Spanish Government Divided Over Indicting Bush Administration Torturers

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Apr 20


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Spanish Government Divided Over Indicting Bush Administration Torturers
By Sheila Casey / RCFP

An internationally renowned Spanish judge is attempting to prosecute six former Bush officials for their role in allowing torture at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Despite being urged by the Spanish Attorney General to drop the case, Judge Baltasar Garzon has submitted the case to a lottery system which will now assign it at random to one of six high court judges. As one of those high court judges, Garzon has a one in six chance of getting the case back.

Spain has jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents claim to have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay.

The language used by Spanish Attorney General Conde-Pumpido, such as calling the case “fraudulent,” has led some observers to conclude that Conde-Pumpido bowed to pressure from the Obama administration. The AG also said: “If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder said that he isn’t going to prosecute any Central Intelligence Agency employees who water-boarded suspects. Holder said that it would be unfair to prosecute those who actually carried out acts of torture because it was considered legal at the time by the Justice Department. Holder also said the US would defend the CIA torturers against attempted prosecutions from overseas.

The 1984 Convention Against Torture states: “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture…” Both Spain and the US are signatory to the Convention, which the US was involved in negotiating.

Judge Baltasar Garzon is well known as a fearless crusader against tyranny and torture. Garzon had Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet served with an arrest warrant while he was visiting Britain in 1998. During 17 years in office, Pinochet ordered the murders of thousands of his political enemies and the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of others.

Pinochet was held under house arrest for over a year until British Home Secretary Jack Straw declared, based on a medical examination, that the former tyrant was brain damaged and unable to stand trial. Pinochet died in 2006 without ever being brought to justice.

The officials named in the Spanish complaint are former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s former legal counsel, David Addington.

Jay Bybee and John Yoo wrote the infamous torture memos, including the opinions that water-boarding isn’t torture, nor was anything torture, short of “death, organ failure or permanent impairment of a significant body function.” The Pentagon’s chief counsel, William J. Haynes, resigned after a magazine article accused him of rigging the trials of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Cheney’s chief counsel, David Addington, was a strong advocate of torture.

If the case lands with a judge who feels as strongly about torture as Garzon, the prosecution of these men will go forward. However, any convictions obtained could be essentially symbolic, as the US will not honor a request for extradition of former government officials.

The Obama administration has stated that it plans to continue to use rendition (kidnapping suspects and flying them to another country for torture or imprisonment). If Spain claimed for itself the same right to rendition that the US is claiming, we could see Bybee, Yoo or Addington kidnapped off an American street and into a Spanish prison.

Numerous Bush operatives have admitted that torture was committed, and the recently released torture memos make clear that prisoners, including children, were slapped, deprived of sleep for up to 11 days, subjected to stress positions, slammed against walls, water-boarded, and tortured with insects.

About water-boarding, the soon to be Attorney General Eric Holder said in January: “If you look at the history of the use of that technique, we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam… . Water boarding is torture.” President Obama has made clear that he has no intention of holding anyone accountable for torture, saying: “This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past….that is why we must resist the forces that divide us and, instead, come together on behalf of our common future.”

Evidently Obama believes that those who want torturers to pay for their crimes constitute “forces that divide us.” The case against the Bush 6 was initiated when a Spanish human rights group, the Association for the Dignity of Prisoners, filed a 98-page complaint with the National Court in Madrid, which specializes in international crimes. The court assigned the case to Judge Baltasar Garzon. Although the Spanish Attorney General recommended that the case be dropped, Garzon submitted it to a lottery system for another judge to continue.

The 1984 Convention against Torture states:

Article 2

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture… .

Article 15

Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.

This language makes clear that signatories have not just the right, but the duty, to prosecute torture, that there are “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” that can be used to justify torture, and that statements obtained as the result of torture cannot be used in a court of law.

Sheila Casey is a DC based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com


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Scientists Find Explosives in World Trade Center Dust
By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

Scientists have detected flecks of undetonated explosives in four samples of dust from the World Trade Center catastrophe. A paper just published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal describes the findings of nine scientists after 18 months of work.

The paper is titled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”. The primary authors are Niels Harrit, professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and Jeffrey Farrer, professor of Physics at Brigham Young University (BYU), Provo, Utah.

The research was initiated when Dr. Steven Jones, then also at BYU, observed small red/grey chips in the magnetic fraction of dust he was analyzing from the WTC disaster. The scientists studied four independently collected samples of dust. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC tower, two samples were collected the next day, and a fourth was collected about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).

After careful study of the material the scientists concluded that the red component of the bi-layer chips is a high-tech explosive nano-material known as super-thermite. The material is composed of ultra-fine grains of iron oxide intimately mixed with nano-sized aluminum metal in a matrix of silicon and organic compounds. While these chips are very small (typically less than a millimeter) tests show that the material is highly energetic and can be ignited to produce a micro-explosive effect. The observed properties and composition of the thermitic material appears to match the published descriptions of nano-thermite fabricated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere. These high-tech explosives were relatively new at the time of the disaster, with some of the first published descriptions appearing in the literature in the late 1990s.

The scientists begin the paper with an explanation of their motivation for pursuing the research. “The destruction of three skyscrapers (WTC 1, 2 and 7) on September 11, 2001 was an immensely tragic catastrophe that not only impacted thousands of people and families directly, due to injury and loss of life, but also provided the motivation for numerous expensive and radical changes in domestic and foreign policy. For these and other reasons, knowing what really happened that fateful day is of grave importance.”

While several government agencies, including NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) produced reports on the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings, they pointedly did not analyze the debris for the presence of explosives. This omission is at odds with the requirement of the national standard for fire investigation (NFPA 921), which calls for testing related to thermite and other pyrotechnics. It is also at odds with the video evidence of explosions, and the testimony of fire department personnel, more than 100 of whom officially reported hearing or seeing explosions. NIST also failed to explain the source of large quantities of molten metal in the WTC rubble, or the abundant amounts of iron microspheres in the dust.

