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Signs Editorials
Editorial: Child Abuse: Christopher Bollyn Shows His True Colours
Henry See
The Signs of the Times forum is a place for public discussion of topics of interest in understanding our world. Data is brought to the participants where it is read, analysed,and discussed. When Christopher Bollyn, a sometime reporter for the American Free Press, was arrested in August of this year by police in Chicago, we started a thread to discuss the issue. If a journalist who had made a name for himself going after the Israeli connection to 9/11 was arrested and beaten, it was an important story.
As we read the reports, we noticed that Bollyn's story changed with the retelling. At first, he mentioned that he got on his bike to go to the local wine store so that he wouldn't be home if there was trouble, essentially admitting that he was happier if his wife and kids met the police alone. Members of our forum pointed out the, shall we say, less noble aspects of such an attitude, and shortly thereafter, we noticed that Bollyn was no longer including that particular insight into his thinking in his subsequent reports.
Then there was the question of exactly what happened when the police showed up at his house. The details changed with the retelling, and in each case, they changed to make Bollyn look better. Interested readers can follow the discussion on the forum.
Lisa Guliani, from Wing-TV, began contributing to the thread on the third page. Lisa, being a real journalist, that is, she doesn't take anything said by anybody at face value without verifying the facts, even if he is a 'hero' of the so-called 9/11 truth [sic] movement, phoned and talked to a spokesman for the police force that arrested Bollyn. She got and reported the police's version of events. One would think that this is simply good journalism.
Not so Bollyn and his supporters. Lisa was accused of taking sides with the police. Bollyn had been invited to discuss the issue on Wing-TV on the day following Lisa's interview with the police spokesman. He never phoned in for the interview.
The matter had died down on the Signs forum until a few days ago when Bollyn himself joined. At first, we were happy to see him there, and we foolishly thought that he might be willing to answer some of our unanswered questions.
It did not take us long to be disabused of that notion. What we were not expecting was the virulent and base attack on Lisa that he posted last night. The title of his post alone indicates just how far the man has fallen - if it all wasn't a front to begin with.
"An Appeal to Lisa Guliani on Behalf of Her Abandoned Children: An Open Letter from Christopher Bollyn"
Interested readers can find the post at the forum.
Today, Lisa posted a response.
We invite our readers to read the entire thread on Christopher Bollyn's arrest and to judge for yourselves what kind of a man would write such filth, dragging in children and speaking in their name. Lisa Guliani's children have nothing whatsoever to do with her work as a journalist and critic of the seamier side of the 9/11 truth movement. With this attack, Christopher Bollyn has revealed for all to see that he is a man without a conscience.
It will be very interesting to see who comes to his defence and who refuses to get involved, preferring to sit on the fence. It doesn't matter how many thousands of words Bollyn has written on 9/11, that one piece has shown what lies under the mask of crusading journalist. The attack of Christopher Bollyn on Lisa Guliani will be a litmus test for the ponerization of the movement and the individuals within it. Perhaps the seamier side of the movement is all that there is.
Our world is the expression of what we are inside, of the chaos, violence, and lies of our inner lives. Until each of us addresses that most fundamental of issues, the world will continue on in its relentless pursuit of annihilation. Now is the time for people of conscience to speak up, for if those who claim to oppose the horrors of the 'war on terror', the lies of 9/11, and the brutality of Israel and the genocide of the Palestinians, refuse to take a stand on this issue, if they cannot even see the pathological violence of Bollyn's words and take a stand for decency, then they are worth nothing in a fight for truth.
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Editorial: Not My Son in Video, Declares Atta Senior
October 03rd 2006
Kurt Nimmo
In fairness, you'd think the corporate media would hear out Muhammad al-Amir al-Sayd Atta, father of patsy hijacker Mohammed Atta, who has told the Saudi daily al-Watan the latest intelligence video fabrication, allegedly showing Mohammed and Ziad Jarrah, is a crass fake. "The video-testament of my son is false and I continue to believe he is innocent," Atta said. "There is a big difference between this photo and the images shown by the Americans-that one is not my boy.... "The Americans tampered with and falsified that video ... they want to change the truth in order to achieve their goals in the Middle East."
A Google News search returns exactly one reference to Atta's comments, posted on the Adnkronos International web site. But even Adnkronos International accepts as gospel truth the dubitable myth the younger Atta "flew one of the planes that brought down the World Trade Center." As of yet, nobody has demonstrated Atta was anywhere near an airplane on September 11 and as for bringing down the WTC with planes, this is in the province of flat-worlders and physical science no-nothings, including not only every damn neocon on the planet but no shortage of daft left gatekeepers such as Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn.
It is interesting to compare the now infamous mugshot of Atta with this supposed earlier likeness. According to at least one nine eleven researcher, the Mohammed in Florida was fond of alcohol and cocaine, and if indeed this is the case imbibing these substances must have taken a heavy toll over the period of 20 months because the Atta portrayed in the passport mugshot is far more haggard and older looking than the earlier, smiling Atta, who looks to be less of a psychopath as well.
But the inconsistencies really shine in compared photos of Ziad Jarrah, as Steve and Paul Watson demonstrate on the Infowars web site.
"These are clearly not the same man, there are up to three different people feature\d here! The passport found in the wreckage does not show the face of the Jarrah in the latest video release who is Jarrah #1," write the Watson brothers.
As for the recently released video, they conclude: "All indicators suggest that it was filmed by U.S. intelligence and purposefully timed for a politically expedient release to coincide the the passage of the Military Commissions Act. The fact that Atta and Jarrah appear in the same release, even though it was not the same day as the Rally and they may not have been in the same location as Bin Laden makes the whole thing stink to high heaven."
Indeed, it does stink to high heaven, and then some.
This latest attempt to add fluff to the boxcutter wielding hijackers fable fits nicely in previous attempts, most notably the fat Bin Laden video, the Osama with a nose job video, and the recycling of old, pre-nine eleven CIA videos shot in Afghanistan, attempting to pass them off as newly acquired footage.
Of course, for the corporate media, not allowing Muhammad al-Amir al-Sayd Atta to have his say is wholly predictable, as they have a vested interest in promulgating the neocon version of events, considering the multinational corporations that own our media stand to cash-in on the "clash of civilizations" farce. However, you'd think, with the billions of dollars at their disposal, they would do a better job at pulling the wool over our eyes.
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Editorial: Murder For Sport - The Israel Army In Palestine
Ellis Sharp
29/06/2006
The plight of Palestinian children arrested by the Israeli army has long been one of the neglected aspects of Israeli occupation, involving some 600 minors a year since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. Nearly all are held without access to legal support during questioning, often compelled to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they don't understand, while subjected to intimidation and mistreatment as a matter of routine course.
It starts with the arrest itself, which can take place during night-time incursions or mass arrest campaigns, or alternatively at the military checkpoints which have played such a part in curtailing the economic and social life of the West Bank.
After a night or two behind bars, some minors are released without charge, while the unfortunate ones, around 300 a year, start their passage through the Israeli military justice system which stands as the rule of law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
This system allows no special provisions for minors, despite the fact that Israel is a signatory of numerous international treaties which demand due consideration for age in the legal process, not least of which is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Those considerations are, by contrast, applied to Israeli minors, including those living cheek by jowl with the Palestinians in illegal West Bank settlements.
Life doesn't improve on the inside, with Palestinian children routinely reporting torture or mistreatment.
The brutalisation of Palestinian children is not news; 600 kidnappings a year is not a crisis. Contrast the absolute silence about the treatment of those children with that of the wall-to-wall coverage of the captured Israeli. The corporal's youth is repeatedly stressed by reporters. We know his name. A variety of photographs of him (many in civilian dress) are repeatedly shown on TV. He is humanised. We hear from his father. We hear from a family friend. On breakfast TV the anchorwoman looks concerned as she plaintively refers to "this young man". He is constructed as a victim. He is not represented as a member of an army notorious for its human rights abuses but as the victim of a "kidnap". He is never identified as what he was - a tank gunner.
And while enormous emphasis is put on the soldier's comparative youth, there is another striking fact never mentioned by news reporters. Almost half the population of Gaza is under 15 years old. Many of them are already traumatised by past Israeli brutalities. Earlier this month John Pilger described how:
"Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma . . . 99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed."
So, Israel's tanks "roll in", along with armoured bulldozers. Jets and helicopter gunships fill the skies. Yesterday's ITN lunchtime news described how at least nine missiles had destroyed Gaza's only power station, destroying the region's electricity supply. There was no military purpose to this. It was in fact a war crime. Electricity to most of Gaza has been cut, including hospitals and clinics. The main coastal road connecting north and south Gaza has been severed. Today we learn (but only on Channel 4 news) that oil supplies to Gaza have been cut. Fuel, water, electricity are now no longer available, or are fast running out, for an estimated 80 per cent of the population.
These are punitive crimes against a civilian population, but you will never hear the words "war crime" or "collective punishment" frame the telling of this news story.
Nor has a single TV or radio journalist that I've heard ever mentioned one of the most sadistic weapons in the Israeli state's vast armoury - using jets to create sonic booms all through the night, to make the entire population of Gaza unable to sleep at night.
Today, the Israeli army "rounded up 64 Palestinian ministers and MPs" (BBC news). The language of the Israeli PR machine is cravenly imitated by BBC and ITN; only Jon Snow asserts that they were "kidnapped".
Sixty four elected representatives seized and unlawfully imprisoned! Just imagine the hysteria if a single Labour MP, or a member of Congress, or a member of the Knesset - let alone 64 - was abducted by an Islamic group. Bush and Blair would rush to the microphone to denounce this savage attack on democracy. The cruise missile left would rage about Islamo-fascism and its contempt for democracy and western values. But where elected Hamas representatives are concerned there is total silence from the United Nations, Britain, the USA, France, and Germany - the same powers which have sponsored and indulged 58 years of Israel's existence.
And note the language - "rounded up", as you might cattle or stray dogs. Palestinians are indeed the Untermenschen of our age.
Yes, "the battle lines are clearly drawn". On one side are Palestinian civilians and some poorly armed resistance fighters, and on the other is an army of tanks, bulldozers, helicopter gunships and the most advanced weaponry in the world - an army whose previous actions in Gaza were witnessed by the US journalist Chris Hedges, who in an interview in 2001 described his revulsion at the sadistic savagery of Israeli soldiers:
"Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered- death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."
Well it's not as if we don't know what to expect in the next few days. BBC TV news reporter Katya Adler - she's new and she'll go far - spoke of Palestinian civilians fearful of being "caught in the crossfire". (BBC Lunchtime News, June 28). As Robert Fisk has pointed out, that's a favourite rhetorical device of the Israeli PR machine. And what it means is what Chris Hedges described:
"indiscriminate killing of men, women and children; the systematic destruction of property; the cutting off of water supply; and the prevention of travel even for ambulances. It is a full-scale war against the entire population."
