Marble chunk falls from Supreme Court facade

What a poetically appropriate synchronicity.

Maybe next the Lincoln Monument will begin shedding bloody tears.

A basketball-sized piece of marble moulding fell from the facade over the entrance to the Supreme Court, landing on the steps near visitors waiting to enter the building.

6,644 are still missing after Katrina; toll may rise

From the article:

...Those counting the victims are particularly concerned about an estimated 1,300 unaccounted-for people who lived in areas that were heavily damaged by Katrina, or who were disabled at the time the storm hit. The fact that authorities haven't been able to determine what happened to them suggests that the death toll from Katrina could climb significantly...

Nearly 1,000 of the 6,644 unaccounted-for people are children. Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, says volunteers continue to go door to door to try to close missing-person cases.

The Rendon Group Grope

Another organization to keep your eyes on. Worth recalling, also, the Hill & Knowlton orchestrated psyops about "babies ripped out of incubators" in Kuwait that facilitated a vote on the first Iraq war in Congress (and TRG was involved in that, as well, despite the denials on their site). The Rendon Group is just the latest example of a corporate PR entity paid by the U.S. to stoke the flames of war.

From Think Progress:

From “Saddam Hussein’s Development of Weapons of Mass Destruction” [White House website]:

In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, said he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. … Mr. Saeed said Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing of the United Nations - and then secretly used the equipment for their weapons programs.

None of al-Haideri’s claims were true. Today’s Rolling Stone reveals that the administration’s use of al-Haideri’s lies to justify the Iraq war were “the product of a clandestine operation…that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling a war.”

At the center of this operation was John Rendon and The Rendon Group, “a controversial, secretive firm that has been criticized as ineffective and too expensive,” paid more than $56 million by the government since the 9/11 attacks. (Taxpayers are paying Rendon himself $311.26/hour.)

The Rendon Group personally set up the Iraqi National Congress and helped install Ahmad Chalabi as leader, whose main goal — “pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein” — Rendon helped facilitate. Pentagon documents show that Rendon has the highest level of government clearance (above Top Secret), which helped it with its INC work — “a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein…into the greatest threat to world peace.”

While the White House continues to insist it did not manipulate intelligence before the Iraq war, it sure seems that it hired John Rendon and his group to do just that.

Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

Kunstler rightly brings up the issue of oil as the "elephant in the room" in debates about withdrawing from Iraq.

From the article:

Unless an anti-war opposition has a plan to withdraw from the project of suburban sprawl, we're going to have to keep soldiers in Iraq, if not in the cities, then out in desert bases guarding the oil works and keeping planes ready to fly in case some al-Zarqawi-type maniac mounts a coup in Saudi Arabia. It would certainly be legitimate for the Democratic party to oppose the idea that we can continue to be crippled by car-dependency, or that we ought to keep subsidizing that way of life -- which Vice-president Cheney called "non-negotiable." We'd better negotiate that or somebody else is going to negotiate it for us, and that is exactly what they are doing with IED's in Iraq and elsewhere.

As I've noted time and time again, there is no plan to ever withdraw completely from Iraq. U.S. domination of the Middle East's oil, with the requisite military bases to guarantee enforcement, has been part of the plan for decades -- not just since the Neocons took over.

Anyone with a lick of sense knew this occupation would be a nightmare, and the talk of Iraqis throwing sweets and flowers was a joke even to the Bush/Cheney cabal.

The creation of a quagmire is intentional. The creation of more terrorists via torture is intentional -- after all, you can't fight a war without an ever-replenishing supply of enemies to kill. What looks like incompetence and poor planning to the untrained eye is actually brilliant strategizing. Congratulations, Rove, Cheney, Feith, and Wolfowitz -- you've gotten the prize and hoodwinked the populace.

The goal, quite simply, is permanent occupation. As a modicum of stability returns to Iraq (via a puppet government), some troops will be withdrawn to placate the growing calls to bring them home. But U.S. military bases will remain, in perpetuity.

It's the oil, stupid.

The UFO/Ritual Abuse Nexus

The infamous McMartin Preschool abuse case of the 1980s is rife with paradoxes, contradictions, and just plain weirdness -- clear indications, to the trained eye, that we're moving out of the mundane and into the realm of the Trickster.