NIST spokesperson Michael Neuman was challenged by Hartford Advocate reporter Jennifer Abel on this glaring omission in the WTC report…

ABEL: … what about that letter where NIST said it didn’t look for evidence of explosives?

NEUMAN: Right, because there was no evidence of that.

ABEL: But how can you know there’s no evidence if you don’t look for it first?

NEUMAN: If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time….

And NIST cannot claim that it is unfamiliar with the nano-thermitic materials. Several of the lead 9/11 investigators at NIST collaborated with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, in the late 90s, to test and characterize sol-gel preparations of high-power thermitic materials. Arden Bement, the former deputy secretary of defense who was appointed director of NIST by President Bush immediately after 9/11, was a metallurgist and expert on fuels and materials and former director of DARPA’s office of materials science and a former executive at TRW. He would be expected to be familiar with nano-thermite since DoD and DARPA are lead agencies in its development and TRW supplies NASA with advanced propellants including nano-gelled thermite.

[In an interesting side note: Bement was also a director of Battelle Corporation which was most likely the source of the weaponized anthrax spores used in the anthrax attacks of 2001.]

Some of the same individuals and organizations contracted by DoD and DARPA to develop nano-thermitic materials were selected by the Bush administration to investigate the collapse of the towers and Building 7. What the Scientists Found

The red/grey chips were found to be present in all samples of fine WTC dust analyzed to date. While the grey layer is the subject of ongoing investigation, the current paper focuses on the red layer. Very high magnification electron microscopy of the layer reveals a sponge-like structure composed of very small particles of several types. By using XEDS, researchers were able to map the elemental composition of the material. Iron oxide particles, shown as white in the image above, are fairly uniform in size and shape and about 100 nanometers long while the metallic aluminum appears as plate-like structures about 50 nanometers thick and up to a micron (1000 nanometers) in length. Other elements such as silicon and carbon were also detected in the red layer. This is significant because the presence of carbon in the material would supply the hot gas reaction products needed to turn the thermitic material from an incendiary into a low explosive. The authors avoided describing the material as “explosive” because the flakes studied are too small to assess the bulk properties of the material.

To test the power of this thermitic material, small samples were heated in a Differential Scanning Calorimeter, a very sensitive device for detecting the heat generated by a chemical reaction. The samples ignited at about 430ºC and generated as much or more heat than an equal mass of high explosive such as TNT. They also produced, as a reaction product, tiny metallic iron microspheres, just like the iron microspheres found in abundance in all samples of WTC dust as previously reported by USGS, FEMA and NIST.

Conclusions

“The chips are clearly a nano-engineered material with two types of extremely small particles, each highly consistent in shape and size, held in close stable proximity by a durable matrix which is laminated to a hard homogeneous material. The student of energetic materials will appreciate that this description matches exactly that of a super-thermite in which the reactant particles are suspended in a sol-gel matrix applied to a substrate.” (Jim Hoffman, 2009)

Sol-gels of nano-thermites are described in the literature as being very stable and safe to handle in liquid form. They can be applied to surfaces by spray or even paintbrush. It is entirely possible that the explosives were applied to the building disguised as a paint or as a spray-on fireproofing.

Researcher Kevin Ryan has previously published a paper (Journal of 9/11 Studies) noting the extreme coincidence that the floors in the towers where structural failure was initiated exactly correspond to the floors where fireproofing had recently been “upgraded” in 1999 and 2000. (See diagram)

Researchers have estimated, based on the weight of red/grey chips found in the four samples tested, that these chips make up as much as 0.1% of the mass of the fine dust produced on 9/11. While it is difficult to estimate the total mass of fine dust produced that day, the dust did cover Manhattan from river to river and for several miles in all directions. The dust mass was certainly at least several thousand tons (estimates range as high as 30,000 tons) which would mean several tons of the red/grey material is involved.

How did several tons of unexploded super-thermite end up in the dust of the World Trade Center disaster?



View Open Chemical Physics Journal article here.

Apr 06


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Eyewitnesses Contradict Pentagon 9/11 Story

BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Two California men who call themselves the Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) have compiled impressive video evidence that the plane seen flying towards the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 could not have caused the death and damage at the Pentagon, nor the damage to five light poles outside the Pentagon.

Frustrated with the inability of 9/11 researchers to do anything other than speculate about what really happened that day, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis decided to take matters into their own hands. They have repeatedly flown in from southern California, canvassed the area near the Pentagon on foot to find people who saw a plane just prior to the fireball, and then quizzed these eyewitnesses extensively on camera to establish exactly what they saw, when they saw it and where they saw it from.

Their research is summarized at their website: thepentacon.com, as well as in four DVDs containing interviews with 13 witnesses who attest that they saw a plane fly to the north of the Citgo gas station on Pentagon property, not south of the Citgo station as required by the official story.

CIT had each witness draw the flight path he witnessed on a map; the compilation from all the witnesses is shown in the photo above. The yellow curved lines clustered together toward the top of the map are from the witnesses; the single straight line angling up from the bottom edge of the map is the official flight path of the plane, as described by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

Taken together, the 13 witnesses deliver a devastating blow to the official story about the Pentagon attack. Five 40-foot, 247-pound light poles were knocked down that day. If the plane flew north of the Citgo station, it could not have knocked down those poles. The west side of the Pentagon was damaged as if it were hit by a plane heading north, with the zone of destruction angling north. If the plane flew to the north of the Citgo station before hitting the Pentagon, it would not have caused this kind of damage.

CIT’s evidence is compelling for a number of reasons. Three of their witnesses are Pentagon police officers who were on duty at the time of the attack. Most of the others were government employees at their jobs, and their presence at that place and time can be verified. This stands in sharp contrast to the witnesses who claim they saw the attack from their cars, as their presence on the road cannot be confirmed.

CIT’s witnesses are quite sure about what they saw. Sergeant William Lagasse, an officer with what is now known as the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, was fueling his patrol car at the Citgo station when the jet flew past him. He has stated that he is “100% sure” that the plane flew to the north of the gas station, that he would “bet his life on it.”

