much commercial poisons harm people."

EPA's refusal to adopt basic safeguards requiring proof of informed consent, independent review or protections for children is part of a Bush Administration drive to liberalize rules on human testing of pesticides and other chemicals. Without actual human experimental data to justify higher chemical exposures for children, industry must abide by the 1996 amendments to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act setting ten-fold stricter exposure standards for children.

At the same time it is encouraging industry to expose human subjects, EPA itself is conducting similar experiments that serve to provide a template for industry. Last month to avoid a hold on his confirmation, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson reluctantly cancelled a controversial study financed jointly by EPA and industry called CHEERS (Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study) that would have paid Florida parents to apply pesticides and other chemicals in the rooms primarily occupied by their infant children. During his confirmation, Johnson disclosed that EPA is also conducting more than 250 other human experiments, several of which involve chemical testing on children, including

* Exposing children (ages 3 to 12) to a powerful agricultural insecticide (chlorpyrifos) to test absorption in their systems through "urinary biomarker measurements";

* Paying "young male volunteers" to inhale methanol vapors at levels described as "a worst case scenario"; and

* Having asthma sufferers inhale potentially harmful ultrafine carbon particles.

"The need for safeguards is particularly acute because EPA is giving industry an economic incentive to push the edge of the ethical envelope," Roose added. "It is distressing that a federal agency is using tax dollars to write a primer for commercial exploitation of human subjects."

Missing from the front page news

IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED."
Special to BuzzFlash
Thursday, May 5, 2005
By Greg Palast

Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it.

The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...."

For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me, "Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a "high crime or misdemeanor."

And if this ain't it, nothing is.

The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.

A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering. However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many lives.

Here's more. "Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Really? But Mr. Bush told us, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report on WMD intelligence before the war, dismissing claims that Bush fixed the facts with this snooty, condescending conclusion written directly to the President, "After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons."

We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick whitewash aimed to let Bush off the hook for his murderous mendacity.

Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections." Mission accomplished.

You should parse the entire memo -- posted on my website -- and see if you can make it through its three pages without losing your lunch.

Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on Monday.

It has effectively finished the last, sorry remnants of Tony Blair's political career. (While his Labor Party will most assuredly win the elections Thursday, Prime Minister Blair is expected, possibly within months, to be shoved overboard in favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a political execution which requires only a vote of the Labour party's members in Parliament.)

But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this hard evidence of Bush's fabrication of a casus belli as some "British" elections story. Apparently, our President's fraud isn't "news fit to print."

My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But in the US press
nada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a story for "over there."

The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing else.

Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look.

My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about the American people is that you have to lie to them. What's bad about Americans is that it's so easy to do.

-----------

Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read the memo in its entirety at www.GregPalast.com

Making a Killing: The Big Business of War

Until 2000, Halliburton was headed by US Vice-President Dick Cheney. On April 15, Cheney released his 2004 tax return. It showed that he received $194,852 in deferred payments from Halliburton, only slightly less than the $203,000 he earned as vice-president.

Link

Ma$ter$ of War

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

--Bob Dylan