The subject of ritual abuse has much in common with UFO abduction reports: eyewitness testimony of outrageous, belief-stretching events; a rabid either/or split between warring believers and skeptics; horrific violence, often with sexual aspects; scant, but tantalizing evidence; and a surreal otherwordliness that envelops the entire phenomenon.

I continue to read both "sides" of the ritual abuse argument and, as with UFO contact reports, I remain uneasily afloat in the middle of the skeptics and the believers, drifting back and forth with my mental currents. SMiles at Elfis called it "flipping," which is very apt. While some might call it fence sitting, or equivocating, I'm convinced the truth is hidden between the extremes. It's a slippery truth -- a truth that wants to stay hidden.

I'll be writing more about this in the near future, but this latest tidbit is an example of difficult to dismiss testimony that something out of the ordinary happened at McMartin, and that maybe it wasn't just "Satanic Panic" after all.

From a letter to the Hermosa Easy Reader:

Dear ER:

For the residents of the beach cities and beyond who remember the McMartin and Manhattan Ranch cases and want the dark stain removed from their conscience, Kevin Cody’s article (“The McMartin Preschool case: What really happened?” ER, Oct. 27, 2005) will help them. The need to whitewash this horror and scrub it clean has been with us from the day my wife and I were contacted by the Manhattan Beach Police Department and told our son was one of the children identified as a victim of molestation at Manhattan Ranch Pre-School.

My wife and I didn’t want to believe any of this ever happened, either. But wishing it never happened doesn’t make it go away. Put yourselves in my wife’s and my shoes for a moment.

We had just moved to the Hollyglen neighborhood of Hawthorne in the summer of 1983. We enrolled our four-year-old son at Manhattan Ranch Preschool because my wife and I both worked full-time jobs. Sometime in the following summer, we received a phone call from the Manhattan Beach Police. We were told to come down to the headquarters to speak with a police detective. At that time we learned that our son had been identified by other children at the preschool as a fellow victim of molestation. Based on that information, we acted to protect our son. We scheduled him for medical examination. We took him to therapy. My wife asked him to show her the places where he had been taken during the day while we were at work.

When the medical report came back with positive confirmation that my son had been sodomized, I didn’t need to be persuaded further. The news was devastating.

For this, we and the other parents were castigated by the media for expressing concern about the safety and well-being of our children. We were branded as “witch-hunting” parents because our children had been violated and we wanted justice.

Now, one of the adult children involved in this sad saga comes forward and admits he lied under oath. And the community in need of vindication will once again tell itself that none of this ever happened. The same public that chafes at the notion that “ . . 300 children told authorities that they were molested at the preschool, but no adult every acknowledged witnessing the assaults . . .” will find it similarly difficult to believe that priests abuse altar boys behind closed doors. Both groups will go on hiding their heads in the sand and believe what they want to believe.

As for Cody’s inference that the parents’ silence since the trial’s end be read as an admission of error, I can offer my own reaction. McMartin and Manhattan Ranch happened over 20 years ago. My son who was four at the time is now 26 years old. In the intervening years, he has asked about Manhattan Ranch once. His request was to look at the newspaper articles that we kept from the trial. He looked at the file when he was 16 or 17 and never asked about it again. The memories of Manhattan Ranch, McMartin, and the specifics of his molestation, are not easy topics to bring up or resolve. The fact that parents and their children don’t want to discuss this issue is self-evident to those of us who went through it. There is only emotional pain, like a scab being ripped off, to greet our effort. Instinctively, we knew then as we know now that survival means moving on.

Cody’s explanations regarding the prosecution’s failure to bring about convictions in the McMartin case (and Manhattan Ranch, as well) overlooks the most obvious problem – the children themselves. They never stood a chance in the face of attorneys whose profession relies on the ability to impeach testimony. Were they coached by therapists, encouraged by their families, prepped by attorneys? Certainly. Who wouldn’t have been? They were also scared to death – literally. Then they were thrown to the lions.

The strategy now is to discredit Children’s Institute therapist Kee MacFarlane, and all the therapists and medical specialists who were literally on the cutting edge of justice in child abuse cases. We were supportive of the therapists’ techniques of using hand puppets, of encouraging the children to draw their feelings, of encouraging, even prompting them to reveal their secrets. Without these tools, my son’s therapy would have been pointless. For Cody to suggest that “hundreds of children were virtually molested by the therapists and doctors who examined them” is absurd. How does one elicit the truth from a child who fears physical harm if he reveals his secrets?