There is a remarkable degree of congruence in the witnesses’ accounts. They are not 9/11 researchers and none of them seemed to be aware that they were describing a flight path at odds with the official story, thus they had no reason to be less than forthcoming. Each was interviewed separately, yet their stories are quite similar.

CIT includes each interview in its entirety, without editing. Although this makes for a long video, it preempts any accusations of misinterpreting or leading the witnesses. We have the advantage of seeing the witnesses’ body language and hearing their tone of voice. We get a glimpse into their personalities and character, and are given the maximum amount of information possible with which to assess if they are telling the truth. We found the witnesses credible and convincing.

After thousands of hours of painstaking investigation and analysis, Ranke and Marquis have concluded that the plane seen by so many people did not hit the Pentagon, but flew over the building at the same time that pre-planted explosives caused a huge fireball and thick, black smoke, obscuring the fact that the plane was still in the air and flying away.

Several of CIT’s witnesses mentioned a second plane that came along about 30 seconds later, but media reports immediately after 9/11 talked about a second plane “shadowing” the attack plane. The belief that there were two planes in very close proximity serves as a useful fiction to confuse anyone who saw the plane fly over the Pentagon as the fireball exploded. Rather than concluding that the plane never actually hit the building, observers would almost certainly conclude that they had seen the “shadowing” second plane.

All of CIT’s witnesses also believe that the plane they saw hit the Pentagon, although this cannot be possible. This fact has been used to dismiss CIT’s work as irrelevant, but it’s not a compelling argument.

Less than an hour earlier, America had seen the south tower of the World Trade Center being hit by a plane and exploding into a huge fireball. Most people were aware that an attack was underway. If they saw a jet heading directly towards the Pentagon, and next saw a massive fireball, it is doubtful that one person in a thousand would question whether the plane had crashed and caused the fireball. To conclude that the fireball was caused by explosives preplanted in one of the most heavily guarded buildings on the planet, in an intentional false flag attack to justify war, would require observers to have a degree of perspicacity that was extremely rare in the pre-9/11 world, and only slightly less rare now.

The most riveting segment in the CIT footage is of the interview with Lloyde England, a taxi cab driver who was photographed numerous times just after the attack. In all the photos, England and his cab are on Route 27, on the bridge going over Columbia Pike. The front windshield of his cab has a big hole in it and the cab is at a stop and straddling the lanes. A broken light pole lies nearby.

England’s story is that he was going 40 mph when he felt the jet go over head, and then the light pole came smashing through his front windshield. He says he then skidded sideways to a stop, and that a stranger stopped and helped him remove the light pole from the windshield, and then left without ever giving his name or even speaking a word.

England’s story is suspect because photos show the hood of his sedan untouched and gleaming like a mirror, although his front windshield was destroyed. England is quite clear that it was not the smaller section at the top of the light pole that impaled his windshield, but the big, 40 foot, 247 pound pole. He contends that after it pierced his windshield, with perhaps five feet of the top end of the pole inside the cab, that the other 35 feet stuck straight out into the air, not touching the hood of the cab.

The question is, with the windshield destroyed, what held the pole up the in air? CIT drove with England to his property in the country to inspect the cab. They hypothesized that perhaps the narrow end of the pole had pierced the back seat or floorboards of the cab, holding it in place and not allowing it to touch the hood of the cab. But their inspection showed that there was only an insignificant rip in the rear seat, and no damage to the floorboards. Although the dashboard was damaged, no part of the hood, including the edge near the windshield, showed any damage.

What makes the story even more incredible is that England claims that as he was removing the pole from the windshield, he fell down, but managed, even as he was on the ground, to keep holding the pole in the air. Remember that the pole is 40 feet long and weighs 247 pounds, while England appears to be about 65 years old.

Pressed to explain how it can be that the pole never touched the hood of the sedan, England said only “The car speaks for itself.” Unfortunately for England, the car seems to be saying that his account cannot possibly be true. In addition, with 13 eyewitnesses saying that the plane went nowhere near those light poles, it seems clear that something else caused the damage to England’s windshield.

The video with England validates CIT’s practice of keeping the camera rolling as much as possible, even during casual conversation, as the most damning statements from both England and his wife came out spontaneously and unexpectedly. While Ranke and England’s wife were chatting at the Englands’ home, Ranke told her that they had determined that the jet never hit the Pentagon, but kept on going, and, amazingly, she agreed! The audio is hard to hear and she then refused to say more, but her meaning was clear. Mrs. England, who works for the FBI, also said that she knows why her husband’s car was not impounded as evidence, but wasn’t going to tell.

England spontaneously offered this damning statement: “You gotta understand something. When people do things and get away with it, you…eventually it’s gonna come to me, and when it comes to me, it’s gonna be so big, I can’t do nothing about it.”

CIT also kept the camera running during the 90-minute drive to see England’s car, and captured a few very interesting statements on tape. Although England speaks generally and indirectly, in the context of a conversation about the attack at the Pentagon, his meaning is clear.


England: I wasn’t supposed to be involved with this, this is too big for me, man, this is a big thing. This is a world thing happening, I’m a small man…I’m not supposed to be involved in this. This is for other people, people who have money and all this kind of stuff.

Ranke: Your point that these people who have all the money…

England: This is their thing.

Ranke: This is their event.

England: This is for them.

Ranke: Meaning they’re doing it for their own reasons…

England: (with conviction) That’s right. I’m not supposed to be in it.
…
Ranke: They must have planned it.

England: It was planned.
…
England: You know what history is? It’s not the truth. It’s “his story.” Has nothing to do with the truth.


As someone who has been researching the 9/11 story for two years, and has experienced mockery, abuse and denials from the government and media, I was a thrilled to hear someone who was directly involved in the cover-up admit on tape that it was a big event, a world event, planned by rich people for their own reasons.