A full-scale war against an entire population. You'll never find anyone in "the broad centre" of the British mass media ever using such disagreeable expressions.
Except, perhaps, when things get personal. The tone of Julian Manyon's reportage changed dramatically on today's lunchtime ITN broadcast. He described how he and a film crew were filming from the roof of a Palestinian house in Gaza near the northern border with Israel when Israeli gunners opened fire with a barrage of shells, perhaps as many as 50, lasting for two hours. Some of the shells landed "so close to the house that in fact bits of shrapnel flew up into the air and landed right at our feet, forcing us to beat a retreat down the stairwell of the home."
Manyon seemed shaken by his experience. "You can imagine that the local people are terrorised by this," he commented.
Palestinians terrorised by the Israeli army.
Careful, Julian. Too much of that sort of thing and you'll be transferred to reporting on jumble sales in Swansea.
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Editorial: Bad faith and the destruction of Palestine
Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
29 September 2006
Palestinian electricity workers extinguish a fire inside the headquarters of the main electricity company in the Gaza Strip after it was attacked by an Israeli missile during air strikes over the city, June 28, 2006. (MaanImages/Wesam Saleh)
A mistake too often made by those examining Israel's behaviour in the occupied territories - or when analysing its treatment of Arabs in general, or interpreting its view of Iran - is to assume that Israel is acting in good faith. Even its most trenchant critics can fall into this trap.
Such a reluctance to attribute bad faith was demonstrated this week by Israel's foremost human rights group, B'Tselem, when it published a report into the bombing by the Israeli air force of Gaza's power plant in late June. The horrifying consequences of this act of collective punishment - a war crime, as B'Tselem rightly notes - are clearly laid out in the report.
The group warns that electricity is available to most of Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants for a few hours a day, and running water for a similar period. The sewerage system has all but collapsed, with the resulting risk of the spread of dangerous infectious disease.
In their daily lives, Gazans can no longer rely on the basic features of modern existence. Their fridges are as good as useless, threatening outbreaks of food poisoning. The elderly and infirm living in apartments can no longer leave their homes because elevators don't work, or are unpredictable. Hospitals and doctors' clinics struggle to offer essential medical services. Small businesses, most of which rely on the power and water supplies, from food shops and laundry services to factories and workshops, are being forced to close.
Rapidly approaching, says B'Tselem, is the moment when Gaza's economy - already under an internationally backed siege to penalise the Palestinians for democratically electing a Hamas government - will simply expire under the strain.
Unfortunately, however, B'Tselem loses the plot when it comes to explaining why Israel would choose to inflict such terrible punishment on the people of Gaza. Apparently, it was out of a thirst for revenge: the group's report is even entitled "Act of Vengeance". Israel, it seems, wanted revenge for the capture a few days earlier of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from a border tank position used to fire artillery into Gaza.
The problem with the "revenge" theory is that, however much a rebuke it is, it presupposes a degree of good faith on the part of the vengeance-seeker: You steal my toy in the playground, and I lash out and hit you. I have acted badly - even disproportionately, to use a vogue word B'Tselem also adopts - but no one would deny that my emotions were honest. There was no subterfuge or deception in my anger. I incur blame only because I failed to control my impulses. There is even the implication that, though my action was unwarranted, my fury was justified.
But why should we think Israel is acting in good faith, even if in bad temper, in destroying Gaza's power station? Why should we assume it was a hot-headed over-reaction rather than a coldly calculated deed?
In other words, why believe Israel is simply lashing out when it commits a war crime rather than committing it after careful advance planning? Is it not possible that such war crimes, rather than being spontaneous and random, are actually all pushing in the same direction?
More especially, why should we give Israel the benefit of the doubt when its war crimes contribute, as the bombing of the power station in Gaza surely does, to easily deciphered objectives? Why not think of the bombing instead as one instalment in a long-running and slowly unfolding plan?
The occupation of Gaza did not begin this year, after Hamas was elected, nor did it end with the disengagement a year ago. The occupation is four decades old and still going strong in both the West Bank and Gaza. In that time Israel has followed a consistent policy of subjugating the Palestinian population, imprisoning it inside ever-shrinking ghettos, sealing it off from contact with the outside world, and destroying its chances of ever developing an independent economy.
Since the outbreak six years ago of the second intifada - the Palestinians' uprising against the occupation - Israel has tightened its system of controls. It has sought to do so through two parallel, reinforcing approaches.
First, it has imposed forms of collective punishment to weaken Palestinian resolve to resist the occupation, and encourage factionalism and civil war. Second, it has "domesticated" suffering inside the ghettos, ensuring each Palestinian finds himself isolated from his neighbours, his concerns reduced to the domestic level: how to receive a house permit, or get past the wall to school or university, or visit a relative illegally imprisoned in Israel, or stop yet more family land being stolen, or reach his olive groves.
The goals of both sets of policies, however, are the same: the erosion of Palestinian society's cohesiveness, the disruption of efforts at solidarity and resistance, and ultimately the slow drift of Palestinians away from vulnerable rural areas into the relative safety of urban centres - and eventually, as the pressure continues to mount, on into neighbouring Arab states, such as Jordan and Egypt.
Seen in this light, the bombing of the Gaza power station fits neatly into Israel's long-standing plans for the Palestinians. Vengeance has nothing to do with it.
Another recent, more predictable example was an email exchange published on the Media Lens forum website involving the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. Bowen was questioned about why the BBC had failed to report on an important peace initiative begun this summer jointly by a small group of Israeli rabbis and Hamas politicians. A public meeting where the two sides would have unveiled their initiative was foiled when Israel's Shin Bet secret service, presumably with the approval of the Israeli government, blocked the Hamas MPs from entering Jerusalem.
Bowen, though implicitly critical of Israel's behaviour, believes the initiative was of only marginal significance. He doubts that the Shin Bet or the government were overly worried by the meeting - in his words, it was seen as no more than a "minor irritant" - because the Israeli peace camp has shown a great reluctance to get involved with the Palestinians since the outbreak of the intifada in 2000. The Israeli government would not want Hamas looking "more respectable", he admits, but adds that that is because "they believe that it is a terrorist organisation out to kill Jews and to destroy their country".
In short, the Israeli government cracked down on the initiative because they believed Hamas was not a genuine partner for peace. Again, at least apparently in Bowen's view, Israel was acting in good faith: when it warns that it cannot talk with Hamas because it is a terrorist organisation, it means what it says.
But what if, for a second, we abandon the assumption of good faith?
Hamas comprises a militant wing, a political wing and a network of welfare charities. Israel chooses to characterise all these activities as terrorist in nature, refusing to discriminate between the group's different wings. It denies that Hamas could have multiple identities in the same way the Irish Republican Army, which included a political wing called Sinn Fein, clearly did.
Some of Israel's recent actions might fit with such a simplistic view of Hamas. Israel tried to prevent Hamas from standing in the Palestinian elections, only backing down after the Americans insisted on the group's participation. Israel now appears to be destroying the Palestinians' governing institutions, claiming that once in Hamas' hands they will be used to promote terror.
The Israeli government, it could be argued, acts in these ways because it is genuinely persuaded that even the political wing of Hamas is cover for terrorist activity.
But most other measures suggest that in reality Israel has a different agenda. Since the Palestinian elections six months ago, Israel's policies towards Hamas have succeeded in achieving one end: the weakening of the group's moderates, especially the newly elected politicians, and the strengthening of the militants. In the debate inside Hamas about whether to move towards politics, diplomacy and dialogue, or concentrate on military resistance, we can guess which side is currently winning.
The moderates not the militants have been damaged by the isolation of the elected Hamas government, imposed by the international community at Israel's instigation. The moderates not the militants have been weakened by Israel rounding up and imprisoning the group's MPs. The moderates not the militants have been harmed by the failure, encouraged by Israel, of Fatah and Hamas politicians to create a national unity government. And the approach of the moderates not the militants has been discredited by Israel's success in blocking the summer peace initiative between Hamas MPs and the rabbis.
In other words, Israeli policies are encouraging the extremist and militant elements inside Hamas rather the political and moderate ones. So why not assume that is their aim?
Why not assume that rather than wanting a dialogue, a real peace process and an eventual agreement with the Palestinians that might lead to Palestinian statehood, Israel wants an excuse to carry on with its four-decade occupation - even if it has to reinvent it through sleights of hand like the disengagement and convergence plans?
Why not assume that Israel blocked the meeting between the rabbis and the Hamas MPs because it fears that such a dialogue might suggest to Israeli voters and the world that there are strong voices in Hamas prepared to consider an agreement with Israel, and that given a chance their strength and influence might grow?
Why not assume that the Israeli government wanted to disrupt the contacts between Hamas and the rabbis for exactly the same reasons that it has repeatedly used violence to break up joint demonstrations in Palestinian villages like Bilin staged by Israeli and Palestinian peace actvists opposed to the wall that is annexing Palestinian farm land to Israel?
And why, unlike Bowen, not take seriously opinion polls like the one published this week that show 67 per cent of Israelis support negotiations with a Palestinian national unity government (that is, one including Hamas), and that 56 per cent favour talks with a Palestinian government whoever is leading it? Could it be that faced with these kinds of statistics Israel's leaders are terrified that, if Hamas were given the chance to engage in a peace process, Israeli voters might start putting more pressure on their own government to make meaningful concessions?
In other words, why not consider for a moment that Israel's stated view of Hamas may be a self-serving charade, that the Israeli government has invested its energies in discrediting Hamas, and before it secular Palestinian leaders, because it has no interest in peace and never has done? Its goal is the maintenance of the occupation on the best terms it can find for itself.
On much the same grounds, we should treat equally sceptically another recent Israeli policy: the refusal by the Israeli Interior Ministry to renew the tourist visas of Palestinians with foreign passports, thereby forcing them to leave their homes and families inside the occupied territories. Many of these Palestinians, who were originally stripped by Israel of their residency rights in violation of international law, often when they left to work or study abroad, have been living on renewable three-month visas for years, even decades.
Amazingly, this compounding of the original violation of these Palestinian families' rights has received almost no media coverage and so far provoked not a peep of outrage from the big international human rights organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
I can hazard a guess why. Unusually Israel has made no serious attempt to justify this measure. Furthermore, unlike the two examples cited above, it is difficult to put forward even a superficially plausible reason why Israel needs to pursue this policy, except for the obvious motive: that Israel believes it has found another bureaucratic wheeze to deny a few more thousand Palestinians their birthright. It is another small measure designed to ethnically cleanse these Palestinians from what might have been their state, were Israel interested in peace.