In retrospect, our son’s inexplicable night terrors, his panic over having his picture taken, his fear of going to school and being dropped off, of being dressed in other children’s clothing when we went to pick him up at the end of the day, would have made sense if only we had stopped in unannounced at Manhattan Ranch to observe.

Instead, we assumed our son was safe in pre-school. Lesson learned.

Michael S. Simpson

San Pedro

The U.S. Terrorist Factory

From a Raw Story article about the 13,000-plus Iraqi prisoners the U.S. is holding:

This information supports what sources close to the Defense Department have previously expressed concern about to RAW STORY, namely that detainees held and tortured and then released essentially become the enemy army. According to these sources, who declined to go on the record by name, hundreds of detainees are released each month, having been detained for periods of six to twelve months, during which they are subjected to torture or other abuse.

As I noted in Sex, Drugs, Mind Control, and GITMO:

But what is the aim at Guantanamo? To extract information, as the Pentagon would have us believe? Or is it to further refine methods for breaking down minds and creating dissociation in order to craft more effective assassins? When these prisoners are released -- as many of them ultimately will be -- will they be cutting edge tools of their Spook masters, unleashed to create more programmed chaos and manufactured "terrorism?" Will their names turn up as future hijackers, suicide bombers, and political assassins?

Two possibilities:

1. The Bush Cult, against all evidence, believes that torture is a valuable method for gaining actionable intelligence. The administration and its allies aren't aware that U.S.-sponsored torture is turning the entire Arab and Islamic world into a terrorist breeding ground.

2. The torture is a cleverly crafted policy designed to destabilize the fledgling Iraqi government (creating more enemies to fight), prolong the war (increasing profits for the corporate/military/industrial complex), and fuel the perpetual "our god is bigger than your god" quest for hegemony in the Middle East.

Take your pick.

Sex, Drugs, Mind Control, and Torture Index

This page will serve as a permanent index for my articles and links to the Sex/Torture/Occult nexus of U.S. military intelligence organizations.

NEW (10/11/06): Al Qaeda Suspect: U.S. Government Gave Me LSD

Sex Rituals of Abu Ghraib (February 17, 2006):

Main article: Sex, Drugs, Mind Control, and GITMO (Wednesday, July 06, 2005)

Rumsfeld: GITMO hunger strikers on "diet" (Wednesday, November 02, 2005)

Dick Cheney: Vice President of Torture and War (Wednesday, November 09, 2005)

More Sex and Torture Revelations (Saturday, October 22, 2005)

One Victim's Story of Torture (Thursday, October 20, 2005)

Too Close to the Truth? Monday, October 17, 2005

Convicted Soldier Speaks of Worse Abuse at Abu Ghraib (Tuesday, October 04, 2005)

Child Prisoners - Iraq Saddamized Redux (Friday, August 05, 2005)

Children of Abu Ghraib (Friday, August 05, 2005)

First Do No Harm? (Friday, June 24, 2005)

Newsweek and the Toilet Paper Koran (Tuesday, May 17, 2005)

Hosanna Church Cult and Coverup - Index

Since I've been getting so much traffic to the individual Hosanna Church articles, I decided to archive them all in one spot, and make them always accessible from the main page (the right sidebar).

I am always looking for personal insights into this case from Ponchatoula residents or anyone else with a connection to the alleged crimes. Please email me, and I will maintain strict anonymity if requested.

UPDATE 10/22/2008: Ex-pastor gets concurrent life terms in child sex case (2theadvocate.com)

UPDATE: 9/24/2008: Thanks to the nitwit(s) who are spamming the blog's comments, I'm turning on comment moderation. Comments can still be anonymous, but they'll have to be approved by me.