Incredibly, once Ranke explained that 13 witnesses had all placed the jet at the north side of the Citgo station on a trajectory that could not have knocked down the five light poles, England changed his story and declared that he was not where all the photographs show him to be, but actually well north of Columbia Pike. Ranke showed England numerous photos of himself, his damaged cab and the downed light pole on the bridge over Columbia Pike. Even faced with incontrovertible evidence of his exact location, England resolutely maintained that pictures don’t always tell the truth and that the accident with the light pole had taken place much further north.

The 90-minute video of the interview with Lloyde England, completely discredits England. Ranke points out that England may well be a victim himself, in that he may have been forced to tell the story of the pole impaling his windshield. But his story is so incredible, and his protestations that he was not in the
location where multiple photos and videos place him on that day are so absurd, that Lloyde England’s account now stands as perhaps the most vulnerable point in the edifice of lies that constitute the official story of the attack on the Pentagon.

The entire body of work from CIT is a testament to the tremendous power of dedicated citizen journalists to uncover the truth behind a government story. Using thousands of dollars of their own money and thousands of hours of unpaid time, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis have performed a significant public service. They have created a body of work that definitively shows the government story about the Pentagon to be a lie.

CIT’s next move is to consolidate their research into a more concise format that edits all the lengthy interviews into a single 60 minute video called “National Security Alert.” The video will have no music or other artistic flourishes, which will make it suitable for informing government or media figures. Within the next 30 days, they expect to go live with a new website at CitizenInvestigationTeam.com. That site will have a link for free downloads of their new video, plus detailed information on how citizens can use the video to get action, including a series of steps to take if the appropriate authorities don’t respond.

Ranke and Marquis will be returning to the DC area to present a four hour conference in tandem with Pilots for 9/11 Truth. The free conference will be held at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) conference center in Arlington, Virginia from 12:30 pm to 5 pm on Saturday, July 11.

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She
blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com

Mar 25


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Cheney Directed Assassination Ring
BY MATT SULLIVAN / RCFP

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed during a talk at the University of Minnesota, March 10, that Dick Cheney orchestrated assassination squads directly out of the office of the vice president.

Here is what Hersh said: “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

“Right now, today, there was a story in The New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him [Cheney].

“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s anexecutive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leader, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.” Interestingly, Hersh gives us two pieces of information here. First he tells us that the CIA has been “deeply involved” in domestic operations; something that is forbidden by law. And second, he reveals that the office of vice president has been directing assassination squads abroad, also clearly illegal underdomestic and international law.

It is not much of a leap of logic to put these two bits of information together and ask the question: ‘Did the CIA engage in domestic assassination as well?’ Clearly the fact that this would be illegal is no barrier; according to neocon doctrine, the unitary executive is above and beyond any law.

Let’s see if there have been any likely assassinations that may be the handiwork of the Cheney hit teams. For example:

September 9, 2001; Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan just two days before the 9/11 attack. His death cleared the way for the Afghan invasion.

Shortly before his October 2002 death in a mysterious airplane crash, Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone met with the Vice President. Cheney was rounding up Senate support for the vote giving the administration the go ahead to invade Iraq in spite of United Nations objections. At a campaign stop in Willmar, Minn., days before his death, Wellstone told attendees that Cheney told him, “If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.” Senator Wellstone’s death cleared the way for the Iraq Invasion.

On February 5, 2005, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harari was killed in an explosion. His death was immediately blamed on Syria, but without any evidence. Within weeks Syrian peacekeeping forces which had been in Lebanon for a decade, were forced to leave. Syria’s departure cleared the way for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

The DC Madam, Deborah Palfrey, found dead on May Day, 2008, was very likely murdered. She had a very embarrassing little black book of clients for her prostitution service which included Washington lobbyists, defense contractors, intelligence operatives and even, reportedly, Dick Cheney himself. Before she was ‘suicided’ she made several public statements, including in radio interviews, that she had no intention of committing suicide and that if she was to be found dead, that it would be murder.

Mike Connell was a republican IT specialist: He helped the GOP orchestrate the electronic theft of the 2004 Ohio election (among others). He was scheduled to testify in a federal probe about not only the election thefts, but also about the “missing” White House e-mails. Before his death, Connell’s lawyers were on-record requesting protection for their client based on threats from Karl Rove.

Connell’s death appears to be part of a ‘clean-up’ operation.

This is but a brief list of possible, even likely, executive assassinations. Now that it has been revealed that a sophisticated covert program of assassination has been ongoing under the direction of VP Cheney, a thorough review of unsolved, politically convenient murders would seem to be in order.

Let’s start with the 3000 killed in lower Manhattan.



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Feb 24


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NY Times Complicit in FBI Anthrax Coverup


BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Back in 2001, just months after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, several articles came out in mainstream newspapers that pointed clearly to the CIA and Army as the most likely sources of the weaponized anthrax. Articles in The Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald, Washington Post and New York Times laid out the facts that incriminated Battelle Memorial Labs in West Jefferson, Ohio, and the Army’s lab at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah as the only logical sources for the anthrax. These facts, as reported in 2001, include:

1. For over a decade, Army scientists at Dugway have been making weapons-grade anthrax that is “virtually identical” to the anthrax used in the attacks.

2. The anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was extremely concentrated, with a trillion spores per gram. The Dugway anthrax had a similar concentration.

3. The FBI was increasingly focused on US government bioweapons research programs as the source of the deadly anthrax.

4. Both the lab in Utah and the lab in Ohio received anthrax samples from the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, although USAMRIID deals only with wet anthrax and ships it wet.

5. The investigation was focused on the Dugway anthrax, and Dugway was described as the only facility that was known to be weaponizing anthrax.

6. One FBI official said that the CIA’s anthrax was “the best lead we have at this point.”

7. Army officials said that Fort Detrick did not have the equipment for weaponizing anthrax.

The FBI has never explained what became of this initial focus on the labs in Utah and Ohio. Instead, after the death of Fort Detrick anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins in July, 2008, the FBI attempted to make the case that Ivins was the murderer and all other suspects had been cleared of suspicion.