Unlike the other two examples, it is impossible to assume any good faith on Israel's part in this story: the measure has no security value, not even of the improbable variety, nor can it be sold as an over-reaction, vengeance, to a provocation by the group affected.
Palestinians with foreign passports are among the richest, best educated and possibly among the most willing to engage in dialogue with Israel. Many have large business investments in the occupied territories they wish to protect from further military confrontation, and most speak fluently the language of the international community - English. In other words, they might have been a bridgehead to a peace process were Israel genuinely interested in one.
But as we have seen, Israel isn't. If only our media and human rights organisations could bring themselves to admit as much. But because they can't, the transparently bad faith underpinning Israel's administrative attempt at ethnic cleansing may be allowed to pass without any censure at all.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, is published by Pluto Press.
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Editorial: A Political Culture of Lies and War
Rodrigue Tremblay
October 2, 2006
The New American Empire
"How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that imputes the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calms the conscience. - It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and -thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better."
Mark Twain - [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)
As a principle, a democratic government should not rely on misinformation, half truths and outright lies in order to defend its public policies. Indeed, public affairs should be discussed in the open and policies judged on their merit. To do otherwise is to betray the necessary trust a responsible government must have with the citizens. But everybody knows that politicians do lie, and the more they get away with it, the more they resort to this subterfuge.
"The President's [George W. Bush's] decision to ignore intelligence community assessments prior to the Iraq war and to make repeated public statements that gave the misleading impression that Saddam Hussein's regime was connected to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 cost him any credibility he may have had on this issue."
Carl Levin, U. S. Senator (D, MI)
"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
Plato (427-347 B.C.)
"How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that imputes the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calms the conscience. - It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and -thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better."
Mark Twain - [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)
As a principle, a democratic government should not rely on misinformation, half truths and outright lies in order to defend its public policies. Indeed, public affairs should be discussed in the open and policies judged on their merit. To do otherwise is to betray the necessary trust a responsible government must have with the citizens. But everybody knows that politicians do lie, and the more they get away with it, the more they resort to this subterfuge.
On September 25, 2002, for example, President George W. Bush uttered a big lie that was bound to have disastrous historical consequences. It would lead to one of the dumbest wars ever. -In his search for fictional reasons to attack Iraq, he said: "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." This was a lie because American secret services had long established that secularist Saddam Hussein considered violently religious Osama bin Laden to be an enemy. A bi-partisan U.S. Senate panel has confirmed that Saddam Hussein had rejected overtures from al Qaeda and believed Islamic extremists were a threat to his regime. This was completely different from the portrait of an Iraq allied with Osama bin Laden that the Bush-Cheney administration painted in order to initiate a war of aggression against Iraq. -It was thus impossible to have al Qaeda operatives being trained in Iraq (as they were in Taliban Afghanistan). With that lie, Bush was trying to mislead the American people into supporting a war against Iraq that he had intended to launch even before he became president.
Therefore, the war against Iraq that George W. Bush launched on March 20, 2003, was a premeditated war of choice, not a defensive war of necessity. In fact, the 2003 unprovoked American military attack against Iraq looks like a repetition of the unprovoked 'preventive' attack that imperial Japan launched against the United States at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941.
Bush's second big lie was the one about Iraq supposedly having a stock of weapons of mass destruction about to be used against the United States. On September 12, 2002, Bush II said emphatically, "Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons." This false assertion was repeated time and again by President George W. Bush and by his Vice President on numerous radio and TV networks. The Bush-Cheney administration was publicly accusing Iraq of having hidden unconventional weapons and was pressuring it to pledge to stop producing or concealing such weapons of mass destruction. On October 8, 2002, in a speech delivered in Cincinnati, the American president raised the level of fear even higher, declaring that "we cannot wait [before attacking Iraq] for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
In fact, the Bush-Cheney administration had been told by their own secret services that Iraq's WMD capability had been essentially destroyed in 1991, more than ten years before. But it was not the purpose of the Bush-Cheney administration to use intelligence in order to better the decision-making process. What Bush II and his Neocons intended was to use and twist intelligence to justify political decisions already made. For David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, the Neocons' claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was simply "delusional." -And even today, the campaign of disinformation continues, because the situation in Iraq is much worse than what Bush II and the Pentagon are saying in public.
At the end of the day, all these lies and distorsions have paid off big politically for the Republican Party. Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, obviously inspired by the movie 'Wag the Dog', was able to plan both the 2002 mid-term elections and the 2004 presidential election around the theme of fear and terror: his program was to picture a mediocre and devious politician as a "war president" fighting terror around the world, dressed up in the American flag.
The Democratic leadership was so hoodwinked by this strategy, that Dick Gephardt, the then House Democratic Minority Leader, for example, was anxious to be photographed with George W. Bush in the fall of 2002, when the latter was making his warmongering pronouncements. Gephardt was naive enough to believe that by jumping onto Bush's war wagon, the Democrats could win 40 new seats and take control of the House. Instead, as it was amply previsible, the subdued Democrats lost 5 seats in the House. Bush and Rove were lucky to have such confused adversaries. -Karl Rove is now trying to apply the same ploy to the 2006 mid-term elections. It remains to be seen if the Democrats will fall into the same trap.
And then, there was torture or, in Orwellian speak, 'enhanced interrogation techniques'. Because of George W. Bush's decisions about torturing prisoners or so-called "enemy combatants", with the advice of devious and crooked-minded lawyers, the United States is seen around the world as a country that violates the Third Geneva Convention against torture and which routinely authorizes the mistreatment of prisoners. The Bush administration's use of torture at the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo prisons is a well documented fact.
Also, because of George W. Bush's decisions about detainees, there are 14,000 people in secret American gulags with hardly any legal recourse, a situation which is contrary to international law but also, to American law. What's more, torture in Iraq, according to the United Nations' chief anti-torture expert, is now worse than it was under the regime of Saddam Hussein. This unenviable record places the American president in a very precarious legal position because he could be accused of war crimes and impeached for such offenses.
Realizing that, Bush is now desperately trying to save himself by having the U.S. Congress retroactively modify both Article 3 of the Geneva Convention and the U.S. War Crimes law, even though such a move would be unconstitutional, since no law can be erased retroactively, under the U.S. Constitution. It even seems that American military lawyers have been coerced to go along with an illegal practice they have themselves denounced before. Indeed, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 29, 2006 (in a 5-3 decision) that President Bush violated both American and international law in his effort to railroad Guantanamo Bay detainees in kangaroo courts, some legislative cover was thought to be required. On September 28, 2006, Congress pretended to want to curtail somewhat the President's power to use torture, but finally approved a bill that suspends the eight century old right of Habeas Corpus and the American Bill of Rights for detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba or for any person designated as 'enemy combatant' by the President, by stripping them of the right to challenge their detention in court. With this new law, the American Congress is now officially on record as going along with the Bush administration in legalizing the recourse to future torture techniques by U.S. government agents, thus confirming the moral decadence of the United States and its decline among democratic nations.
In conclusion, it can be said that the Bush-Cheney's addiction to lies and to war is a major threat to the United States itself, to its liberty and to stability and freedom around the world. This decline of democractic principles and in public morality, concomittent with the recourse to ever more sophisticated armaments in military conflicts, is a direct threat to the survival of humanity.
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com.
He is the author of the book 'The New American Empire'.
Visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
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Editorial: American Narcissism and Iraq
By NORMAN SOLOMON
October 2, 2006
The uproar over Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, has intensified the media focus on a basic controversy that's summed up this way: Is Iraq a quagmire?
Like many other debates that flourish in American mass media, the standard answers on both sides are wrong -- because the question bypasses human realities.
Most obviously, Iraq is not a swamp; it's a place where real people live and die. They are not metaphors, and neither is their country. Iraqi people exist quite apart from the roles imputed to them by politicians and journalists in Washington.
But "quagmire" serves as a kind of mental framework for where most U.S. media coverage has remained.
Forget the American Century. This is the American Narcissism.
You see, no matter what happens in Iraq, it's mostly about us -- spelled U.S.; the United States. We're encouraged to perceive that Iraq is most important, at least implicitly, because of what it means for the USA: its image in other countries, the deaths and wounds of its soldiers, the political strength of the president and, this fall, the likely effects on the midterm congressional elections.
During September, as the Nexis media database attests, the USA's sizeable newspapers and wire services ran articles referring to Iraq as a "quagmire" several times a day. Readers of the New York Times have seen such references on an average of once a week this year. Overall, major U.S. media outlets have associated Iraq with the term "quagmire" thousands of times in 2006.
Some of those references are from war supporters eager to dispute the notion that "quagmire" is applicable to what's going on in Iraq. They challenge the relevance of the word yet do not hesitate to recycle other cliches that were also used in public debate about the Vietnam War four decades ago -- and so we hear that the United States must "stay the course" and must not "cut and run."
But to focus arguments on whether the Iraq war should be called a "quagmire" is to flatten moral issues, transmuting them into matters of strategy and efficacy. That may sound like appropriate journalistic attention to practical politics. However, if a war is wrong, the wisdom of supporting it shouldn't hinge on whether it's a quagmire or a cakewalk.
Criticisms of the war that accuse it of being a "quagmire" can be disputed with lofty calls to persevere -- doing the difficult right thing -- until conditions on the ground change, the Iraqi government gets stronger and so forth. But opposition to the war that turns on morality cannot be so easily deflected in such ways.
The extreme American self-absorption of the "quagmire" debate lends itself to ostensible solutions that shift -- but perpetuate -- the U.S. government's central role in the carnage. Reigning political manipulator Karl Rove, whose Machiavellian electoral calculations have had extraordinary leverage over the current administration's foreign policy, is very likely to seek further U.S. reliance on air power that uses the latest Pentagon technologies as blunt and lethal instruments in Iraq.
A key goal will be to bring down U.S. casualty rates and reduce American troop levels in Iraq while the people of that country suffer further deaths and destruction.
If the Iraq war is primarily framed as a problem because of what it's doing to Americans, the "solutions" could make the war seem like less of a quagmire even while more Iraqi people pay with their lives. Media arguments over whether Iraq is a quagmire turn the spotlight away from the human calamities that Iraqis are experiencing on a daily basis, while American taxpayers continue to subsidize Uncle Sam's deadly machinations.
Sometimes the fancy words don't provide the kind of clarity that we need. "Quagmire" may sound sophisticated and realpolitik; many journalists and pundits seem to think so. But that doesn't really get to the essence of the war.
It's not a quagmire.
It's wrong.