UPDATE 8/24/2008: Trial of Louis Lamonica Begins

UPDATE: I hadn't seen this article from the Hammond Star, which is the first to describe the ritualistic aspects from a law enforcement official: Agents Graphically Describe Abuse (11/30/2007)

UPDATE: Guilty Verdict in Hosanna Church Rape Trial (Video, WWLTV)

UPDATE: Hosanna Jury Likely to Get Case (Dec. 3, 2007) (2theadvocate)

UPDATE: Witness: Bernard Would 'Confess': Ex-Churchmember Says He Also Recanted (Dec. 1, 2007) (2theadvocate)

UPDATES: Detectives Pray, Quote Scripture During Hosanna Case Interrogations (Nov. 30, 2007) (2theadvocate); Witnesses Deny Abuse at Hosanna Church (Dec. 2, 2007) (2theadvocate)

UPDATE: FBI Agent Testifies in Hosanna Trial (Nov. 29, 2007) (2theadvocate)

UPDATE: Child's Nightmares Launched Case (Nov. 29, 2007) (2theadvocate)

UPDATE: First Witness in Hosanna Church Case to Take the Stand (Nov. 28, 2007) (2theadvocate.com)

UPDATE: Jury Selection in Austin "Trey" Bernard's trial
Jury Selection Starts for Church Member Accused of Child Rape (KATC3)

UPDATE: August 15, 2007
Defense: Witnesses Recant (2theadvocate.com)

UPDATE: May 10, 2007
Attorney Gets Copy of Hosanna Suspect's Confession (2theadvocate.com)

UPDATE: December 23, 2006
I know some of my sources have spoken about shady dealings in regards to the church property. As always, feel free to contact me privately or post anonymously to the comments section if the full story is not being covered.

A Second Chance for Hosanna Church

UPDATE: November 16, 2006
First Trial Scheduled for August, 2007

September 29, 2006 - Resignations in the Sheriff's Department

March 5, 2006
Hosanna May Reach Trial in '06 (2theadvocate.com)

January 23, 2006
Coverup Continues

December 19, 2005.
DA: Hosanna trial priority

Hosanna Coverup (part 1)

Hosanna Coverup (part 2)

Hosanna Coverup (part 3)

Hosanna Coverup (part 4)

Hosanna Church Update - The Evidence Emerges

Hosanna Church Update -- Charges Put on Hold (Monday, September 19, 2005)

DA to Seek New Indictments in Hosanna Church Sex Case (Thursday, September 15, 2005)

Hosanna Church Cult and "Brainwashing"

Community-based Ritual Abuse and the Hosanna Church Cult

Related:

Is "Brother" Mike DePhillips "Detective" Mike DePhillips?

Hosanna Coverup, the DA, and Sadie Henderson

Rick A. Ross Institute's collection of related links

Rigorous Intuition

They should be ashamed to call themselves democrats

Excerpt:

In blatant defiance of the Constitution's guarantees of Habeas Corpus and separation of powers, the Senate on Thursday approved the Graham Amendment to the Department of Defense Authorization Act by a vote of 49 to 42. Five Democrats joined all but 4 Republican Senators in giving the President unfettered power to hold prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for the rest of their lives, with no criminal charges, and no right to challenge their confinement by Habeas Corpus....

snip

The Democrats who voted in favor of the Graham Amendment were Joseph Lieberman (Conn.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Ben Nelson (Neb), Mary L. Landrieu (La), and Ron Wyden (Or).

Community-based Ritual Abuse and the Hosanna Church Cult

According to the skeptics and the False Memory Foundation, there is little evidence of organized ritual abuse.

They're wrong.

One excellent source of empirical evidence is Cult and Ritual Abuse: Its History, Anthropology, and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America (Revised Edition) by James Randall Noblitt and Pamela Sue Perskin. The book has a chapter on the large body of evidence that has accumulated in the past decades. I highly recommend the book -- Noblitt and Perskin are not wild-eyed evangelists or overzealous anti-cult cops, but sober, reality-based writers (Noblitt is a secular psychologist).

Of particular interest to me, in light of my research into the Hosanna Church cult, was some research on what has been termed "community-based ritual abuse."

A study by Snow and Sorenson*, published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, presents evidence from interviews of 39 Utah children who were allegedly victims of five separate, neighborhood-based cults. The common characterstics were:

• Intrafamilial incest
• Forced sex
• Threats of violence
• Mulitiple locations of abuse
• Pornography
• Ingestion or other use of excrement
• Espousal of Satanic beliefs
• Use of occult paraphernelia
• Animal mutilation/killing
• Use of drugs

But what really caught my attention was this sentence:

"The abusers were generally viewed as respected members of the community and many were religious leaders."

Ring any bells?

The Hosanna Church cult is just another example of abusers working within a narrow template of ritualistic, violent, sexual behaviors. Why are the techniques listed above so common, even among disparate communities -- even countries?

Perhaps it's because those techniques work. And because they have been part of human knowledge -- particularly the knowledge of priests and shamans -- for aeons.