Since Ivins’ death, the media have, with very few exceptions, passively swallowed the line dispensed by the FBI, and have acted as little more than stenographers in parroting the hollow arguments presented by the FBI that Ivins is guilty.

On December 12, 2001, The Baltimore Sun published a seminal article by Scott Shane that clearly laid out just how strong the evidence was against the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Subtitled “Organisms made at a military laboratory in Utah are genetically identical to those mailed to members of Congress,” Shane’s article also includes this eyebrow-raising line: “Scientists familiar with the anthrax program at Dugway described it to The Sun on the condition that they not be named.”

Apparently Shane has forgotten all that he reported seven years ago. Now with The New York Times, Shane’s latest piece, published January 4, 2009, raises troubling questions about the independence of The Times, and the memory hole that Shane must have used to shunt away all that he once knew about the case the FBI code-named Amerithrax.

Shane calls his 5,200 word article “the deepest look so far at the investigation.” Titled “Portrait Emerges of Anthrax Suspect’s Troubled Life,” it is primarily a hatchet job on Bruce Ivins. Filled with innuendo and unsubstantiated allegations, the purpose of the article is clearly to solidify the perception that Ivins was the killer, and to pooh-pooh the widely held belief that the anthrax came from a CIA or military lab in Utah or Ohio.

Shane dismisses these beliefs breezily, stating: “The Times review found that the FBI had disproved the assertion, widespread among scientists who believe Dr. Ivins was innocent, that the anthrax might have come from military and intelligence research programs in Utah or Ohio.” Not a single piece of evidence is presented to back up this sweeping claim.

Halfway through his article, Shane springs another shocker on us. “By early 2004, FBI scientists had discovered that out of 60 domestic and foreign water samples, only water from Frederick, Maryland, had the same chemical signature as the water used to grow the mailed anthrax.”

Really? Do FBI scientists think that anthrax researchers go to the kitchen sink for the water they use to grow the anthrax? According to Wikipedia, biochemistry labs use only highly purifi ed water, such as double-distilled. Distilled water is created by boiling water and collecting the steam. To obtain double-distilled water, the process is done twice, so that all impurities and minerals are removed. Distilled water has the same chemical signature, namely none, no matter where in the world it originates.

It is unprecedented to have a major development in a high profi le case go unreported for a full five years. Not only has the FBI never before mentioned this so-called discovery about the signature of the water, but when they were specifically asked if anything could be learned from the water, they said no.

The question came up on August 18, 2008, when the FBI held a science briefi ng to follow up on the highly publicized August 6 press conference by DOJ attorney Jeff Taylor. The science briefi ng was hosted by Dr. Vahid Majidi, Assistant Director of the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.

Dr. Majidi was asked: “In your looking at the elemental and chemical properties, could you tell anything about the water that was used to fi lter this anthrax, and did that do you any good?”

Dr. Majidi replied: “No. No.”

Yet here we are, five months later, with Scott Shane telling us that the FBI has known since 2004 that the anthrax was grown near Fort Detrick, because of the chemical signature of the water.

Beyond these outrageous claims, Shane’s article is busy assassinating Bruce Ivins’ character. We have Nancy Haigwood saying of Ivins “he did it,” for no apparent reason other than she doesn’t like him and thinks he’s odd. She also thinks Ivins vandalized her house 27 years ago and impersonated her. No reason is given for why she believes these things.

Shane editorializes heavily. He charges that Ivins was “chipper” even as five people were dead or dying of anthrax inhalation, and was relishing his moment in the spotlight. No evidence is presented for how Shane reached these conclusions about Ivins.

Words Shane uses to describe Ivins (including quotes from others) are: corny, dour, scary, provocative, emotionally laden, thin-skinned, aggressive, goody two shoes, very sensitive, creepy, possessing an unnerving hubris, stressed, depressed, rude, sarcastic, nasty, devious, jumpy and agitated.

We find out that Ivins had been a nerdy, awkward teenager, was not popular in high school, and was still bitter about this.

He liked to eat a mixture of peas, yogurt and tuna for lunch and wore outdated bell-bottoms, practices that, according to Shane, got him labeled an “oddball.” The words odd, oddball or oddities appear five times in Shane’s article.

The final reference, regarding “a man whose oddities, for many people, made the FBI’s anthrax accusation more plausible,” tips Shane’s hand. His constant harping on Ivins oddness betrays the poverty of the FBI’s case, which Shane acknowledges has “yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch” that Ivins was the killer.

Fortunately for many of us, being odd is not a crime.

But was Ivins odd? The Frederick News Post published a letter from Amanda Lane on August 10, 2008 that includes: “I want to shout from the mountain tops that Bruce was the kind of man we look up to … He was a decorated scientist and the humblest of men who didn’t use his title as a status symbol. He picked up a mop or emptied the trash without a moment’s hesitation. If he thought you were having a bad day he would offer candy or a catchy tune to cheer you up. If someone had to stay late to accomplish a task, Bruce would work with you so that the task would get completed faster.

“He was not the greatest athlete, but he was the best cheerleader present at every game to support his friends. I will truly miss his good humor, as there are few people in life who measure up to this man. I hope that he knew how much joy he brought to my life and others around him. If I learned anything from Bruce, it was to enjoy life and to always smile. His friendship brightened so many lives. I hope that Americans will remember Bruce for the funny and compassionate person that he was, because that is all Bruce knew how to be.”

Although Shane does mention that Ivins’ colleagues cherished him, the implication is that they didn’t really know him, as “he hid from them a shadow side of mental illness, alcoholism, secret obsessions and hints of violence.”

The New York Times has published a hit piece, devoid of incriminating facts, more gossip than journalism. Shane’s article raises disturbing questions about the relationship between The New York Times and the US government. What happened to the FBI’s original focus on the CIA and Army labs? Who is behind the drive to pin the attacks on a dead man who possessed neither the means nor the motive to carry them out? And why is The Times acting as a PR arm for those with an agenda that has nothing to do with journalism?