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Israel - Salivating At The Thought Of War
Israel, US, EU trying to start civil war in Palestine
Mehrnews.com
02/10/2006
On Sunday, clashes between the supporters of the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and Ismail Haniya's Hamas government left seven people dead and one hundred wounded.
The fighting began in the Gaza Strip and then spread to the PA capital of Ramallah, with several government buildings destroyed and dozens of vehicles set ablaze.
This was one of the rare outbreaks of internecine conflict in nearly 60 years of occupation, during which time the Palestinian nation has regarded the Zionist regime as their only enemy. This attitude is the secret of their unity.
This is the most dangerous stage in the history of the Palestinian nation's struggle because the United States, Israel, and the European Union are making serious efforts to spark a civil war in Palestine.
The West and Israel adopted this strategy when they realized that the victory of Hamas in the parliamentary elections and the formation of a broad-based fundamentalist government would most likely jeopardize the security of the Zionist regime.
Therefore, the U.S., the EU, and even some Arab countries imposed a political and economic boycott on Hamas, and the EU cut its $500 million assistance package to the Palestinians after Hamas won the elections.
This assistance was part of the commitment that the EU assumed after the Oslo Accords of 1993.
Since the cutoff of financial assistance, Hamas has had serious problems in paying the salaries of its workers and providing public services in the occupied territories.
Under U.S. pressure, Arab League member states also cut their financial assistance, which had amounted to about $1 billion, leaving the Palestinian nation to face increasing economic troubles.
Parallel to this pressure, the Zionist regime has been trying to create a rift between the two leading Palestinian parties, Hamas and Fatah, and has also been making efforts to paint the Hamas government as incompetent in order to force the Islamic government to recognize Israel.
To this end, in a provocative move in violation of international law, Israel arrested 28 Palestinian ministers and MPs so the parliament would lose its quorum.
This came at a time when certain Fatah elements were creating insecurity and trouble for the supporters of Hamas in order to push them to make a hasty and unwise response.
In addition, Hamas's insistence on its primary stance, i.e., not recognizing Israel before the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, led Palestinian secular figures to intensify their pressure on the Hamas government to lay the groundwork for its collapse.
All these factors have led to an unprecedented bloody conflict between the supporters of Hamas and Fatah.
If Palestinian leaders do not resolve their differences through a constructive national dialogue at this sensitive juncture, there will definitely be a civil war in the occupied territories in the near future.
In that case, the main winner of this dangerous game will be the Zionist regime and the main loser will be the Palestinian nation.
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Palestinian in-fighting provokes despair, frustration
Reuters
04/10/2006
The bloodshed marks the worst internal fighting in more than a decade, since the Palestinian Authority was founded in 1994. For ordinary Palestinians it is not only a sour reminder of how far they have to go before there is an independent state, it also comes at a time when the vast majority are marking the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a time of solidarity and peace.
Comment: Palestinian in-fighting may be provoking despair and frustration among Palestinians, but the Israeli government is quietly celebrating the achievement of something they have been working towards for many years.
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The threat of civil war in Palestine
Tehran Times Opinion Column
Oct. 3, 2006
By Hassan Hanizadeh
TEHRAN, Oct. 2 (MNA) -- On Sunday, clashes between the supporters of the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and Ismail Haniya's Hamas government left seven people dead and one hundred wounded.
The fighting began in the Gaza Strip and then spread to the PA capital of Ramallah, with several government buildings destroyed and dozens of vehicles set ablaze.
This was one of the rare outbreaks of internecine conflict in nearly 60 years of occupation, during which time the Palestinian nation has regarded the Zionist regime as their only enemy. This attitude is the secret of their unity.
This is the most dangerous stage in the history of the Palestinian nation's struggle because the United States, Israel, and the European Union are making serious efforts to spark a civil war in Palestine.
The West and Israel adopted this strategy when they realized that the victory of Hamas in the parliamentary elections and the formation of a broad-based fundamentalist government would most likely jeopardize the security of the Zionist regime.
Therefore, the U.S., the EU, and even some Arab countries imposed a political and economic boycott on Hamas, and the EU cut its $500 million assistance package to the Palestinians after Hamas won the elections.
This assistance was part of the commitment that the EU assumed after the Oslo Accords of 1993.
Since the cutoff of financial assistance, Hamas has had serious problems in paying the salaries of its workers and providing public services in the occupied territories.
Under U.S. pressure, Arab League member states also cut their financial assistance, which had amounted to about $1 billion, leaving the Palestinian nation to face increasing economic troubles.
Parallel to this pressure, the Zionist regime has been trying to create a rift between the two leading Palestinian parties, Hamas and Fatah, and has also been making efforts to paint the Hamas government as incompetent in order to force the Islamic government to recognize Israel.
To this end, in a provocative move in violation of international law, Israel arrested 28 Palestinian ministers and MPs so the parliament would lose its quorum.
This came at a time when certain Fatah elements were creating insecurity and trouble for the supporters of Hamas in order to push them to make a hasty and unwise response.
In addition, Hamas's insistence on its primary stance, i.e., not recognizing Israel before the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, led Palestinian secular figures to intensify their pressure on the Hamas government to lay the groundwork for its collapse.
All these factors have led to an unprecedented bloody conflict between the supporters of Hamas and Fatah.
If Palestinian leaders do not resolve their differences through a constructive national dialogue at this sensitive juncture, there will definitely be a civil war in the occupied territories in the near future.
In that case, the main winner of this dangerous game will be the Zionist regime and the main loser will be the Palestinian nation.
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Al-Aqsa Brigades: We'll kill Hamas leaders
Reuters
10.03.06
Fatah's armed wing threatens to kill Hamas leaders, including Khaled Mashaal following recent escalation in Gaza internal fighting
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, threatened for the first time on Tuesday to kill Hamas leaders, including exiled political chief Khaled Mashaal.
The threat marked an escalation in the power struggle between Fatah and the ruling Hamas movement after two days of internal fighting in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in which 12 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded.
In a statement sent to Reuters, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said it held Mashaal, Palestinian Interior Minister Saeed Seyam and senior Interior Ministry official Youssef al-Zahar responsible for the deaths.
Comment: Ah yes, the mysterious "al-Aqsa martyrs brigade" has announced it's intention to do the work of the Israeli military, leading us to wonder just who these people really are. We should remember the offer by the Israel law center for visitors to Israel to "meet Israel's Arab agents who infiltrate the terrorist groups and provide real-time intelligence."
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Not an internal Palestinian matter
By Amira Hass
Haaretz
Wed., October 04, 2006
The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called "what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens."
These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since 1991); remove the prisoners' usual means of livelihood; seal off all outlets to the outside world, nearly hermetically; destroy existing means of livelihood by preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing of goods and produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines and hospital supplies; do not bring in fresh food for weeks on end; prevent, for years, the entry of relatives, professionals, friends and others, and allow thousands of people - the sick, heads of families, professionals, children - to be stuck for weeks at the locked gates of the Gaza Strip's only entry/exit.
Steal hundreds of millions of dollars (customs and tax revenues collected by Israel that belong to the Palestinian treasury), so as to force the nonpayment of the already low salaries of most government employees for months; present the firing of homemade Qassam rockets as a strategic threat that can only be stopped by harming women, children and the old; fire on crowded residential neighborhoods from the air and the ground; destroy orchards, groves and fields.
Dispatch planes to frighten the population with sonic booms; destroy the new power plant and force the residents of the closed-off Strip to live without electricity for most of the day for a period of four months, which will most likely turn into a full year - in other words, a year without refrigeration, electric fans, television, lights to study and read by; force them to get by without a regular supply of water, which is dependent on the electricity supply.
It is the good old Israeli experiment called "put them into a pressure cooker and see what happens," and this is one of the reasons why this is not an internal Palestinian matter.
The success of the experiment can be seen in the miasma of desperation that hangs over the Gaza Strip, and in the clan feuding that erupts almost daily there, even more than in the battles between Fatah and Hamas militants. One can only wonder that the feuding is not more frequent, and that some bonds of internal solidarity have been maintained, which saves people from hunger.
In contrast to the feuding between clans, Sunday's battles in Gaza and campaigns of destruction and intimidation, mainly in West Bank cities, were not the result of a momentary loss of control. They are generally viewed as battles between two militias, each of which represents one half of the population, but they were initiated by groups within Fatah to put a few more nails into the coffin of the elected leadership.
The security forces of the Palestinian Authority - in other words, of Fatah, or in still other words, the ones that Mahmoud Abbas is in charge of - are hiding behind the genuine distress and protests of public employees who have not been receiving regular salaries. And they are doing so despite the fact that everyone knows that the failure to pay salaries is not a managerial failure, but is above all due to Israeli policy. These forces were dispatched in order to sow organized anarchy, as taught in the school of Yasser Arafat.
And why is this, too, an Israeli matter? Because those who dispatched these militants have a shared interest with Israel in regressing to a situation in which the Palestinian leadership collaborates with the appearance of holding peace talks, while Israel continues its occupation and the international community sends hush money in the form of salaries for the Palestinian public sector.
And there is another reason why this is also an internal Israeli issue: Whatever the outcome, the Palestinian feuding and the risk of civil war directly affect about 20 percent of Israeli citizens, the Arabs. They affect the Arabs, and also those segments of the Israeli public that have not forgotten that Israel will remain the occupying and ruling force over the Palestinians as long as the goal of establishing a Palestinian state in all of the territories occupied in 1967 is not realized.
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Israeli minister says war may resume
Compiled by Daily Star staff
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Israel's national infrastructure minister said on Tuesday that war with Hizbullah might restart in a few months, and called for an enhancement of the Israeli Army's capacities. Benjamin Ben-Eliezer told Israeli public radio that the deployment of the Lebanese Army along the border with Israel "will not ensure safety for Israel" and that Hizbullah still presents a threat to the Jewish state.
Meanwhile, Britain-based Jane's International Defense Review reported that Hizbullah received direct intelligence support from Syria during the month-long Israeli offensive on Lebanon, using data collected by listening posts jointly operated by Russian and Syrian crews.
Hizbullah was also fed intelligence from new listening posts built on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, which are operated jointly with Iran, it claimed.
Israel has also alleged that Russian anti-tank missiles procured by Syria were reportedly transferred to Hizbullah and used during the war.
Syria's centrality to the collection and transfer of intelligence to Hizbullah is based on separate agreements Damascus signed with Moscow and Tehran on intelligence cooperation, the Haaretz report said, adding that the deal with Russia is much older than the one with Iran, which was signed earlier this year.
The intelligence cooperation agreement between Syria and Iran is part of a broader strategic cooperation accord that was achieved in November 2005 and confirmed during Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinjead's visit to Damascus in January 2006, Haaretz said.