I'll be dealing with some ideas about the roots of ritual abuse, dissociation, and trauma-based conditioning in a future post. But in the meantime, when someone suggests that ritualistic abuse is an urban legend, point them to Noblitt and Perskin's book. The evidence is there, and it is impossible to refute.

For more about the Hosanna Church cult (and the subsequent coverup), see parts 1, 2, 3, 4.

References:

Snow, B. & Sorenson, T. (1990) Ritualistic child abuse in a neighborhood setting. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 5, 474-487. (as cited in Noblitt and Perskin)

We do! We do!

Stonecutter's song

Link

Who controls the British Crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do. We do.

Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do. We do.

Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do. We do.

Who robs cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do. We do.

Defending the indefensible

I posted a variation of this at Dailykos.

The progressives are seizing on Bush's speech today about pre-war intelligence as if it's a magic bullet -- "The intelligence for WMD was manipulated by the White House, twisted to support the case against Saddam by Bush and the neocons! The Democrats in Congress didn't have access to the real intelligence -- that's why they voted to authorize the war! They were misled, the poor, pitiful fools."

That is an argument that cannot win because it's complete bullshit.

Let's be honest.

As an informed citizen, reading news reports and other readily available media, I knew the WMD issue was a smokescreen from the beginning. A sizeable portion of the U.S. citizenry saw through the transparent, obvious attempts to build a bogus case for the invasion of Iraq.

You can look at the polls from the period of time that the Bush Cult began its pro-war P.R. campaign, and you can read about the massive global protests by millions of people who didn't believe that Saddam was the 21st Century version of Hitler, conspiring with Al Qaeda to incinerate the U.S. with dirty bombs and infect the survivors with bubonic plague.

Some members of congress stood fearlessly, speaking truth to power--Byrd, Kennedy, Kucinich--and did their job to represent their constituents. The other Democrats plugged their ears.

So I do not buy the argument that most Dems decided to go to war because they were fed bogus evidence. They voted for war because they cowered at the strong-arm tactics of Bush and Company, because they were worried about being seen as "weak" and hurting their own careers, and because the imperial presidency tolerated no "traitors" and branded anyone not playing along as treasonous.

I'm all for running the prez and his cultists out of town dripping tar and feathers, but let's be honest with ourselves, shall we?

The Dems knew they were being fed horseshit, and they smiled, chewed politely, and said, "Thank you, sir, may I have some more?"

Better late than never, but I, for one, have a hard time accepting the "we didn't know" excuse. If it works as realpolitik to jettison the bastards, fine. But because Democrats who should have known better swallowed the pile of rotten dung, thousands of troops and a hundred thousand Iraqis are now rotting in the ground.

I can't forget that. I won't forget that.

Dick Cheney: Vice President for Torture and War

Yes, it's from a Larouche publication. But the information is accurate, and very relevant to the current machinations of the Cheney Monster to exculpate the CIA from laws against torture.

Cheney, as the article states, is "a man obsessed with torture and war for more than 30 years, who has carefully used the power of his office to trample on the U.S. Constitution, international law, and the most basic concepts of humanity."

This article ties Cheney to coverup of the murder of Frank Olson and the (likely) murder of former CIA director William Colby.

And there are reverberations of MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD, and ARTICHOKE.

Documentary on white phosphorous online

Found this via Dailykos.

Italian TV: U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah

Everything old is new again. From the article:

A documentary to be aired on Tuesday by Italian state satellite TV channel RAI News 24 alleges that US troops used chemical weapons during their assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November last year. The documentary - 'Fallujah - the hidden massacre' - uses witness accounts from former US soldiers, Fallujah residents, video footage and photographs, to support its claim that contrary to US State Department denials, white phosphorous was used indiscriminately on the city, causing terrible injuries to civilians, including women and children.

"I heard the order being issued to be careful because white phosphorous was being used on Fallujah. In military slang this is known as Willy Pete. Phosphorous burns bodies, melting the flesh right down to the bone," says one former US solider, interviewed by the documentary's director, Sigfrido Ranucci.

"I saw the burned bodies of women and children. The phosophorous explodes and forms a plume. Who ever is within a 150 metre radius has no hope," the former soldier adds.

"A rain of fire came down on the city, and people targeted by the different coloured substances began to burn. We found people dead, with strange injuries, with their clothes intact," a biologist from Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq al-Deraji tells Ranucci.