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has been published by the Chicago Sun-Times, Reuters, the Denver Post, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams.
Jan 24


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Top Scientists Ask Journal "Science" To Retract Original AIDS Papers
BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Thirty-seven doctors, senior researchers and attorneys have asked the journal Science to retract four articles published in 1984 that supposedly established that HIV was the cause of AIDS. The articles, by a group led by Dr. Robert Gallo, have drawn criticism for some time. An investigation in the early 90s by the US Department of Health and Human Services concluded that the lead paper was “fraught with false and erroneous statements.” A Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations produced a staff report onthe papers which contains scathing criticisms of their integrity.

Now, new analysis of the documentation behind the papers has revealed even more reason to doubt Gallo’s findings. The letter refers to “recent revelation of an astonishing number of previously unreported deletions and unjustified alterations made by Gallo…”

Dr. Mikulas Popovic wrote the manuscripts while Gallo was in Europe, but Gallo made handwritten changes to the manuscripts upon his return. Popovic wrote: “Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified.” This sentence was deleted and replaced by a statement that the findings suggest that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

Gallo submitted micrographs to Science that were identified as containing the HIV virus. But just four days before he submitted them, Dr. Matthew A. Gonda, then head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, wrote a letter to Gallo and Popovic stating that he “does not believe” that the micrographs contain images of HIV. The micrographs were published in Science on May 4, 1984 and identified as containing HIV.

These developments add to the mounting body of evidence that the original conclusion that HIV causes AIDS is deeply flawed.

Thus far there has been no response from Science regarding the request for retraction.


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Cartoon by Joe Sutliff, Rock Creek Free Press, Feb. 2009
Dec 17


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A Call for a Re-evaluation of the AIDS Dogma


By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

A paper about to be published in a scientific journal raises the intriguing possibility that many AIDS cases are in fact misdiagnosed cases of syphilis. The paper was authored by an International group of scientists led by National Academy of Sciences member Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Wolfgang E. Krumbein, professor of Geo-microbiology in Oldenburg, Germany.

The paper, titled Spirochete round bodies. Syphilis, Lyme disease & AIDS: Resurgence of “the great imitator,” will be published in SYMBIOSIS V47, No.1, 2009.

John Scythes, one of the researchers on the paper, reports that he has not found a single case of an immune suppressed patient (regardless of HIV status) who has died of complications of syphilis since the discovery of AIDS in the early 80s. The implications of this are staggering. It is simply not possible that syphilis stopped being fatal just as the new disease of AIDS came on the scene.

The researchers speculate that, because of its immune suppression effect and its ability to imitate other diseases, syphilis is being missed or misdiagnosed as AIDS. Now that improved tests for syphilis infection are available, the researchers urge a large scale investigation into the extent that this is happening.

In addition to Dr. Margulis, other co-authors include Andrew Maniotis PhD. Department of Patholog, University of Illinois at Chicago, J. MacAllister, U. Mass Amherst; J. Scythes of the Community Initiative for AIDS Research, Ontario, Canada; O. Brorson, Tonsberg, Norway; J. Hall, U. Mass. Amherst; W.E. Krumbein, Carl von Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg Germany; and M.J. Chapman, U. Mass, Amherst.

Ever since Luc Montagnier of the Institut Pasteur in Paris first described HIV virus-like particles isolated from “patient 1” in 1983, a close connection has been shown between AIDS and a history of syphilis exposure.

As with AIDS, patients infected with syphilis do not die from syphilis directly, but rather suffer from opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, or dysentery.

Syphilis was once known by doctors as “the great imitator” because of its immune suppression effects and its ability to mimic the symptoms of many other diseases. If syphilis and other spirochete diseases are being misdiagnosed as AIDS, that would explain why the number of reported syphilis deaths has plummeted since the introduction of AIDS.

Many human infections such as Lyme disease, syphilis, anthrax and many others are caused by a class of bacteria called spirochetes. These bacteria are characterized by a spiral free swimming form, and by the ability to revert into a cyst form when subjected to threat such as heat, starvation or antibiotic attack. This ability to form cysts (also called “round bodies”) makes spirochete diseases extremely resistant to treatment.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that syphilis is easily treated with antibiotics, the disease is frequently impervious to antibiotic treatment except in its earliest stages. Far from eradicating syphilis, antibiotics have driven the disease underground.

Until recently, the only way to definitively tell if someone had the syphilis germ, was high magnification microscopy by an expert microscopist. Since this is not usually done for patients in a clinical setting, reported cures of either syphilis or Lyme disease are suspect.

Spirochetes are an ancient form of bacteria. The oldest spirochete in the fossil record was discovered in the intestine of a 20 million year old termite preserved in amber.

Scientists know that Lyme and syphilis are caused by spirochete bacteria because the spirochete is able to cause the symptoms of the disease when it is introduced into a healthy test subject. This observation is one of the steps needed to verify that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease. Called Koch’s Postulates, the four steps require that the agent must:
1. be found in all cases of the disease;
2. be isolated from the host;
3. cause the same disease when injected into a healthy host, and
4. then be found growing again in the newly infected host.

While syphilis and Lyme bacteria meet the test of Koch’s postulates, HIV fails all four.

In the case of both Lyme and syphilis, it is very likely that the disease-causing bacteria establishes a permanent human-spirochete symbiosis soon after infection. The symptoms of the disease vary greatly and may be easily overlooked or misinterpreted.

Most spirochetes are harmless, free swimming species in nature, unrelated to any disease, therefore unknown to medical science. Animals and spirochetes have co-existed for millions of years and have co-evolved to the point that they have a symbiotic relationship, a partnership. It is theorized that some components of mammalian cells such as sperm tails and cilia are descended from these ancient bacteria. If this theory is correct, spirochete remnants have dwelled in stable symbiotic partnership inside animal cells for about 1 billion years.

Over eons of time, integrated symbiotic bacteria (which include Lyme and syphilis as well as many other non-pathogenic bacteria) have lost the ability to live independently. They have shed much of their own DNA and have become dependent on the gene products of the human host.