According to the Jane's report, in its agreement with Syria, Iran insisted that no Russian intelligence officers should be allowed access to the new listening posts, in spite of the long-standing deal between Damascus and Moscow.
The Russian Embassy in Beirut was not available for comment. A Hizbullah spokesperson said his party had no comment.
In another development, Hizbullah held a funeral on Tuesday for one of its Lebanese fighters, who was also an American citizen.
Radwan Saleh, 35, was killed in July during the early days of fighting. Hizbullah members found Saleh's body on Sunday in the village of Maroun al-Ras, one of the last areas Israeli troops left in line with a UN resolution to end the war.
His wife and four children, who live between Lebanon and the United States, flew in from the US for his funeral.
Hizbullah sources said that Saleh joined the resistance in 2000. He lived in California with his wife and children until 1998 before moving back to Lebanon.
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Israel incursion in Gaza, as Rice tours ME
UPI
04/10/2006
A Palestinian police spokesman said tank-backed Israeli troops rolled into Beit Lahya, in the north of the strip, in the early morning hours under heavy fire cover from a hovering helicopter gunship Tuesday and took up positions in the area. Similar massing of troops was reported east of Beit Hanoun, also in north Gaza, where a large number of Israeli tanks took up positions on strategic hills two days ago.
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Olmert to tell Rice he fears an 'existential threat against Israel'
By Aluf Benn, Yoav Stern and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz CorrespondentsLast
update - 11:03 04/10/2006
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, meeting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, is to reiterate a message he gave visiting members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, that "for the first time in my life I feel that there is an existential threat against the State of Israel."
Rice is due to arrive Wednesday for a visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Olmert is expected to stress in talks with Rice that the United States must play a central role in countering the threat posed by Iran and its nuclear ambitions.
Rice will meet Olmert in the evening, after talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.
On Thursday, Rice will meet Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, and is then expected to leave Israel - possibly for an unscheduled visit to Beirut.
Rice is visiting Israel following a meeting Tuesday in Cairo with the foreign ministers of six Gulf States, Egypt and Jordan, in a mini-summit that was meant to coalesce moderate Arab states in the region.
At the end of the summit, Rice called for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
This is the first meeting of this forum, which has raised many questions among Arab states regarding its purpose. "This is not a coalition against anybody," said Rice.
The Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, said that no differences of opinion emerged during the meeting, since all the participants are friendly states.
"Our purpose is peace in the region, stability and development. The aim is the establishment of a Palestinian state," he added.
During her meeting with Abbas in Ramallah today, Rice is expected to discuss Palestinian unity government talks.
Rice will impress upon the Palestinian leader that the U.S. is firm on the three conditions posed by the Quartet in return for recognition of any such government. These include the recognition of Israel, the relinquishing of violence and the acceptance of accords previously signed between Israel and the Palestinians.
Rice's tour of the region takes place amid growing criticism regarding her conduct as National Security Adviser in the Bush administration, prior to 9/11. A new book by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post suggests that she ignored a warning that Al-Qaida planned to carry out a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
According to political sources in Jerusalem, there were reservations among administration insiders whether Rice should visit Israel and the Palestinian Authority at a time when the main purpose of her tour of the area is to foment a unified front of moderates in the Middle East against Iran.
These views stemmed from the assessment that the current political climate on the Israeli-Palestinian front is not conducive to any talks or a breakthrough.
However, the conclusion was that skipping over Jerusalem and Ramallah would be perceived negatively among the same moderates, at a time when the U.S. is trying to restore confidence in its regional role.
Rice and Israel's leadership are expected to discuss the Iranian threat, the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701 in Lebanon, and the problematic domestic situation in the Palestinian Authority.
According to political sources in Jerusalem, it will be difficult to seriously discuss "steps for strengthening the position of Abbas" at a time when there are violent clashes between Fatah and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Judging from statements made by Olmert in a meeting with visiting members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Jerusalem yesterday, Israel, like the Bush administration, is focused on Iran.
The senators informed Olmert of their visit to Jordan and stressed the need for the formation of a "coalition of moderates," in the region against the threat of a more powerful Iran.
During a meeting with Peretz, the senators were interested to hear about ways in which the results of the Lebanon war could affect the situation in Iraq.
Peretz stressed the difference between "facts and symbols."
"Obviously the fact is that we have an advantage. Hezbollah paid dearly, and will consider very carefully before attacking Israel again," he told the visiting senators.
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Palestinian murdered in Israeli raid on Gaza
thenews.com
04/10/2006
Naji Bardawil, a 22-year-old civilian, was seriously wounded during the raid on the workshop next to his house in Khan Yunis and later died in hospital, they said. Another person in the house was also wounded in the raid.
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Israeli warplanes strike on Gaza Strip targets
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-04 06:55:58
GAZA, Oct. 3 (Xinhua) -- Israeli fighting jets carried out late on Tuesday night two separate airstrikes on two targets in northern and southeast Gaza Strip wounding five people, medics and security sources reported.
The sources said that an Israeli F16 jet destroyed by missiles a house east of the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis. The house belongs to an activist member in Hamas movement's armed wing, known as al-Qassam Brigades.
Eyewitnesses said the house was totally destroyed, but no injuries had been reported, adding that the owner of the house, the father of the Hamas militant was notified by the Israeli army to evacuate the house shortly before it was targeted.
Meanwhile, five Palestinian militants were injured earlier on Tuesday night in northern Gaza Strip after an Israeli reconnaissance drone targeted their cars by two missiles, said Palestinian doctors.
Palestinian security sources said the militants were members of Islamic Jihad (Holy War) and Fatah movements, adding that their cars were targeted as they were on their way to launch homemade rockets at Israel.
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Building in illegal Israeli outposts stepped-up during Lebanon invasion
Haaretz
04/10/2006
Peace Now organization reports that building in illegal outposts in the West Bank was accelerated during the war in Lebanon. 31 outposts have seen expansion and infrastructure works and 12 outposts have even seen the construction of permanent buildings, according to Peace Now's bi-annual report. Peace Now leaders now demand the Defense Minister Amir Peretz live up to his promise to evacuate illegal outposts.
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America Has Psychological Problems
Bush vows to improve safety for American children
www.chinaview.cn 2006-10-04 04:09:35
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush said on Tuesday that his administration will strive to improve safety for American children a day after five girls were shot to death in a Pennsylvania school.
Addressing an elementary school in Stockton, California, Bush expressed concern over a spate of school shootings across the country.
"Being at this school reminds us we have a special responsibility to protect our children," Bush said.
"One of the most important jobs of those involved with schools and government is to make sure that our children are safe," he noted.
Bush said he was "saddened and deeply concerned, like a lot of other citizens around the country, about the school shootings that took place in Pennsylvania and Colorado and Wisconsin."
In a bloody case that shocked the nation, on Monday a milk truck driver barricaded himself in a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania and shot 11 girls "execution-style", killing five of them. The man then killed himself.
The massacre took place five days after a man took over a classroom in Colorado and killed a 16-year-old girl and himself. On Friday in Wisconsin, a student killed the principal of a high school.
Bush said he had instructed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to hold a meeting Tuesday with experts to determine how the federal government can help state and local authorities improve school safety.
"Our schoolchildren should never fear (for) their safety when they enter into a classroom," the president said.
Comment: More evidence of just how sick American society has become: school shootings and the hollow words of the US president.
"Our schoolchildren should never fear (for) their safety when they enter into a classroom," the president said.
That an American president has to say these words indicates that the process of ponerization of society has gone so far, it may not be able to be brought back to its senses without bloodshed and violence. It is clear from the Patriot Act up to last week's 'legalizing' of torture, not to mention the horrific US/Israeli orchestrated attacks on 9/11, that the Bush gang will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. They will crush any and all dissent.
It is only starting. It's going to get much worse. Unless, of course, there are too few critical and clear-headed Americans left.
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US-government-peddled vaccine proven to cause diabetes in children
Vaccines.net
04/10/2006
Baltimore, July 31, 2002: The prestigious peer reviewed journal Autoimmunity published data this week by Dr. J. Bart Classen, an immunologist at Classen Immunotherapies, and David Carey Classen, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah, proving a causal relationship between the hemophilus vaccine and the development of insulin dependent diabetes. The data is particular disturbing because it indicates the risks of the vaccine exceeds the benefit. The findings are expected to allow may diabetics to receive compensation for their injuries and lead to safer immunization.
The study followed over 100,000 children which had been randomized in a large clinical trial to receive 1 or 4 doses of the hemophilus vaccine and over 100,000 unvaccinated children.
After 7 years the group receiving 4 doses of the vaccine had an statistically significant 26% elevated rate of diabetes, or an extra 54 cases/100,000 children, compared to children who did not receive the vaccine. By contrast immunization against hemophilus is expected to prevent only 7 deaths and 7 to 26 cases of permanent disability per 100,000 children immunized. The study showed that almost all of the extra cases of diabetes caused by the vaccine occurred between 3-4 years after vaccination. Furthermore the paper provides new data proving the vaccine causes diabetes in mice and reviews data from 3 smaller human studies, which all had similar results to the current study, but were too small to reach statistical significance.
"Our results conclusively prove there is a causal relationship between immunization schedules and diabetes. We believe immunization schedules can be made safer" stated Dr. Bart Classen.
The Classens' research is already becoming widely accepted. An independent group of researchers working at a prestigious Swedish medical center recently published a paper (Ann. N.Y. Acad Sci. 958: 293-296, 2002) supporting their findings. Last year doctors attending an conference of the American College for Advancement in Medicine overwhelmingly agreed that vaccines can cause chronic diseases such as diabetes. For the latest information on the effects of vaccines on insulin dependent diabetes and other autoimmune diseases visit the Vaccine Safety Web site
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Man Dies After Shot by Taser
POSTED: 10:37 am EDT October 1, 2006
UPDATED: 12:24 pm EDT October 2, 2006
MADISON TOWNSHIP, Ohio -- Madison Township police in Lake County suspended their use of Taser guns after a man died Friday.
Joseph Kinney, 36, died after officers shocked him with Taser guns several times, police said.
Police were called after receiving reports that Kinney was causing a disturbance and was allegedly on drugs. He had a criminal history in the township, police said.
When officers approached, police said Kinney fought the officers even after being shocked by the Taser gun.
Officials said Kinney continued to struggle until he became unresponsive. He was pronounced dead at Geneva Memorial Hospital at about 10 p.m.
Kinney's friend said two officers shocked him for more than a minute.
"When the guy's on the ground, you could have cuffed him. They could have used pepper spray. They could have done a number of things, but to use these lethal weapons in a manner like that," said Matthew Webb.
He said the officers should be suspended and investigated.