The evidence in 'Fallujah - the hidden massacre' claims to show the US forces did not use phosphorous in the legitimate way - to highlight enemy positions - but dropped the substance indiscriminately on the city, and on a massive scale. The documentary also shows the terrible damage wrought by the US bombardment of Fallujah, and the carnage to civilians, some of whom lay sleeping.

Equally disturbingly, a document in the report claims to prove that the U.S. forces have used the MK77 form of Napalm - the chemical used with devastating effect on civilians during the Vietnam war - on civilians in Iraq.

"I had gathered testimonials on the use of phosphorous and Napalm in Iraq from several refugees from Fallujah, and wanted to tell the world about it, but my kidnappers would not allow me to," said Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, held hostage in Iraq earlier this year, during the documentary.

The use of white phosophorous and Napalm is prohibited by UN conventions. Moroever, the United States signed up to the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997.

Peyote Bends But Doesn't Alter Minds

From the article:

There seem to be no mental or behavioral problems associated with long-term use of the hallucinogenic substance peyote (mescaline), at least among Native Americans.

That's the conclusion of researchers at the McLean Hospital here and Harvard Medical School, who found that among the Navajo who take peyote legally as part of their religion, long-term drug users did just as well as non-users on standard neuropsychological tests. On some measures, they did even better.

The study, led by John H. Halpern, M.D., of the McLean Hospital, was partly funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse. It was published in the November issue of Biological Psychiatry.

snip

"We found no evidence that these Native Americans had residual neurocognitive problems," Dr. Halpern said. "Despite lifelong participation in the peyote church, they performed just as well on mental tests as those who had never used peyote."

In fact, peyote users scored significantly better than non-users on the "general positive affect" and "psychological well-being" measures of the Rand Mental Health Inventory (RMHI), a standard instrument used to diagnose psychological problems and determine overall mental health.

In contrast, alcohol abusers did significantly worse than the comparison group (non-users) in all measures of the RMHI.

Rumsfeld: GITMO hunger strikers on "diet"

I'd like to see Rummy go the Gitmo "diet."

Fucking scumbag.

From the article:

The military said Tuesday 27 detainees currently were engaging in the hunger strike, including 24 receiving forced-feedings. Detainees' lawyers estimated that about 200 are taking part.

Asked about the motivation of the hunger strikers, Rumsfeld said, "Well, I suppose that what they're trying to do is to capture press attention, obviously, and they've succeeded."

He added, "There are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that."

Julia Tarver, a lawyer for ten Gitmo prisoners, told Amy Goodman:

...the situation at Guantanamo has deteriorated drastically, even since our previous visit at the end of July. The level of hopelessness in the camp has reached a point where our clients are literally vowing they have no other choice but to die. The treatment they are receiving from the guards and the medical staff at Guantanamo is very, very disturbing.

What we've learned is that in some sort of ill-advised attempt to stop the hunger strike, the guards and the medical staff are using intervention, medical intervention, to actually inflict forms of torture on our clients. They claim that in order to preserve life at the base they are inserting tubes into the clients' noses that go down into their stomachs, and they're able to be fed that way.

But the problem is the clients have told us horrific stories repeatedly, from different clients, about how these same tubes are being forcibly inserted in by riot guards, how they're taken from one detainee and inserted into the next detainee with no sanitization, with the bile and the blood still on the tube from the previous detainee.

Profits of Fear

From CNN:

President Bush announced Tuesday that he would ask Congress for $7.1 billion in emergency funding to prepare the country for a possible flu pandemic.

He also said he will ask Congress to pass legislation that would limit legal liability of vaccine makers to encourage more to enter the market. At present, the United States is home to one vaccine producer

The plan also calls for spending $1 billion to stockpile antiviral drugs -- such as Tamiflu and Relenza -- to protect first-responders and $583 million for "pandemic preparedness," that would include $100 million for states to make plans.

And from CNN Money:

The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world.



Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.

The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

Rumsfeld isn't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand for Tamiflu, which is manufactured and marketed by Swiss pharma giant Roche. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equaling about 10% of sales.) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead since the beginning of 2005.




Another board member is the wife of former California Gov. Pete Wilson.




"I don't know of any biotech company that's so politically well-connected," says analyst Andrew McDonald of Think Equity Partners in San Francisco.