Scientists call this relationship “cyclical symbiosis” and have shown that in this type of symbiosis, virus-like particles are created as part of the integration process between the symbiont partners. These virus-like particles are not the disease-causing agents themselves; they are simply packets of genetic information being exchanged between co-evolved symbionts. Reverse transcriptases and virus-like particles are abundant in such cyclical symbioses.

Is it possible that HIV and other retroviruses are not disease-causing agents at all, but are rather genetic messages being passed between symbiotic partner cells? If so, that would explain why AIDS vaccine trials failed so spectacularly. It would also explain why HIV fails every one of Koch’s postulates for a disease causing agent.

Is it possible that the conventional HIV-AIDS medical orthodoxy is wrong? That certainly would explain why we are no closer to a cure today than we were 25 years ago when AIDS was first discovered; nor have we experienced the long predicted “AIDS pandemic.” There were approximately 1 million AIDS cases in 1990 and there are roughly that number today.

But the implications for public health are far more serious. The ongoing disintegration of the conventional medical theories about HIV-AIDS demonstrates that the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have failed the public spectacularly yet again. It also means that thousands of patients are being erroneously treated with toxic, potentially deadly, AIDS drugs.

The entire HIV-AIDS paradigm must be re-evaluated.


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The only “change” we are likely to get.
Nov 24


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Everything You Know About AIDS is Wrong
By Sheila Casey / RCFP

On April 23, 1984, Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler and researcher Robert Gallo from the National Cancer Institute held a press conference and announced that Gallo had found the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the retrovirus HIV. Heckler estimated that a vaccine would be available in just two years. That same day in 1984, Gallo patented the blood test to detect the HIV antibodies.

As a retrovirus researcher, Gallo had previously tried to pin the blame for Alzheimer’s, leukemia and neurological disorders on a retrovirus, all without success. Now AIDS was in his sights.

But Gallo had skipped an important step in the scientific process: his HIV research had never been subjected to peer review, and was not published until after the press conference with Heckler had already conferred legitimacy on it.

Billions of dollars poured into research programs and millions of people lined up to have their blood checked; by 2006, 72 million Americans had been tested, with a third of that number tested every year. As its creator, Gallo received a percentage of the cost of each test.

To receive a positive HIV test result was considered a death sentence: you would get AIDS and die a miserable death, sooner or later.

As the years passed, it became apparent that this was not true. Only five percent of the people who tested HIV positive went on to develop AIDS. A vaccine has never been found. And there is now a growing group of scientists who dispute that HIV causes AIDS.

Peter Duesberg is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg earned renown as one of the scientists to discover a cancer gene in 1970, and earned tenure at UC Berkeley at the age of 36. At 49 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1986 he received a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health.

He was on the fast-track to receive the Nobel until he published an article in 1987 in Cancer Research challenging the consensus that HIV is the cause of AIDS. After that his funding dried up and he was dismissed as a misguided contrarian by those with careers and billions in funding riding on the view that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

The views of Dr. Duesberg, David Crowe, Dr. Charles Geshekter, and other disidents who dispute the infectious model for AIDS are summarized below.

1) All viruses are harmless after antibody immunity. Disease is caused before the antibodies are created, because it is the antibodies that neutralize the pathogen and enable the host to recover. When people test positive for the antibodies, that means they have developed resistance, ‘immunity’ to the virus. No microbe causes disease only after antibodies have appeared, as HIV is claimed to do. Why develop a vaccine for people who already have the antibodies to the disease? Duesberg: “there is no virus in AIDS patients, only antibodies.”

2) Retroviruses, which are one type of virus, do not kill T-cells. They do not kill the cell they infect—ever. (AIDS is diagnosed partly by a deficiency of T-cells.)

3) HIV does not infect enough T-cells to cause disease.

4) No retrovirus causes disease and there is no logical reason why they should.

5) Viruses replicate quickly; there is no such thing as a slow virus. If a host cannot mount an immune defense quickly enough, the virus will overwhelm and kill the host in a matter of days or weeks. Yet we are told that HIV can cause up to 30 different diseases ten years after initial infection. None of these diseases are specific to AIDS; all existed prior to the “discovery” of AIDS.

6) HIV is not a new virus. When a virus is new in a population that has never been exposed to it, it explodes exponentially. But this is not what we see with AIDS. The number of AIDS cases hasn’t changed since 1985.

7) It fails Koch’s Postulates, which require four steps to verify that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease.

1. the agent must be found in all cases of the disease;

2. it must be isolated from the host;

3. it must cause the same disease when injected into a healthy host; and

4. it must then be found growing again in the newly infected host.
HIV fails all of these tests. Although theoretically it can be found and isolated from a host, this is in practice very difficult to do, since the HIV virus is not found in humans; only antibodies to HIV are found.

The history of medicine has many examples of diseases which were assumed to be infectious but later proved not to be. Scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, Beriberi is caused by a thiamine deficiency, and pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency. All failed Koch’s postulates and all ultimately proved to be non-infectious dietary deficiencies.

8) AIDS has remained in its original risk groups and has not broken out into the general population. Outside of Africa, 97% of AIDS patients are homosexuals, IV drug users, hemophiliacs and transfusion patients.

9) The US Army tests recruits for HIV and finds the virus evenly divided between men and woman, yet AIDS is 90% a male disease.

10) With other infectious diseases, cases are always seen among the doctors and nurses who work with infected patients—but this has not happened with AIDS. Medical workers are actually less likely to become sick with AIDS than the general population.

11) AIDS behaves differently depending on geography. African AIDS appears to be a completely different disease. In part, this is because in Africa, no HIV test is necessary for diagnosis. A patient is considered to have AIDS if he exhibits three of the 4 symptoms: persistent cough, persistent fever, persistent diarrhea and weight loss. These also happen to be the symptoms of malaria, malnutrition and tuberculosis, but there are no large funding programs for those diseases. If something is called AIDS, money pours in.