The autopsy is done but the cause of death is pending on the toxicology report.
Police officers were given Taser guns less than a month ago. The assistant police chief said the department has suspended using them until they can be sure they are working properly.
The Lake County Sheriff's Office will investigate the death.
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Flashback: Tasers - Tools Of Terrorism: Legalized For Use In Instantaneous Tortures And Random Executions Of Civilians
Mathew Kristin Kiel
August 31, 2005
It also seems that tasers remove all empathy from the officers who use them. It may be that most officers have been so thoroughly convinced of the taser's benign nature they simply fail to understand that it can harm anyone, not even a small child. It is nearly certain that they do not consider it a weapon of last or next to the last resort, but of first and only choice in conflicts with even minimally recalcitrant members of the public. They do not hesitate to use tasers immediately and repeatedly. This is insanity. It would be immediately recognized as insane behaviour if the weapon being used so frequently, arbitrarily and dangerously by police officers were a cudgel or a whip, for example. But there is a peculiar and lethal blind spot in the public's attention and consciousness regarding tasers. Yet tasers are frightening technological devices that deliver a massive dose of artificial lightning to the victim's body and brain.
Before reading this article, please click on the web link below. Listen to the screams of the young woman who was tasered by 2, burly, fully armed Boynton Beach, Florida, police officers, during a routine traffic stop. Her "crime?" She had refused to get out of her vehicle immediately, when so ordered by the officers. She can be heard clearly, in the video, attempting to finish informing a contact on her cell phone, her mother, as to her exact location and circumstances. That is an important point in this incident for a number of reasons. Rather than to allow her the few seconds, or perhaps a minute or two at most, to calm down and finish her call, the officers tasered her. Not once, twice.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/video/taser_video3a.html
How many seconds of her screams were you able to endure before having to stop the video or turn off the sound? 5 seconds? 10? 30? The entire video? The answer to that will probably be shortest for those who have experienced the greatest amounts of physical pain and longest for those who have never known dire pain up close, ugly and personal, from the inside out. But, think about this: The officers who inflicted that brutal torture upon her not only felt no empathy for the indisputable agony they'd caused, they tasered her a second time for the "offence" of being unable to place her hands behind her back. Yet the officers had to have known that their first shot had rendered her completely unable to initiate or control any movements of her body.
It is also necessary, in an effort to clarify the issues in this incident, to provide some background on the circumstances in which Ms. Goodwin found herself when she was pulled over for a traffic violation. Another serious problem with tasers is the detrimental effects they seem to have on the abilities of the law enforcement personnel wielding them to use sound judgment as to when, and when not, to use a potentially lethal weapon against a civilian who is not in the act of committing a violent crime and not attempting to flee. The background in Ms. Goodwin's case provides a striking example of the apparent loss of reason and judgment present in taser armed law enforcement officers.
A growing number of women in the U.S., including several Florida residents, have been raped by one or 2 men posing as cops making routine traffic stops. This common criminal MO has been used by rapists in every area of the country, and several women were killed in the midwest, along Interstates 80 and 90, during the 1990s. The fact that rapes and rape-murders by police, and/or police impostors, have been happening since the 1970s should be common knowledge to every active duty law enforcement officer in this country. Women's rape support groups and self defense organisations, including those affiliated with the national YWCA, have long recommended that women driving alone, when ordered to pull over by a patrol car should continue to drive slowly, safely and carefully until reaching a police station, firehouse, ambulance company or other municipal office, rather than stopping at once.
In addition, women who have cell phones are advised to contact a friend or family member and report their exact location and circumstances to someone they can trust to follow up on the call. They are advised do so before either opening the window or getting out of the vehicle. These guidelines have been sent to police departments around the country, and should be common knowledge to all police officers by now. Ms. Goodwin was following exactly the recommended personal safety guidelines for any woman driving alone when she called to report her situation to her mother.
But the Boynton Beach Police Department is evidently unaware of even that much factual information regarding the rights and needs of the public they are allegedly sworn to "protect and serve." Not coincidentally, among traffic stop taser incidents thus far reported, all but one victim was a woman, one of whom was 8 months pregnant. Never before have police in routine traffic stops even considered using weapons against a pregnant woman, or women in general, nor against children, elderly and disabled people, but such incidents are now becoming routine for law enforcement and security personnel armed with tasers.
Other police tasering victims in the past months include a 75 year old woman who was a confused visitor in a nursing home, a 13 year old girl who was yelling at her mother, an epileptic man in need of medication, and an unruly 6 year old child in a school principal's office, tasered to supposedly "keep him from hurting himself" with a piece of broken glass he was wielding. There is obviously some essential element of the plain old common sense police officers once used in their jobs that is being forgotten as soon as a taser is in hand. They fail to realize that the taser is, in fact, a weapon, and that tasers can kill. This is largely due to the product "information" they have received about tasers from the manufacturer. The only taser product information available, as yet, comes from Taser International, Inc., and without benefit of any actual scientific and medical studies of tasers' actions and effects having ever been done.
A basic psychological element tasers seem to cancel is the self restraint of police officers using them. A fundamental and important question comes to mind here: What would they have done, in all of these situations, had they NOT had tasers? Tasers are being used indiscriminately, with alarming and growing frequency, in situations where there is no justification for the use of a weapon, and where there would have been a far less violent, or even lethal outcome, had no taser been available. The last point holds especially true for all of the past year's 103 taser related deaths. Had the officers involved not had tasers, it is most likely that all of those victims would still be alive.
It also seems that tasers remove all empathy from the officers who use them. It may be that most officers have been so thoroughly convinced of the taser's benign nature they simply fail to understand that it can harm anyone, not even a small child. It is nearly certain that they do not consider it a weapon of last or next to the last resort, but of first and only choice in conflicts with even minimally recalcitrant members of the public. They do not hesitate to use tasers immediately and repeatedly. This is insanity. It would be immediately recognized as insane behaviour if the weapon being used so frequently, arbitrarily and dangerously by police officers were a cudgel or a whip, for example. But there is a peculiar and lethal blind spot in the public's attention and consciousness regarding tasers. Yet tasers are frightening technological devices that deliver a massive dose of artificial lightning to the victim's body and brain.
In the video of Ms. Goodwin's tasering, the utter loss of reason by the police officers is striking. They DO know that the taser's effect is to make all voluntary movement and muscle control impossible. That is why and how it "stuns" someone. That information, including witnessing the effect, even shooting each other with their tasers and experiencing it for themselves, is an integral part of their training in the use of these weapons. Yet, they tasered this woman a second time for her "disobedience" in "refusing" to put her hands behind her back, when she was, in fact, absolutely incapacitated from doing that by the very taser blast they'd just given her. That is completely irrational behaviour. Their logical, reasoning minds had ceased to function at all. They had ceased to be human at that point, and were then acting/reacting on the purely "lizard brain" level. They had reverted to instinctual, predatory, hunting pack mentation and behaviour.
WHAT WOULD THESE POLICE OFFICERS HAVE DONE IF THEY HAD NOT BEEN ARMED WITH TASERS? Whatever it was, that is what and as they should have done, and never even thought to do, not only in Ms. Goodwin's case, but in all of the previously cited incidents of unjustifiable taser use against innocent civilians. Somehow, once armed with a taser, a police officer becomes worse than trigger happy. It becomes a literal "shoot first and ask questions," or even think at all, "later" reflex for them to use these weapons. The only problem being that there were 103 dead, innocent victims of tasers in the past year who would be alive here and now if the police officers who shot them had not been armed with tasers.
It is clear that the officer who fired the first time, as displayed in his gestures, voice and bearing, was angered by Ms. Goodwin's defiance of his order to leave her car at once. What really triggered the first tasering was his affronted ego. Next, it was her defenseless agony both of the officers reacted to in the second attack upon her. If you will consider the way a cat goes after a crippled and cornered mouse, then compare that classic predatory behavior with the actions of these two Boynton Beach cops, you will come to the realization that they were predators hotly pursuing and enjoying the "killing" of their chosen prey. While that dynamic may or may not be present in the tasering of other victims by police, it is the dynamic in this one incident, with these two police officers.
Whatever the full psychological underpinnings of the ease with which the police in this country and elsewhere are using tasers, there is an element of "gotcha" that has entered the equation. It is probably subconscious, and was previously kept in check by an awareness that all of the weapons available to them, i.e. nightstick, gun, mace, could and would cause injuries to their victims. Police officers, prior to being armed with tasers, knew that they themselves would be held accountable if they used any of their weapons in a trivial matter and caused injury to an innocent civilian. That was the check on their behaviour, the previous restraint which is now obviously missing. With the threat of their own personal accountability and probable punishment removed, the officers strike out at will, on a whim and whenever it suits them. And, thus far, no police department or court has told them to stop it, or yet held a single officer accountable for a taser fatality, let alone for the unnecessary use of a taser.
The blame for the rising numbers of taser deaths, and the rising frequency of taser use, lies squarely in two camps, both of which are profiting handsomely, in different ways, from the cancerous spread of the use of tasers. The owners of the company that makes the devices are getting filthy rich, and the police who use them are literally getting a free license to torture and potentially kill anyone who even dares to rub them the wrong way, let alone to "argue" with them or refuse to obey them immediately and in every slightest regard. Big payoffs indeed, for both sides.
Police armed with tasers think that they've been given the perfect means to "get" everyone who defies their authority even slightly, by using a weapon that will not result in harm to their targets. That is how the taser has been and is being billed, as a totally harmless weapon cops can use freely, anywhere, anytime, on anyone, with no adverse or lasting consequences to the victims beyond the temporary, all encompassing pain and paralysis it inflicts.
However, in the horrendous "torture guidelines" that brought us Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and worse, one of the criteria cited, in an absurdly narrow definition of what does constitute torture, is "producing pain sufficient to cause bodily injury, organ failure or death." Thus, it has clearly been long known and well documented that pain alone, if severe enough, can and will kill. Is it the agony inflicted by tasers, an essential ingredient in their much touted "stopping power," that is randomly killing people?
The amount of pain necessary to reduce any human being to the horrified screams of Ms. Goodwin, after the first taser blast, is at least equal to that of having several major bones broken, badly, all at once. Only those who have experienced that amount of pain for themselves will be able to fully appreciate the horror of that recording. An exponentially worse level of pain is required to reduce a human being to the hopeless, uncontrollable type and cadence of moaning semi-screams being heard after she was hit with the second taser jolt. By the time any human being has been reduced to the second stage, he or she would gladly die to escape the agony. Again, only those who have experienced it themselves will know the truth of it. Those who have not had the intimate experience of pain severe enough to cause such responses should fervently hope that they never will.