12) According to David Crowe, president of Rethinking AIDS, and founder and president of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, HIV is not transmitted sexually. He quotes a study done in the 90s on seroconversion in couples where one partner was HIV positive and the other HIV negative. Not a single case was found where the HIV negative partner became positive, even after years of unprotected sex.

13) Different risk groups manifest AIDS in a different way. IV drug users get tuberculosis and wasting syndrome, gays get Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Yet these specific diseases also occur in high numbers among members of these risk groups who do not have HIV infection. If an IV drug user has tuberculosis and no HIV antibodies, he is simply diagnosed with tuberculosis. If he has tuberculosis and does have HIV antibodies, he is diagnosed with AIDS. It is this method of defining AIDS that assures a high correlation between HIV infection and the constellation of diseases defined as AIDS.

14) HIV supposedly causes 30 different diseases. All other viruses cause only one disease. Duesberg: “There is no HIV specific disease anywhere.”

15) AIDS occurs without HIV infection, and 95% of those with HIV infection never get AIDS. Despite all this, it is clear that people are sick and dying. If not HIV, what are they dying from? AIDS is a condition of suppressed immunity, and there are many things that can suppress immunity. One of the worst is the HIV drug AZT, which destroys the bone marrow and which Duesberg describes as “the most toxic drug ever licensed for long term consumption in the free world.” Many people who test positive for HIV antibodies are told they must go on these dangerous drugs—even though they are completely healthy.

In a tragic case described by Celia Farber in the March 2006 Harpers magazine, Joyce Ann Hafford, a healthy 33 year old single mother, four months pregnant, was enrolled in an HIV drug trial, put on three anti-HIV drugs in June, and was dead by August 1. Although Hafford felt completely well prior to the drug trial and the drugs immediately made her violently ill, she stayed on them in the belief that she must, at all costs, prevent passing the HIV virus on to her unborn child. Hafford had only one HIV test prior to enrolling in the study, and was never told that pregnancy can cause a false positive HIV test.

According to Duesberg, recreational drug use also suppresses immunity and the gay community has, to some degree, brought their woes upon themselves. He points out that it is common knowledge that toxic foreign substances cause disease: alcohol causes cirrhosis of the liver and smoking causes emphysema. But gay activists typically dismiss it as homophobia to point out that drug use and sexual promiscuity can result in lowered immunity.

Crowe says that gay community leaders essentially had a choice between facing up to promiscuity in the gay population, or to the rampant use of recreational drugs such as inhalant nitrate poppers. They were willing to face up to the promiscuity, but not the drug use.

Because recreational drugs such as heroin, cocaine, speed and poppers suppress immunity, many gay men use large amounts of antibiotics to combat infections. Repeated antibiotic use eventually wears down the immune system.

If a gay man with a depressed immune system develops pneumonia and is found to be HIV positive, he will be diagnosed with AIDS and put on toxic HIV drugs, which will further destroy his immune system and virtually guarantee his eventual death.

According to AIDS dissidents such as Crowe and Duesberg, gay community leaders have unwittingly contributed to prolonging the fiction of a viral cause of AIDS, due to their unwillingness to confront and change the behaviors that are destroying the immune systems of gay men. Instead, they have successfully clamored for more research dollars focusing on the infectious model, drawing a disproportionate amount of funding away from other, more prevalent diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

But what about Africa? Surely there are not large numbers of Africans inhaling poppers and overloading their immune systems with antibiotics? Yet we are told that AIDS is decimating Africa, and that Africa is teeming with AIDS orphans who have lost both parents to the disease.

Yes, say the AIDS dissidents, Africans are much sicker now than they were 25 years ago. Colonialism has destroyed traditional societies, and there is rampant malnutrition, malaria, war, poverty and a lack of clean drinking water.

According to Charles Geshekter, Ph.D., a three-time Fulbright scholar who teaches African history at California State University in Chico, the current explanation for the AIDS epidemic in Africa is based on racist beliefs about African promiscuity. In fact, says Geshekter, the European communities in South Africa are far more promiscuous than the Africans, yet AIDS is practically unknown among the Europeans, who are much richer, well-fed, and have access to clean drinking water.

Also, virtually all HIV testing in Africa is done at pre-natal clinics. Although pregnancy causes high numbers of false positives, statisticians extrapolate from the tiny numbers at the clinics to the continent at large, giving the impression of a vast epidemic. In addition to pregnancy, there are 70 different conditions—including use of cosmetics and skin lighteners—that can cause false positives for the HIV antibody.

“After 25 years of a so-called epidemic, with unlimited amounts of money being spent, there is absolutely nothing to show for it,” says Geshekter. He posits that there is not supposed to be an end to the AIDS epidemic in Africa – it is just supposed to keep going. “To ask hard questions threatens the livelihood of the thousands of AIDS researchers, as well as the journalists who have won Pulitzer Prizes for conforming to the received wisdom about AIDS in Africa,” says Geshekter.

Geshekter says that humanitarian groups have a strong incentive to hide the truth about AIDS in Africa. “All the people with money in Africa are those in AIDS programs.” He goes on to explain that there is little money for organizations helping Africans build wells and improve their nutrition and sanitation—but billions upon billions poured into programs to fight AIDS. As for journalists, Geshekter states baldly that those who report the truth about AIDS lose their jobs, while massive research organizations would shrivel up and die if it became known that HIV does not cause AIDS.

The pharmaceutical companies would be wiped out by lawsuits from the survivors of the millions of people who have died after taking toxic HIV drugs, if the truth were to come out. It seems that everyone is making money from the AIDS epidemic – all at the expense of those who suffer and die from the constellation of diseases, many of them pharmaceutically induced, we call AIDS.

In 1990, Neville Hodgkinson, then medical and science correspondent of the London Sunday Times, wrote: “If HIV does not cause AIDS, then we will have witnessed the biggest medical and scientific blunder of this century.”

Eighteen years later, it seems all but certain that Hodgkinson was right.

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams and the Rock Creek Free Press. She blogs at sheilacasey.com

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