The sounds you heard in that video are not those of a hysterical woman over- reacting to a fairly mild pain. They are the sounds of a human being who has just been psychologically and emotionally destroyed by a torture so profoundly shattering that she will never be the same again. She will have PTSD from it, and suffer damages in mind and spirit for the rest of her life. It will either make her or break her, in terms of her personal development over all the rest of the years of her life. Either way, SHE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN. Neither will any victim of a taser.
She has lost the last vestiges of her innocence: Her belief that there is any safety for her in this world; her innate certainty that bad things won't happen to her, personally; her naiveté in not being aware of her own vulnerability to every possible ill, terror and suffering that can afflict a human being; her basic sense of worth, of being deserving anything good; her dignity and sense of personal privacy. All those things and more were annihilated with the taser's total and violent destruction of her body and brain's neuro-synaptic impulses and connections. The taser inflicts a lifetime's worth of punishment upon its victims in a very few minutes. Make no mistake of that. The pain tasers inflict is, all alone, "sufficient to cause bodily injury, organ failure or death."
There is a solid and growing body of medical evidence to support the contention that the electrical shock delivered by a taser can and does kill, based upon the overall health, age, sex, race, galvanic skin conduction status and serum electrolyte balance of the victims. There were 103 taser deaths in the U.S and Canada in the past year, and the one, most obvious cause of death failing to be considered by coroners is the systemic neurological shock and trauma to the brain that can result in death from pain alone, if the pain is severe enough. It is directly because of the advertising and promotional materials distributed by the manufacturer of tasers that this very real and probable cause of death for taser victims has been overlooked, or even deliberately denied and hidden.
Those pamphlets and promotional videos say, over and over, as a litany - begging the remark that the makers of tasers "doth protest overly much" - that the electrical shock of a taser does not produce severe enough pain to cause harm. That is a blatant lie. Any injury that inflicts so much pain as to render an adult unable to control their own muscles and causes the bladder to void from the stress, induces the most extreme degree of pain possible. The taser incapacitates the target through the induction of systemic neurological shock and neurological pain.
It shorts out the body's electro-cerebral impulses with a 50,000 volt blast of artificial lightning. That is the very definition of a serious electrical injury to the nerves and brain. Anyone who received the same amount and kind of electric shock from any source other than a taser would be taken to a hospital at once, treated for acute electrical shock and placed under observation, at the very least, for the next 24 to 72 hours. Guarding a patient against sudden cardiac arrest and/or sudden respiratory arrest after he or she has had a major electrical shock, or been hit by lightning, is necessary for a minimum of 24 hours and the danger is not entirely past for 3 to 5 days.
Everyone knows that electric shocks are dangerous. A household electrical socket, in the US and Canada, will only deliver 110 volts, but there are very few people who would consider getting seriously shocked with even household current to be "harmless." Electrical shocks most often injure the autonomic nervous system, that part of the brain and nervous system that controls involuntary functions such as breathing, respiration, temperature, pulse and blood pressure, all of which can fluctuate wildly, even fatally out of control, without warning, for many hours after a major electrical shock.
The primary criteria used to determine whether any kind of electrical shock, other than from a taser, was strong enough to recommend that a person be placed under observation for a day or more is whether the shock was strong enough for the victim to have been knocked unconscious, to have been temporarily paralysed, or to have caused the patient severe pain accompanied, even briefly, by uncontrollable muscle spasms and twitching.
These are exactly the results of a taser's shock, and the means by which it "stops" the target. Tasers have been aggressively, and very profitably marketed, by their inventor and manufacturer, Tom Smith, founder and CEO of Taser International, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona, as a risk free, non-lethal restraint device. There are at least 129 taser related deaths since the introduction of tasers in 2001, 103 of them in the past year alone. Mr. Smith is either not telling the whole truth about the danger of tasers or else, as is entirely possible, he believes his own hype about their safety and is in denial of their dangerously lethal reality.
Clearly, there is something directly related to the nature of the taser itself that is the cause of these deaths, and no research to find out exactly what a taser does to the human body has ever been done. NONE. Not one single study.
In strictly medical terms, it is never "safe" or "risk free" to provide the human brain/body system with 50,000 volts electrical shock. That is a massive shock, whether such a huge amount of voltage is delivered at 0.01 amp, 1 amp or 50 amps. The voltage alone is sufficient to potentially cause brain and neurological damage, cardiac arrhythmia or arrest, temporary respiratory paralysis and even death. And, exactly as with any other source of serious electrical shock, the deeper neurological or cerebral injuries won't necessarily appear in the first few minutes after the shock was inflicted.
The taser's mechanism of action in the human body is akin to that of being hit by natural lightning. It electrically creates a systemic cerebral, neuroleptic and synaptic shock. Those who display its "harmlessness" by voluntarily allowing themselves to be shocked are playing a deadly game of Russian Roulette. In fact, since the effects may be cumulative over time, or delayed several years in their onset, not uncommon with neurological damages of all kinds, the lasting, lifelong neurological and/or cognitive impairments will come a few years down the road. Those who have volunteered for any previous taser jolts would be well advised to stop doing so at once. The lives they save may be their own.
Someone who has been shot with a taser a dozen times and lived to tell the macho tale may just happen to have a slight potassium deficiency the next time, perhaps from sweating heavily on a hot day, or from hard exercise. Even worse, he might still be covered with sweat. If so, then the next voluntary taser shot will very probably kill him. That is just how unpredictable and random the factors determining who will live and who will die from any given use of a taser really are.
Galvanic skin conduction is vastly increased by the presence of sweat on the skin: The heavier the sweat, the greater the electrical conductivity of the skin. A person whose body is entirely soaked with sweat will offer zero resistance to the taser's voltage, from head to toe, and, no matter where the taser's barbs strike, the voltage will be freely, uniformly distributed over every inch of the body that is covered by the sweat.
Sweat is loaded with electrolytes, such as potassium, sodium and calcium, all of which are electro-conductive metals. It is even more highly conductive of electricity than water. Sweating will render a polygraph test unreadable. Sweat filled pores and their fully active sweat glands may also provide a direct conduit for the conduction of a taser's voltage into the interior of the body and directly into the root nerves, lymphatic and endocrine systems thereby.
When a body covered with sweat is shocked by a taser, or other electrical source, the actions of the sweat in enhancing the punch delivered by the voltage is directly analogous to the function of the wet sponge placed under the helmet of a condemned person in the electric chair to assure maximum delivery of electricity into the brain. The sweat conducts the taser's 50,000 volts directly and deeply into the entire body, including the sweat soaked head, thus the brain. The result of tasering a sweating person quite possibly is death by electrocution, plain, simple and ugly.
The actions of a taser's voltage within the human body, the kind and quantity of the pain it creates and the way in which it produces that pain, are the real causes of death. The factors determining a taser victim's survival are: a) How much of that voltage gets delivered; b) How deeply it is conducted into the body; c) Where it goes in the body; and d) How much voltage a specific individual can withstand, at the level of the brain and neuro-synaptic pathways in the central and peripheral nervous systems, at a given moment, on any given day. There is simply no way to know who will die except by who does. Any new medication with the unpredictable kill rate already demonstrated by tasers would have been banned by now. The taser is a highly dangerous weapon that has been falsely labeled and sold to law enforcement and the public as "safe."
This is NOT the harmless stun gun of the Star Trek "phaser" variety that it is purported to be. It could kill any victim, any and every time it is used. For the American public now facing taser armed cops, with all of the psychological restraints against using a weapon removed by the taser's presence, every traffic stop or other law enforcement confrontation has become a "crap shoot" and a potential immediate sentence of death by electrocution, cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest or systemic shock. Whenever anyone fires the leads of a taser into someone's flesh there is no possible way to measure all of the variables involved so as to know whether that individual is going to die. It all depends on a wide number of factors, unique to each and every individual and variable from one hour to the next within each person's body. There is simply NO means for any police officer, or anyone firing or facing a taser, to be sure that the person being shot will not die.
The taser has been aggressively promoted as a "safe, harmless, nonviolent restraint and personal defense device." I find that to be a somewhat misleading representation for any weapon that leaves its victims screaming in sudden and potentially lethal agony. The only question remaining is not whether tasers are deadly weapons, but how many innocent people will have to be killed by tasers before action is taken to prohibit their indiscriminate use, if not by banning them entirely, at the very least by putting them under the same use guidelines and ownership restraints, and in the same category of lethality, as handguns.
Already, in an effort to gag the press over printing the facts about taser deaths, Taser International is suing Gannet Publishing, the owners of USA Today, for libel over their reporting on taser deaths in the U.S. and Canada, and for raising the same questions about the taser's alleged safety as are asked here. I have gone USA Today one better and presented some of the biomedical realities of what the taser actually does to the human body. There are abundant, solid, scientific and medical facts available to make Taser International's claims of the weapon's safety somewhat dubious, at best. The one fact that not even Taser International can deny is that the taser inflicts an instantaneous electrical shock severe enough to render the victim helpless to move or resist. That is what they claim in their own marketing brochures. It is their biggest selling point.
I have spent 30 years closely studying what science and medicine have as yet learned about the substances and structures of nerves, the brain, the spinal cord, how they work, and how pain works on all of the various systems in the human body, particularly its effects upon the cardiovascular and endocrine systems where pain causes the greatest changes and damages anywhere outside of the brain and central nervous system. The first thing to understand about pain is that it is the body's primary means to alert the brain to the fact that something is wrong somewhere. Pain is necessary to our survival. Because of that, the brain is hardwired to respond to pain with maximum speed and force, commensurate with a given pain's severity and speed of onset.
It is, for example, not the disease of leprosy itself that causes disfigurations, such as fingers or toes rotting away and falling off, as the myths and ancient texts have it. Rather, leprosy gradually kills off the sensory nerves, central and peripheral, especially in the outer extremities and the face. Its victims become unable to feel any pain when they are injured, thus ignoring minor wounds until they've become infected, often to the point of gangrene, resulting in the lass of fingers, toes, noses to severe infection. Without the essential warning of pain, there would be no way for us to know when we've been injured, or when a disease has attacked an internal organ, or if the heart is getting too little blood from a blocked artery. Pain, in its rightful place serves one of the most life- saving of functions for us all.
However, there is, innate to the brain's functions, a "ratings system" for pains. There are various alert levels specifically related to the severity of pain. The more pain there is, and the more sudden its onset, the greater the alarm the brain sends out. In the event of an abrupt pain so severe that it is "of a kind sufficient to cause bodily injury, organ failure or death," every system in the body is put into an imperative, reflexive emergency reaction/response mode.
Some functions, such as circulation of blood to the extremities, urine production, liver enzyme and bile production, blood sugar production and protein metabolism, digestion and peristalsis are shut down entirely or greatly slowed. Others, such as blood pressure, adrenaline production and release, heart rate, sweating, electrolyte metabolism, respiration, serotonin cascades and endorphin releases in the brain, are turned up to the maximum very briefly. All of the stops are pulled out because the brain has assumed that the severity and suddenness of the pain indicates that the body has been injured badly enough to possibly die.
Shock inevitably follows the first alert stage, after a period of time as short as 5 minutes to as long as several hours. Shock, syncope, is the second phase of the basic severe injury survival mechanisms hardwired into the brain/body system. First comes the hyper-charging reaction to help you run away or fight back, and next comes the shock to make you be still after your escape or victory. It is a survival strategy that is in place in the base brain of every vertebrate life form on Earth, from the frog to the human being.
In systemic shock, the body is placed into a state that is almost a natural form of suspended animation. All life support functions are abruptly shut down to the most minimal levels, except for the heart rate, which sometimes will stay as high as double the normal rate for hours. Blood flow is taken away from the brain, skeletal muscles, face, arms and legs, then concentrated in the heart, lungs and internal organs, in a reflex to minimise potential bleeding and prevent movements and agitation. Shock, left untreated, can be fatal. The brain, once shock has set in, cannot necessarily reset or restart the body's normal balance without external stimulation, especially not if there are continuing stressors, such as would ld naturally be the case with someone who had been tasered then jailed. the stress of being in jail would ld deepen the degree of shock by causing the continuing release of higher than normal amounts of adrenaline.
This may have been the case in several taser victims who died while in transport to a jail, or in a jail cell in the hours immediately following being tasered. Since the officers have no way of knowing that the taser's blast induces severe enough pain to cause shock, they wouldn't know to take taser victims to the hospital, as a matter of course, as is the case with gunshot victims. If, in fact, the dead taser victims had all been wounded by a conventional police pistols, their chances for survival would have been far better because they'd have received immediate medical care. At the very least, the same policy of transporting taser victims to hospitals, not jails, must be put into place. Being shot is being shot, whether with a taser or a firearm.
An abrupt drop in blood sugar is also induced by severe pain and can be sufficient to induce an endogenous insulin shock in someone with no history of either diabetes or hypoglycemia. In a person who suffers from hypoglycemia, blood sugar that tends to often run or suddenly drop too low, a taser's shock produces extreme, sudden pain that could induce a fatal hypoglycemic episode. It is estimated that for every person known to have hypoglycemia there may be as many as ten more undiagnosed sufferers. Since it is far more common in women than men, this is but one of several factors that might account for why more women than men have died from being shot by police armed with tasers.
Neither Taser International nor any independent product testing group has done studies on the short or long term after effects of being hit by a taser's charge. Not one controlled study yet, in a clinical setting, where hourly post shocking blood tests, neurological exams, EEGs and EKGs, brain scans, galvanic skin response measurements, mental orientation, memory and other tests could be conducted. There have been no neurological tests done on a broad range of victims immediately following tasering, and no studies done to determine precisely where and how in the nervous system the taser's effects are created, or how far they extend throughout the body, or what changes about those effects in the presence of sweat, or what the specific cardiac responses to them might be. No one has even asked the question, let alone done the tests, to determine if, as is nearly certain, taser victims do go into shock.
With the increasing number of inexplicable deaths from taser use, these questions MUST be asked. Unless we force the issue, things are only going to get worse, much worse. Tasers are spreading throughout all levels of law enforcement personnel like a cancer, from the smallest local constables offices up to the US Secret Service and the FBI. The social and psychological ramifications of this are enormous and ominous.
My advice, should you find yourself on the business end of a taser, do not anger the cop. The pain tasers inflict is, based upon my study of their effects and of how they do work in the human body, "sufficient to cause bodily injury, organ failure or death." Do anything and everything to avoid having a police officer fire that taser at you, because there is absolutely no guarantee that it will not kill you, or else induce permanent psychological trauma and even neurological injuries that could be extremely painful and debilitating.
For now, domestic terrorism has arrived for each and every human being who faces a taser wielding police or other officer. Those who have them will use them: anywhere, anytime, on anyone, without provocation and without any rational need or justification for their use. There is nothing but a guarantee of unbearable, possibly lethal agony to come from attempting to reason with anyone bearing a taser. And it is obvious that tasers have removed the abilities to use reason and to behave rationally from the minds of those who use them.
This is the inevitable, predictable result of giving police officers a weapon that is sold and promoted by its inventor and makers as "completely safe and harmless" for use against anyone, anytime, in any manner, under any conditions, when, in fact, there have never been any objective scientific and medical studies done to either prove or disprove the safety of tasers. However, there is a substantial and rapidly growing body of evidence, found in the dead bodies of taser victims, to indicate that these weapons are far from being so "safe for all law enforcement and personal protection uses" as their manufacturer has claimed.
In exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that the pharmaceutical companies have been held accountable and made to pay for the deaths caused by their falsely labeling as "safe when used as prescribed" medications that have subsequently turned out to be intermittently and unpredictably deadly, it is high time for the families of the victims of tasers to seek redress against Taser International, Inc. of Scottsdale, Arizona. As yet there has been no public information made widely available about tasers' many and potentially deadly adverse effects. Hopefully that has now begun to change.
In the meantime, civilians beware. Tasers have given a license to law enforcement members to torture anyone who crosses their paths, at will, for no reason at all other than that they feel like it. If you see a taser pointed at yourself, surrender, in every way and regard possible, immediately, and do not attempt to move or speak except in response to questions orders. RESPOND TO ANY TASER ARMED LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER WITH IMMEDIATE AND ABSOLUTE OBEDIENCE, AS IF YOUR SURVIVAL DEPENDED UPON IT. IT MAY, AND THE ONLY WAY TO FIND OUT IS TO RISK YOUR OWN BRUTALLY PAINFUL DEATH BY ELECTROCUTION.
The psychological and physical harm you risk, and the strong possibility you might be killed, by not obeying a cop with a taser, is a far greater form of damage than merely being cuffed and arrested. Even if you are utterly innocent, do not dare to argue with any police or other law enforcement officer wielding a taser. Do not attempt to reason, because, with the advent of tasers, the stakes are much too high, and the capacity for reason is hugely diminished or gone from police officers armed with tasers. It is your life that hangs in the balance now. All of our lives hang in the balance now, with every law enforcement encounter we face, no matter how trivial.
I assure you, no one wants to know what kind of pain it takes to make a human being sound like Ms. Goodwin did in that video, nor to have to live with the psychological trauma that it will leave with them for the rest of their lives. No one deserves to be electrocuted by the roadside for a speeding ticket either, and that has already come to pass. Nor should people have to live under the constant threat that at any moment, in any kind of interaction with any officer of the police or government, that kind of brutal pain can and will be inflicted upon them, without one second's hesitation, and with their potential death added to the threat.
However, that is the tragic reality that has come to us all with the advent of tasers. Never have we been so endangered, in the course of living law abiding lives and going about our routine daily activities, as we are now endangered by police officers armed with highly destructive and potentially lethal weapons that they believe are utterly harmless. No drug "epidemic," no "crime wave," no "threat of terrorism", nor any other possible harm committed in the course of a criminal or illegal activity has ever put the average citizen at so much risk of injury or death as the widespread use of tasers by law enforcement agencies now does.
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Flashback: Amnesty International: US Taser Deaths Up
By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press
Tue Mar 28, 2:53 AM ET
WASHINGTON - The number of people who have died in the U.S. after being shocked by police stun guns is growing rapidly, Amnesty International says in a report that catalogs 156 in the past five years.
Deaths after the use of Taser stun guns have risen from three in 2001 to 61 last year, the international human rights group said. Fourteen have died so far this year, it said, citing police and autopsy reports as well as press accounts.
The rise in deaths accompanies a marked increase in the number of U.S. law enforcement agencies employing devices made by Taser International of Scottsdale, Ariz. About 1,000 of the nation's 18,000 police agencies used Tasers in 2001; more than 7,000 departments had them last year, according to a government study.
Amnesty urged police departments to suspend the use of Tasers pending more study. The group said there has been insufficient independent research on safety issues, an assertion the company disputes.
Taser did not immediately comment on the report. But it has called similar studies flawed because they link deaths to Taser use when there has been no such official conclusion. To the contrary, Taser has said that more than 9,000 lives have been saved because police officers have been able to use stun guns instead of bullets. Tasers deliver a 50,000-volt jolt through two barbed darts that can penetrate clothing.
The Amnesty report is the latest study that raises concerns that Taser use - intended as a nonlethal alternative to a gun - can be fatal in certain circumstances, most often when the victim is using illegal drugs.
Police officers should use Tasers "only in circumstances where potentially lethal force is justified," said William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA. Schulz acknowledged that stun guns could be an effective part of a police arsenal, preferable in some cases to a nightstick or a gun.
Many of those who died were high on drugs, mentally ill or otherwise agitated. Many deaths in the past year occurred after victims were hit by Tasers at least three times and, in some cases, for prolonged periods, the report said.
In seven cases medical examiners or coroners determined that Taser use was a cause of death.
Among them:
- Timothy Mathis, 35, had amphetamines in his system when sheriff's deputies in Larimer County, Colo., shocked him between three and seven times during an altercation. Mathis went into cardiac arrest and died three weeks later. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, but the district attorney declined to press charges.
- A Taser used by a Chicago police officer caused the death of Ronald Hasse, 54, in February 2005, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. Drug use was a contributing factor. Hasse was hit by a five-second electrical burst, followed by a 57-second charge, said Dr. Scott Denton, a deputy medical examiner.
In another 16 cases, authorities ruled that Taser use was a contributing factor in the death. In the bulk of the cases, victims died or lost consciousness soon after being shocked, but autopsies most often determined that illegal drugs were responsible or no cause of death was ascribed. Schulz said all 156 cases should be the subject of independent medical research.
Some police agencies have tightened their rules on stun-gun use following Taser-related deaths.
In Nashville, Tenn., paramedics bearing tranquilizers are called on in place of stun guns to subdue suspects who may have a drug-induced condition known as excited delirium.
The change was made after Patrick Lee, 21, was shocked up to 19 times with a Taser by police officers who found him acting strangely outside a nightclub. Lee, who had drugs in his system and an enlarged heart, died two days later.
Police officers in Las Vegas may no longer use Tasers on handcuffed prisoners and are discouraged from applying direct multiple shocks, following two deaths in 2004.
Apart from use by police, Taser said it has sold more than 115,000 devices to individuals since 1994. Stun guns are legal in 43 states, with varying restrictions, the company's Web site says. T